MBA875 Lessons Learned After a Year of Facebook Ads

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks.

When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform.

Ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster, and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey, welcome to The Hunter the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you the truth on how to build your business effectively and efficiently with our deep dive lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA and webinar Ninja. And in today's lesson I'm going to share with you everything that I learned in this past year when it comes to Facebook ads. These past 12 months, we've been running Facebook ads consistently on a daily basis for our business webinar Ninja, and we've learned a lot about Facebook ads in that year. A lot of things that people don't share. I'm actually quite surprised how a lot of people don't talk about these things when it comes to Facebook ads. They just say do Facebook ads. Facebook is great for marketing. You can get really targeted. All this stuff is very true. But there are a lot of things that they don't talk about. Like how long does it take to actually, you know, hone in your ad and actually get some conversions and make it worth your while and worth your investment. Can you do this by yourself? Do you need to hire somebody? And if so, how do you hire somebody? Many people think or present Facebook ads as something. Like you said, it and forget it. Nothing can be further from the truth. Facebook ads need to be constantly optimized and changed and tweaked because you can't run the same ad months on end. At some point, you're going to oversaturate that audience. Then your rates for your ad are going to skyrocket, and it's not going to be worth that investment. So you have to change things up and kind of like start from scratch. Not completely from scratch, but you're going to have to start over and try to retool, retweak your ads. We talk about all that as well as, you know, what's a really effective way to make sure these ads convert and make it worth your investment, Especially if you're just on a tight budget. If you have, like, a very tight marketing budget on like, $500 a month, and you don't want to waste that $500, you want to make sure it works for you. What do you do? How do you do it? We get into all these details and more, as well as my overall takeaway. Is it worth it? Should you do Facebook ads and will I continue to do them in the future? Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, let's back up a bit when it comes to Facebook ads. I have to admit, about three years ago, I started to dabble with Facebook. Facebook ads, and most of us start with dabbling, right? And I created an ad and I put it up there, and it just didn't do well at all. Pretty much wasted all my money. Luckily, it wasn't a whole lot of money. It wasn't thousands of dollars, just a couple hundred dollars. Then I realized, hmm, I think I'm a little bit in the dark here. I need some help here, right? So I actually bought a few Facebook ad courses and thought, let me teach myself, let me educate myself on how to create effective ads, how to use Facebook's ad manager, or what they call their power editor, and how to really optimize my landing pages to make sure that when they actually land on the page from the ad, they actually convert. Right? And I took these courses, and they were really informative. They really did help in a lot of ways. Some were better than others. And I started to run a couple ads, you know, again, giving it another shot. And I did a little bit better this time. But what I realized is that when you're running ads with Facebook, it's not just one dimensional. It's not just, I'm creating a ad with. With A photo and some copy and a call to action. Right? Go to this page. Sign up here. There's a formula here. There's a lot going on other than just that. Number one, there's the targeting. There's the audience that you're actually going to be presenting this ad to. Who are these people that you're gonna present this ad to? And Facebook has a ton of ways to create an audience. Like, when you take any kind of course on Facebook ads, it's one of the first things they talk about. And there's so many ways you can create an audience, whether it's from pages that people like on Facebook, from uploading your email list and looking at lookalike audiences, people that are similar to the people that are with that email, signed up with Facebook. It's pretty complex and pretty interesting that Facebook has this power. You can narrow down audiences by demographics, like their income, if they're a homeowner, their location, where they live, their age, a whole bunch of stuff. There's a whole different targeting called retargeting, which means that when they visit your website and they're on Facebook, later on, they. They'll see your ad. So there's the aspect of the audience. Who am I showing this ad to? There's the ad itself, like we talked about, the copy, the imaging, making sure the copy and the images match the actual landing page. Then you have the landing page. You know, once they click on the ad, you've paid for that click. You paid for the displaying of that ad, and they're on that website page that you sent them to. What does that page say? What does it do? What are you asking from the actual visitor? Are you asking for their email address? Are you giving them something free? Are you asking them to buy something immediately? Later on, I learned that it's a whole lot easier to get somebody to convert if you just give them a very low barrier of entry. Like, here's a free course. Just give me your email address and I'll give you the free course once I have their email address now, they're in my database now, I can build a relationship with them. I can market to them later on, give them a discount code, something like that, right? But if I ask them to, hey, buy my product right now, sign up for a $400 product right off an ad, they don't know who I am. They don't know what we're all about. And it's so easy for me not to convert. You know, it's so easy for them to be like, I'm not buying anything right now. Forget this, and that's it. And you just lost your ad dollars. So as you could see, it's not super simple. It's not like, this is my business. Here's my link. Create an ad for me, Facebook. This leads me to the second part of my lesson, which addresses the question, can you do this by yourself? Can you actually create Facebook ads, run Facebook ads on a regular basis and just manage this yourself? The answer is yes. But I have to be completely honest with you. It does take a lot of time. When I was doing it myself, it took me at least minimum five hours a week. That's an hour a day, every single day of the week. That's a lot of time. For me, that's a lot of time because I'm doing a whole lot of other things in my business. I'm creating content, I'm creating podcast episodes, I'm managing the team. I'm working with developers, I'm working on the website, I'm doing interviews on different shows. I'm going to conferences. There's a lot of things. And for. For me to have that responsibility to have to manage my ads myself every week, five hours at least. Sometimes it took me more six, seven hours, especially if I have to change things. That's the other thing. When you run ads, it's not just set it and forget it. You have to revisit and look at how the ads are performing on a regular basis, almost on a daily basis, and see, is it converting? How are we converting? What's the cost per click? What's the cost per conversion? What's happening here? Is it going high? Is it going low? Should I double down on these ads? Because the cost per conversion is quite low. Let's add a little money to it. Let's try to increase the budget on that one, maximize the benefit on that one. You need somebody on top of it. And if it's not performing well, you have to tweak the ad, you have to tweak the copy, you have to tweak the imagery. Maybe you have to tweak the audience. You get the point. It takes management. So, yes, you can do it, but you have to make sure you're going to dedicate the time to do it. Because if you're not on top of it, it's a really quick way for you to lose money. So a lot of people ask, well, should I hire somebody? And a lot of people make the mistake where they say, okay, I'm going to hire somebody just to Dial in things. Just make sure everything is optimized. They set up my ads and then I'll say, thank you very much, and then let them go. And I'm going to just let it, you know, I'll run it from there. No, it doesn't work that way because it's dialed in for the moment. But then at some point, in some time, you know, in a couple weeks, maybe even a week, you're going to have to change things up. Are you going to put the time in to change things up? Are you a great person at copy? Are you a good person to create great imagery on with, you know, Photoshop and something that's compelling? Depending on what kind of ad you're running. Is it a video ad? Are you going to produce that video? Are you going to create an explainer video? What are you going to do? So it takes maintenance. It's not just about set it and forget it. So what's the other option? Now, my personal opinion, if you're going to run Facebook ads as a cornerstone, as something, a part of your marketing efforts in your business, it's like a big part of your marketing campaign, then I really highly recommend you hire somebody. And they don't have to be full time. They could be part time, they could be an hourly basis, they could be on a contract basis. And there's plenty of experts there. And sometimes you're gonna have to try a few people out to make sure they're a good fit. We did then. It's not that there weren't a good fit. Actually, there were great fits, but we needed different people to do different things or as we tweaked, and try to change or try new things. And we needed experts in those areas. Now you might be saying, okay, I have to hire somebody, even part time. How much is this gonna cost me? Now, at a bare minimum, you can get somebody around $1,000 to $1,500 a month. Now, I know that sounds like a lot of money. It is not a small chunk of change, especially on a monthly basis. And trust me, that's just the start. You can pay people more than that. 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. And some people, they work on a base as well as a percentage of the number of ads you run or the amount of money you spend on ads. Some people work on a commission for conversions, but in general, everybody has some sort of base. And some people just have a baseline. And they say, hey, this is how much I cost for my efforts. And whatever revenue you make is your revenue. And you can negotiate this, but what you have to do is I gotta look at this and say, hey, I'm gonna pay somebody fifteen hundred dollars to run my Facebook ads. And I still have to pay for the actual ads this ad spend, right? So let's say, for example, each month I'm gonna spend $2,000 on ads. So in total, I'm gonna spend $3,500 on Facebook. Facebook ads. What would be a win for you if you put in that kind of money? Take a look at your products, take a look at what you're selling, Figure out how much money or how many sales it's gonna take for you to make it worth your while. So maybe if you said, okay, I'm Gonna put in $3,500 a month for this whole Facebook marketing stuff, I'd be happy if I made $5,000. If I made $1,500 in profit, I'd be happy if I made 6,007, whatever it is, right? Make that number, figure out the, say it's 5,000. Figure out how many sales you need of your product in order for it to work, for it to be worth it, how many sales you need each month. Now, if you have a reoccurring business, reoccurring, charging, like a SaaS product, this is a different equation because you're going to acquire a customer, but that person's going to keep on paying you every month. So that's even more gravy. But if it's a one time product, make sure, you know, you calculate it for that. I need new customers. I need this amount of money every single month, this amount of sales every single month to make it worth my while. Now, once you've calculated that, you have an idea of how many conversions you need. And I say conversions, I'm talking about sales, not only conversions to the ad, like maybe they sign up for your newsletter or for your free course, but you can also track conversions to sales. And you can easily do that by adding some simple code to your checkout page or the page after the checkout page actually, which is usually called the confirmation page or thank you page. So you have that number. You need to present that now to the person you're going to hire. Say, hey, I'm willing to pay you that money and I'm willing to spend this much money every month at the start right now on Facebook ads. But this is how much money I need to have in return to make it worth my while. At least anything above that is gravy. And show them the math this is how many sales we need, is how many sales conversions we need, and negotiate that. Now, personally, my personal opinion, when it comes to these goals, you got to be realistic about these goals as well as be practical. You're spending $3,500. In my personal opinion, if you make $4,000 in sales every month, that's $500 profit, right? That's $500 more you didn't have last month. And your branding and you're getting the word out there about your products and services, there's a lot of word of mouth that's gonna happen because of those ads. So that's kind of worth it. Especially if somebody else is managing it. You don't need to do much. They're gonna ask for your opinion, you're gonna meet with them, they're gonna ask you for some assets, like some photos or maybe some quick sales copy and the links to your site. So I definitely recommend you exploring this option because it is a full time job. When I say full time, I don't mean 40 hours a week, but you have to be on top of it. And that's really one of the biggest lessons I've learned. When we've hired somebody to work on this to dedicate themselves to our ads, tweaking, changing, improving things, we've really seen a lot of results. And I will continue to do Facebook ads because of that. And we're going to go into different kinds of Facebook ads, video ads. We're also going to explore YouTube ads, but that's a different story. But the point here is that now we can really try and experiment different things now that we have a baseline, now that we know, okay, these are conversions, these are the numbers, this is the formula, and it's worth our while. We're making our money back from the investment. Now you want to make sure whoever you work with is very strong at understanding conversions. We talked about this a little bit before, but the page they land on off the ad is so important. You know, we had to tweak our landing page, the page that they go to after the Facebook ad a few times because we needed to make sure it converted better, that there's no disconnect from the ad to the actual page. Actually, we actually added the same images that are on the ad right on the page. So it looks like it's really well branded and there's no. It's kind of like streamlined. Right. This is especially important on mobile. It's also important on desktop, but you know, the mobile experience is quite quick and different. Windows are opening up and you want to make sure that they don't feel like there's a jarring experience like what is this site doesn't look like anything like the ad. Use the same colors, the same kind of fonts, things like that. But we had to tweak our landing page a whole bunch of times and now we were giving away a free course. We still give away a free course at webinar Ninja over@webinarninja.com course. It's called the ultimate webinar course and helps you get started with your first webinar. So it's a free asset. I'm spending money on ads to get people to take something for free. Why? Because I want to build a relationship with them. I'm interested in people that are interested in starting their first webinar doing webinars. I offer them a course. If they do the course, they're going to be more likely to buy my product. And now I have their email address and they have to give me their email address to get the course, to access the course. And now I have an autoresponder email sequence that goes out that nurtures that customer, that potential customer. And when they're ready to buy and they're ready to do webinars, I will be the go to person they go to because I've cultivated them, I've helped them, I've answered their questions, I've invited them to webinars, a whole bunch of things and if you want, you can offer them a discount and all that kind of stuff. So that page, that landing page that gets them to sign up for that course was worked on a lot and it's still being worked on. And when we change our design for our website, we're going to work on that again. We're going to give a different freebie. It's not going to be a course, it's going to be something completely different. So you could see this doesn't end. This keeps on going. And that's why you have to have somebody on top of it or you're going to be on top of it. But the point is, is that this is a full kind of engagement, full time job that you have to do and keep your eye on it on a regular basis.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.

ClickUp just solved AI's biggest problem, and it's saving 4 million teams from productivity loss every day. Unlike ChatGPT and other AI tools, ClickUp converges all your work into one platform so your AI super agents have full context to prioritize tasks, execute workflows, and drop draft documents instantly. Teams using ClickUp finish work 30% faster and cut meetings in half. Try ClickUp for free today and get 15% off AI upgrades@ClickUp.com podcast that's C L I C K-U P.com podcast there.

Is a reason why Gary Vaynerchuk and all these big experts are pushing Facebook ads, saying Facebook ads are really effective. They're a great marketing tool. It's because they are. They are a great marketing tool, but you have to know how to use the tool. It's a whole industry of people that know how to use this tool. Now you can become part of that industry and, you know, learn it yourself and carve out the time, or you can get somebody to do it for you and make sure it makes dollars and cents. It's worth your return on investment. Personally, I prefer the latter. You know, I've tried both, and I prefer somebody who's an expert that has dedicated the time to, you know, track my ads and make sure that they're optimized and that they're converting properly. A few things I want to add with Facebook ads. It's getting very crowded, right? A lot of people are doing Facebook ads, so it's more important for you to stand, to be authentic, to be real, to be yourself. So show your face, put your image on that ad, show your personality. If you're doing video ads, have fun with it. It's a great way to show your personality and to really stand out from the crowd of all the different sponsors, ads that are on everybody's feeds. If you're on Facebook regularly, take a look at some of the ads that you get. Take note, take some screenshots. I do this all the time. The ones that really interest me and think, oh, this is a great idea, and I'll forward them to the person we work with. With Facebook ads, I say, this is an awesome idea. The other day I saw one from McDonald's that was really cool. The point is, is that you have ideas all over the place. Just, you know, keep your eyes open and you can, you know, look at some ideas that can Inspire you to come up with your own ideas. One more quick tip. When you're starting with Facebook ads, whether you're doing them yourself or you're getting somebody to hire you your first month, do not spend so much money on the ads. Don't put in so much money on marketing. You still have to tweak things. Try it out on very little capital. $500 the whole month, maybe even a few hundred dollars. You have to test things. You can find out if there's results via conversion rates and all that stuff. All the stats they show you in the power editor in Facebook. It's very powerful, hence the name power editor. But the point is, is that you don't need to spend a lot of money to see what's working, what's not at the start. Once you start seeing some results, then you can double down and put a little bit of money on that ad. But don't start out with thousands of dollars. I'm going to go gangbusters on this. It's not a tap. You can just, you know, turn on and be like, okay, I'm going to get all this, you know, money from all my customers. Now I'm going to have thousands of customers because I'm running Facebook ads. No, it doesn't work that way. You need to make sure that you, you know, you tweak things, you make sure that they're, you know, the honed in for your business is in your landing page on low, low investments. And then once they start converting, you see some percentages that make sense for your business and for your roi. Then you double down and you start spending a little bit more. And after that first month of testing, you can really be confident about what kind of money you want to spend on ads. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, let us know in an itunes rating and review. Just leave us an itunes rating and review by searching the $100 NBA show on iTunes. You'll see us right there. It takes two minutes to leave us a review. We read every single one of them and it's a good way for us to know what you love about the show so we can keep doing it. And don't forget to hit subscribe. By hitting subscribe, you make sure all the episodes come to you automatically. You don't have to search for anything, it just shows up downloaded right on your device. So hit subscribe right now. Alright, thank you so much for listening to the show. But before I go, I want to leave you with this at the end of the day, Facebook ads is a form of marketing. And right now the hot thing is Facebook ads. And it's been going on for a few years, and it'll probably go on for another few years, but might be something else in the future. And the skills and the procedures and the different things that you're going to put into the Facebook ads right now can be transferable, whether that's sales, copy, imagery, the conversion page, the page you're trying to get them to convert on. These are things that you're going to be working on and learning about that you can take on and move them to a different platform, whether they're YouTube ads or any other ads. So keep that in mind. You may want to take some notes as you're building your ads. Marketing is not just Facebook marketing. It's marketing in different forms, different ways, different platforms. And a lot of things you put into your Facebook marketing campaigns can be used in other campaigns and other platforms. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then.

Take care.

Of.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.