230: What If This Could Replace Your Daily Content Grind?

Foreign.

Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today.

And my special guest today is Zach. Zach is the founder of Heart, Soul and Hustle, where he teaches business owners how to leverage Facebook ads and launches to strategically maximize leads, conversions and sales. And Zach, I am super excited to chat with you today. I actually mentioned to you that when I started this podcast back in 2019 and we're about 230 something episodes right now, you were one of the first people that I had on my show and I was actually going back to look at that episode and think about, okay, we've come a long way since then.

Yes, I love it. Yes. Episode 13, which I'm wearing my Taylor Swift shirt. So it's.

Oh, you found it. You found it.

It's kismet.

We've come a long way since then. But I'm very happy to chat with you about Facebook ads today. Before we get into all the questions that I have for you, can you tell the good audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?

Absolutely. So. Well, first, I'm so excited to be back. Thank you for having me. I'm Zach Speckler and we are Heart, Soul and Hustle is a small Facebook and Instagram ads agency, education and consultancy company. And when I say small, what I mean is we take on a really limited roster of agency clients and we use the information from testing ads for people in a variety of niches, from everything from spirituality to dog training to photography to your traditional Instagram Facebook marketing. And we translate that over to our membership, our courses, our programs where we basically help people that aren't quite ready for a full blown agency or don't have the means, the funds, or the ability to relinquish that control, to kind of DIY it with a high touch level of support at prices that we think are really accessible. So yeah, that's us.

Well, I can't wait to kind of chat about Facebook ads because Facebook ads have changed over the years. I actually used to be. And a lot of people listening to this, they know this. I used to be a Facebook ads consultant for a little while and I was like, you know what? This isn't for me. I'm going to pivot a little bit. But you know When I first started kind of doing Facebook ads, it wasn't as easy as it is today. So I know that folks are either considering kind of dipping their toes in ads. I'd like you to kind of walk us through, you know, what you think about Facebook ads today, and can any of us, you know, kind of dip our toes in there?

Yeah. Well, I love this question. I think, to your point, it is a lot easier than it's ever been. And I think where people get tripped up is they assume that, like, easy means you should just understand it in its totality right off the rip. And what has actually happened with Facebook ads over the last few years is there's just been a lot of guardrails put in place. So I jokingly tell people like, you can pretty much fumble your way through and you'll. You'll probably get some kind of result. Now, is there benefit to learning the nuance and the strategy? Absolutely. But I think a lot of people are afraid to foray into ads because everything else that we kind of are taught or do in online business outside of paid media is free. Right. So if I do a reel and it flops, well, even though we'll get into this, but even though I didn't waste anything, like, you know, no, no harm, no foul. What I tell people is with Facebook and Instagram ads, you are paying for your time back. And I can tell you, like, gosh, this sounds so egotistical. It's coming out of my mouth, but, like, I'm busy. I don't have time to do some of the things that I need to be doing as it sits now. And so it's like, that's why I use ads, because I can buy back my time. Like, we're doing some really big stuff in our agency right now. We had five new clients come in in a really short period of time, which, like, we normally don't do, but we did. And then I'm going on vacation, and then I'm doing a couple webinars in a couple weeks, so I'm in pre launch. And then I met with my team yesterday, and they were like, oh, hey, by the way, before you go on vacation, the launch after you come back from vacation starts the day you come back. So, like, all of that needs to be done in the next three weeks. And like, it's. I'm not. Listen, there's is the life. I've chosen, booked, busy, and blessed. It's all good. But I share that because I want people to understand when you put an hour into creating a piece of Instagram content. And even if you do it with AI and it takes you 15 minutes, that is 15 minutes that you are not spending working on the bigger picture of the business. And so what I have come to realize is advertising is something that, especially for us, we just kind of turn it on. I mean, I know that is like a real simplification, but we every day, I go look every week, really, my team, we pull our stats, we track them, and we go, how much did we spend on ads this week? How many people joined our list? How much revenue did we generate? Those are like our three big metrics that we track. But I know, hey, even if I do nothing for the next seven days, we'll add 250ish people to the email list. And I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole, but basically, like, that is the lifeblood of our business, is email marketing. And for most course creators, membership owners, service providers that want scale, you need an email list. And so when I am not spending my time trying to get 250 leads a week, which some people might be like, that's crazy. And some people might be like, really? That's it. It's all perspective and subjective. And I don't have to spend my time doing things that don't matter. And conversely, I can spend my time doing things that may make an impact. So we're getting more into YouTube and we're just, this is my own baggage to deal with. But I'm like, I'm not quite where I want to hire an editor because I don't want to outsource our style. I want to get clear on what feels good to me. And so it takes me two, three hours a week to edit a video. I don't again, have time to not have that time available if we want to start breaking into YouTube. So I don't look at advertising as an expense. I look at it as a buyback tool. And I think if you can first start there with that simple perspective shift of, like, how much could you do if you weren't trying and spinning your wheels to get 10 people on your email list a week? Which is really what I hear from a lot of people. And like, not failing at it, but not hitting the levels or the numbers you want, but still putting the time into not getting those results, I love that.

And I just want to echo that. I completely agree with you. And one of the things that I've done personally in my business this year is to turn on ads, especially in hobby School, which is my B2C brand. Just, we just have ads running constantly all the time and it has made a huge difference because we're not having to be on social media. So we, we definitely have people coming in and getting on our email list all the time. So let's say that we were there. We want to buy back our time, we want to hit that. I always call it hitting that easy button right in my business because I feel like that's what it's helped me to do. It's helped me to hit that easy button. I know these leads are coming in so can focus on helping people and getting them into my memberships where I can really serve them well. Walk us through. What is one of the first things that you would recommend somebody do.

Yes, start running ads to grow your email list. Get a good freebie, have a good 5 to 20 depending on your, your niche and your expertise, email sequence and just start growing the list. My pet peeve right now, actually I have two pet peeves right now and this will speak to them. One, you are not going to turn on ads and sell a low ticket product and double your money and sail off into the sunset. If you've never run ads before, understand you don't spend a dollar and make $3 on ads like off the rip. And if it was as easy as throwing together an automated webinar or a really simple $37 product with your order bumps and your upsells, like don't you think everyone would just be doing that, turning on ads and like have nothing else going on in the world if it was really that simple? Right? So that's the first piece. The second new pet peeve that I have is there's like this message floating around, you know, and I'm not a name and shamer, but I've seen it from a few different people that are like, oh yeah, you just turn your ads on. You don't need to spend lots of money to test. And I'm not saying you need to spend thousands of dollars in testing. But just like when you post a reel, just like when you post on Facebook, just like when you send an email, some things hit and some things don't. So you need to have something easy to win, which to me is a freebie. And you need to have a little bit of a pot to play with, a couple hundred bucks to find what message, what market, what audience, what text, what images work. And then to your point, spend a little bit every day growing the list. And then if you're someone who's great at social media? Keep posting on social media. We're working with a client right now where the ads were in that testing phase and they were like, you know, I stopped posting on social media, my sales slowed down. I'm like, well yeah, we have to figure out the ads, right? And they were like, oh well, I'm gonna go back to social media. And they did. Sales picked up immediately and our ads are getting better every day, right? So now we've basically like double dip. So I'm not saying run ads instead of social media either. That's the third piece. It's like take what the time you're buying back and you can use it on social media, you can use it on email marketing, you can use it on YouTube, you can use it on product development, it doesn't matter. But use that time to continue to grow the business. So short answer or long answer to a short question is run lead generation ads, but get your freebie, get your sequence and just run it. Because an audience is an asset and ad is just a blip in the radar really in the grand scheme of things.

And do you feel like your email open rates increase when you're running paid ads?

I personally do find that my email open rates increase. However, if you've only ever. I'm just not good at organic. So if you always done organic, you can get 60, 70% open rates on a fully organic email list. Cold or ad based email open rates, it's not uncommon for them to be closer to 30 to 40%. What I tell people is I'd rather have one in like 50 of the people. I'd rather have 50% of the open rate with none of the work, then double the open rate. But I'm like constantly posting on social media and that's a personal preference, right? Some people want a healthy mix of both. We find that to your point, yes, ad open rates are a little bit lower, but clean your email list, scrub it, get people off who aren't opening every three to six months and then actually email your list. I find very scientific analysis. Maybe 60, 70% of the time people who are saying like my open rates are low or people aren't opening my emails, I'm like, well how often are you emailing? I do think that in an attention economy that we're in where it's like quick hits, tiktoks, reels, open, move on, open, move on, scroll, scroll, scroll. You do need to send more emails. I know the conventional wisdom has always been like once a week we email Our list now, like, three to five times a week. Open rates have stayed great. That, I think, is, like, one of our superpowers. Kudos to. I give him a shout out all the time. I always joke that I'm, like, sending him business instead of promoting my stuff on podcasts, but Cody Burch, great dude. Really strong email marketer and storytelling, and we've leaned into that. So I'm not saying you need to market. It doesn't need to be by my stuff. Buy my stuff. Buy my stuff. We tell a lot of stories in our email. We have a lot of analogies in our emails. But emailing that list, I know, again, I'm a. I'm a talker, so you'll just. You just cut me off if you need to. But just know that growing the list is great. And like, part one A is grow that list, but one B is like, do something with that. Just sit on a really big email list. There was this big saying back when we were starting on the Internet. People used to say, the money's in your list. And I have always said, the potential for money is in your list. But if you don't market to that list, you're not doing anything. You're wasting money.

Yeah. And everybody listening here knows that. I'm a big fan of emailing at a minimum, weekly, and that's what we talk about in the newsletter, Profit Club. So we've talked about, you know, just the free gift, growing our email list, kind of hitting that easy button. We've talked about, you know, doing something with that list on a regular basis once they're there. What do you recommend in terms of selling to your list? Let's say that we were going to do, like, a webinar. Would you recommend setting up, you know, campaigns specific to that webinar? And what would you recommend for a launch like that?

Yes, I love this question. So I think first and foremost that everything works. I'm a huge advocate for challenges, but I also do webinars, too.

Too.

Like. Like, our core of our business is three to four challenges a year that we spend a lot of time and energy on. I mean, we go to the nines, and we always have a theme. Our last theme was Disney Princesses. I bought a Disney princess shirt for every day. We bought zoom backdrops. Like, we just really have a good time. But I also know that not everything needs to be a big production. Right. Sometimes it's the dress rehearsal, sometimes it's show night. And so we also do webinars. But what we have Seen really great results with is is just email the list to come to the event and give them multiple reasons to join. I know when I started conventional wisdom was like, you email your list three to four times to come to your webinar and 4 to 6% of them will sign up. And I'm like, no, I don't do that. So I email my list every day for 10 to 14 days before my webinar. I do have intentional, I call them intentional opt outs. So people can like say, hey, I'm not going to come to this webinar. Don't keep emailing me about it, but keep me on the list. And that is really just good email etiquette. I think that the other thing to keep in mind is just be promoting to your list all the time, Especially with the in surge of low ticket products. I'm a huge fan. I love a good low ticket product. I think pros and cons to everything in the marketing world. But what I really love the most is I always have a low ticket offer that I can promote and I always have a webinar, an automated webinar that we have if I'm not doing it live. And so pretty much every time I send an email, I just like weave it in there. So we sent this email last week that we have a hairless cat and we're getting another one. And I basically wrote this long story email, like 6 or 700 words. I'm a storyteller at heart, so I will write a long email and if people read it, great. But basically I was like, you know, when my husband wanted the cat, which I did not, he exposed me to all this social media content, TikToks and Reels and YouTube videos. And over time I kind of like became okay ish with it. And then we put in the offer for a cat. We basically made the transaction. I got him a cat for Christmas, which is my cat now, but I got him a cat for Christmas. And then we got to experience on the purchase. So we fell in. I fell in love with this cat. And so now we are like repeat customers because we bought a second cow, right? So the through line is basically like people need a lot of exposure to something before they trust it enough to make a purchase. The purchase is just the beginning. They need the experience of what that purchase is. So don't stop at the purchase, continue through the experience and then you can have repeat customers because you create a good experience. By the way, this is exactly what we teach in our bootcamp is how to make sure your content is being seen at the top level, exposure level. Come join our Facebook and Instagram ads Bootcamp. It's on demand. It's 25 bucks. Check it out. And then I just keep telling the story. Like it doesn't have to be this big fanfare of like, here's all the reasons you should buy and your life is so terrible because you're not running Facebook ads. It's just like, here's a fun story kind of relates to this thing. Check it out. And I would say that's probably 50 to 60% of our emails, but that's what I'm sending on the non promotional weeks. So there's this balance of like, people really feel like they get to know you. And you know, I've gone to events where people are like, oh my gosh, I've seen your cat before. Like, oh my gosh, how are your dogs? Or oh my gosh, how's the new house? You know, like, that does happen because people do pay attention. And I think there's just a lot of benefit to weaving personal storytelling into promotion. And there's a lot of benefit to just being promotional. Like, I have no shame if I have a webinar coming up and you don't know about it. I feel like I've done something wrong. So I will promote that thing like crazy.

And as you were talking about the cat story, I remember seeing your pictures in your emails this past week. So there you go. So it definitely stuck in my mind there. Yeah, so it definitely works. Zach, before we wrap it up here, any last minute tips for the audience?

Yes. Biggest tip I can offer you is if you're going to run ads, please. Yes, time is a finite resource. Yes, money is a finite resource. Invest in your education before you click the buttons. Even though it's easier, even though it's good to get started. Even though, even though, even though it is the only type of marketing paid media where it costs you money to not know what you're doing. So I'm not saying go buy my course. I'm not saying go buy that course. I'm not saying go to a webinar. I don't care if you go to Facebook. Com. It's called the Facebook Ads Blueprint. It's literally in the help section of Facebook. I don't care if you go through the Facebook blueprint on how to run ads. Fundamentally understand what the buttons you're clicking means. It's a really valuable use of your time. Even if something goes wrong, you. And guess what? You will run ads the wrong way. We ran, we ran $500 of ads from an old page that I don't run anymore to a broken link before someone messaged me was like, hey, I don't think any of this is right, but I'm pretty sure it's you. And I was like, is this so it's going to happen? And luckily we're, you know, I've been doing it for 10 years and this happened six months ago. It happens, but I understand why it happened. I know how to fix it and I put a process in place to prevent it going forward. Invest the time in learning the fundamentals. And please don't use the boost button. Please use the Ads manager. Those are my two pieces.

I love that. Don't use the boost button. And anybody who's kind of dipped their toes in Facebook ads, they know what you're talking about there. So, Zach, can you let folks know where they can find you and you have a free gift for them also?

Yes. So best place to find me is over on Instagram at Zach, with an H. That's the right way to spell it. Z A C, H Spuckler. I'm always on Instagram. Feel free to DM me. I love to hear what you thought of the show. And then if you want to learn our Facebook and Instagram ad strategy, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com ADS15. So it's ADS15 and you can absolutely check it out. It's a little 15 page guide on how to run Facebook ads for $15 a day that grow your list, grow your engagement, and grow your sales.

So, Zach, thank you so much for joining me and I'm so happy to have you on the podcast for the second time.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.