MBA2177 Why I Took My Money Out of Facebook Ads + Free Ride Friday

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Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the place to be to grow the business you want every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Freeride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our program. We're giving away our automated webinar challenge, retailed for $500 over at webinarninja.com AWC showing you how to automate your leads and sales with automated webinars. You can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter a weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you want it's that easy. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's lesson, you will learn why I took my money out of Facebook ads. I've been running Facebook ads for the last pretty much 10 years. But in 2022, I decided no more. And many of my entrepreneurial friends have asked me why. Why aren't you investing in Facebook ads anymore? What happened? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to explain why I pulled my money out, where I'm putting my money instead, and why you might want to consider doing the same. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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The start of 2022, I was reevaluating where to spend our marketing dollars. At the time, we were spending money on Google Ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, banner ads, all kinds of digital marketing. But the first place I took my money out of was Facebook and Instagram. And I'm going to explain why. There were a few technical and ROI reasons, but there were also strategic reasons why I made this decision. Let's start with the former. You might have heard that Apple devices have started to prompt people to block tracking on ad sites like Facebook, tracking pixels, to be exact, where there's a pop up that says, hey, this website is tracking your web activity. Now, over 50% of my target audience, the customers I'm looking for, use an Apple device. So this actually affects my ability to track a return on investment. What exactly is happening here? Well, the Facebook pixel that Apple's warning people of is really the backbone of the efficacy of Facebook ads. What a Facebook pixel does is that it allows you to know how to target a customer as well as serve them ads that are relevant to them. That's also how retargeting works, where you put the Facebook pixel on your website in the code of your website. So when a customer comes to your website and then goes to Facebook, you could serve them an ad. They know that they were on your website. But more importantly, Facebook will know when they buy because of this Facebook pixel. So that you can know how many people bought that clicked on my Facebook ads without knowing your exact conversions on Facebook, it kind of loses its luster. Meaning the whole reason why Facebook ads are great is because yes, you're targeting a larger audience, but also you know how well it's converting. And with half of my audience pretty much being untrackable now, the data of how well my ads are doing in Facebook and Instagram, by the way, is kind of murky, not accurate. So it's very hard to double down, triple down, put money down on ads that I'm not sure are Working or not. Secondly, if you've never run Facebook ads or Instagram ads, it's a lot of work. There's a lot of work involved in creating effective ads and continually to create new, effective ads, because you need new creative and copy and images and videos and all kinds of different ads to make sure it converts. And you need several different variations so you can split test. So you need a team behind running ads. I would say Google search ads are probably the simplest type of ads because there's no images, it's just text and keywords. And this is why Google Ads are actually quite expensive, because it's one of the easiest forms of marketing and you're getting traffic that people are searching for, rather you pushing ads in people's face. In fact, Facebook has actually publicly said, hey, we had the least growth in the last quarter. They've published our numbers. And a big reason for this is because ad dollars are just not being pumped in Facebook as they used because of these tracking issues. But I had a more strategic reason why I wanted to pull my money out of Facebook, because I wanted to put my monies elsewhere. I want to be able to support other creators that share the same audience as I do by sponsoring their newsletters, their YouTube channels, their podcasts. And by doing that, I get in front of a really targeted audience and I get to help and support a creator that can possibly be a customer of mine in the future or be an advocate. This allows me to build relationships with tastemakers in my economy and get in front of an audience that actually matters to me. Now, this takes a bit more work than just running ads, because I got to build relationships and we got to negotiate rates, and we got to make sure that we run these ads and create creatives and ads that are specific for that audience. But it's well worth it because the impact that these ads make are far greater. Why? Because I'm in their inbox because of newsletters, Because I'm in their ears because of the podcast, because they see me on the videos of their creators. And so far, it's actually doubled our ROI versus Facebook. Now, I'm not saying that you should go out and do this yourself as well, because your business, your industry, your market might be different than mine. I'm in the software business. I'm dealing with small businesses. I'm marketing to creators and coaches. But I want to share with you why I made this decision so you can reevaluate where you're spending your ad dollars, because we all have to spend money on marketing. But we got to be smart about it so that we can get the most out of every dollar so that we can reinvest and grow our business.

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I want to share with you a few more insights when it comes to alternative ways to spend your marketing dollars versus Facebook or Instagram ads. I share with you sponsoring other creators and newsletters, and if you don't want to do it piecemeal or approach each creator individually, you can go to networks. For example ConvertKit, who I just mentioned, they have an ad network for their newsletters or the creators that run their newsletter through ConvertKit. If you reach out to them, they'll work with you. If you say, hey, I have a budget of $10,000 $5,000, I want to be able to sponsor some creators and get my ads in their newsletters. They'll hand pick some great creators that would be good for your needs in your business and your advertisement and do all the legwork for you. Of course they take a modest cut, but it's well worth it because they're doing the work. Another option is running video ads through YouTube. I know many people have gotten a lot of great results from YouTube ads. Now it takes a bit of work because you have to produce a great video ad or ads, but if you nail it, YouTube is one of the best marketplaces to get traffic for your website. Another option is sponsoring live events online like summits and workshops and conferences. We've done this in the past and it's really great value because sometimes I spent a few thousand dollars and our brand gets exposed to hundreds of thousands of people through newsletters, through the actual event, through the website, through social media. It's pretty good. And of course you can use tracking links UTM links so you can track conversions. And lastly, don't forget about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a great way to bring on partners where they can get a commission for every sale so that you can leverage their audience to get more sales and you give them a cut of the sale. There are a ton of different affiliate marketing tools and software you can use. Just Google it And you can find a ton that work for you personally. We use a tool called IDEV Affiliate. It's a bit more technical. We host it on our own servers. It works for us, but you might want to go with a simpler tool like Rewardly or another cloud based option. Well, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you enjoyed it. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. Kim beals. Kim Beals says $100 MBA show 5 stars educational thanks. Short and sweet review by Kim. Thanks so much for that review. Your mission is to email me at omar00mba.net so we can hook you up with the automated webinar challenge over@webinarninja.com AWC. It retails for $500 or you can win it for free just like Kim just did. Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and listen in on Friday to see if you want. It's that easy. And once you leave us a review, you enter the draw every single week until you win. Pretty cool. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There are so many ways to market your business. Get creative. I know people that run live events across the country for free. Free admission so that they can talk to their audience, give workshops, and then sell their products and services. That's marketing. That's spending their money. They're traveling, they're booking the reservation of the venue. It's an investment. But hey, they get direct access to the audience. You get to decide what you do with your marketing dollars. It's a fun challenge. And don't be impatient. Experiment. Try new things and see what works for your business. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take.

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