083: Supersizing Your Audience with Video Views Ads

In today's episode, I wanna help you reframe your thoughts around Facebook ads. Typically, we associate ads with sales. Today, I want you to think about ads as a way to audience build instead. Come join me and one of my biz besties, Susan Bradley, as we talk about supersizing your audience.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Today I've got one of my biz besties with me today, the Susan Bradley. If you listen to the podcast at any time over the last couple of years, you've listened to Susan. She's been on a couple of times before, but we were having such a great conversation inside Launch Your Box today. Susan showed up and delivered some amazing training for our members today that I thought, let's get this this info on the podcast. Let's talk about video ads. Let's talk about why we're scared of ads, why we've not been doing 'em. Let's just talk about all of it because it's a mindset thing and the technical piece of how to do it, that's in Launch Your Box in the membership. But we're gonna talk through a lot of different pieces of this so that you can get mindset ready. And then we've got a little, a little surprise at the end, don't we, Susan?

We do.

Me too.

Little bonus.

Yes. If I have— there's so many new listeners these days, like triple what we used to listen. So maybe they haven't heard from you on the podcast before. I would love for you to just give an introduction on who you are, who you serve, what you do from day to day, and then we'll dig into the meat of the podcast.

Well, that sounds good. Thanks for having me. So listen, my name is Susan Bradley. I am such a good friend of Sarah's because we both kind of do the same things. We are the product sellers of the world. And so I, I don't have a subscription box. You're totally the expert on that. But I teach e-commerce store owners how to sell more of their beautiful products and build a business that they really love, gives them some time flexibility, but also gets them a paycheck.

Yeah, that's important because sometimes it takes a long time to actually get a steady kind of a good paycheck. And that's the goal when we start these businesses. Sometimes it's the side hustle and we're making extra money with our, for our families. But the end goal is usually how can I make this a successful business that I can draw a paycheck from every single month?

We both have our stories about how long it took us, but Even if it's not about supporting your family, even if it's just for validation that I am a successful business owner, we need to start taking a paycheck probably long before we think we're ready.

Yeah, we do. So let's dig into what we're talking about today. And when I think about Facebook ads, Instagram ads, just ads in general, I'm always like, you're the girl. Like, you're the girl that I am going to tell somebody to go talk to You're the girl that I'm talking to when I have ad questions. Like, you're the ads person in my world. And I, I wanna just set the stage for people listening right now because it kind of is a scary word. Like, running ads is kind of a scary thing if you're new to business. And even if you're not new to business, like, I didn't run ads for many years after starting my business. And it's one of these things that there's a lot of fear around. Because it's a little bit complicated. It costs money. And then there's all these analytics that you don't even know if you're even doing well when you start to look at the back end of running ads. And so I just want to eliminate anyone's fear that, oh, this podcast isn't for me because I don't do ads. I'm not ready for ads. If you're not doing ads and you're listening right now, you're going to be doing ads when you get done with this podcast because we're going to talk about the significance of it, why it's important. And Susan's, Susan's just going to help you break down the easy parts. And it really is that easy. And we get so tripped up in our brain that it's got to be this super complicated thing. And then we say, I'm not ready for it, but you're ready for it. You're ready for it.

Yeah. So here's what I want everyone to think about when they think about ads is that social media Even though all the things you've heard about how hard it is to, to make ads work for your business, there has never been a better opportunity for any of us who own a business to find our people. And if you think about social media and the money you'll spend on some ads on Instagram or Facebook or even on TikTok, social media is a place to find our people, gather them up in an audience, and then focus only on them. And there has never been a way to do that as efficiently and cost-effectively as there is on using Facebook and Instagram ads.

I love that you say that because there's this comparison game. If you've been in business any amount of time, maybe longer than 2 years, there's been a huge shift in running ads, which causes like lots of frustration with product-based business owners. And you know, that's the costs that have gone up associated with running ads. That's the ROI we are or aren't getting from our ads. What other things have really changed with the way that ads work now versus several years ago?

Well, I think that several years ago, first of all, it cost a lot less to reach your audience. But really, I think that people got used to— product-based people like us got used to being able to set up an ad on Facebook or Instagram. Once you kind of learned what worked for your business, you could set up an ad and then you could just expect sales to come in. Yeah, it gave you a false sense, I'm going to say, of security about how you could control your sales. Want more sales? Just do more ads. Yeah. And so it helped everyone for sure grow their business. What it really didn't do is help anyone figure out how to pretty much organically grow their business and set up systems and processes that move customers from the top of your sales funnel, like that big audience of people out there that could potentially be interested in your product. How do I find them and how do I move them closer to a sale? It just was like, here, I'm gonna just feed money to this machine and money's going to spit out. And, and I think even before Facebook and Instagram ads, Sarah, this happened with Google Ads. People got reliant on those, and then when they stopped working, they were able to do the same thing on social media. Now social media can't provide those results either, and so that's what's got people feeling like they're wasting their money on ads. But I think there's a better way.

There is a better way. We've talked just briefly about how the landscape of ads have changed, but so has the landscape of what people consume on social media, and that is video. And we have talked it to death lately because it is so incredibly important that all of us are doing short video in our businesses. I hope that you're doing short video right now, and if you're not, Don't feel like a failure. It's just time to get going on that. And so today we're going to talk about how to turn the short video that we've been working on or that we'll be creating and create some supersized audience building ads with short video. So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about what we need to do or what that means.

Yeah, well, I think that first of all, short video can be way less professional than you think it has to be. And short video is just really good at helping people understand who you are and what you have for them that they might be interested in. And so I think, well, I don't think, I know I've been doing it myself. Our members have been doing it for a long time. Using video and supplementing that organic reach that you get with video with some ad dollars is the fastest, most effective way, easiest way to grow a great big warm audience of people without spending very much money, without spending, you know, hundreds of dollars. Like, you can actually do it for a few dollars a day.

Yeah, that's why I loved our training today so much, is because people could really understand. And you were talking about $3 a day when we were doing training in there. For $3 a day, there's really not anybody in business that cannot afford $3 a day. If you cannot afford $3 a day, you might shouldn't be in business. But if you're in business, you know the cost of doing business, and $3 a day feels like pennies based on the cost of doing anything. And what I know about video, and we can just take Instagram for an example. Instagram Reels have really been up and coming over the last year, year and a half. But when you look at your Instagram insights and you look at your engagement for the last 7 days, the last 28 days, you can instantly see what your reach is by your followers and your non-followers. And if you look at that chart, your analytics inside Instagram, you will see that most of the people seeing your stuff that are not currently following you are seeing it on a reel, on that short, short video. And so how do we take that, that we're doing organically, and how do we supersize that? How do we get more non-followers to see what we're doing? How do we keep building and growing past the few followers that we have, past the same people seeing our stuff over and over again and half of our people not? How do we take that and we supersize it?

Well, really, let's talk about the strategy. And, and, and really what it is is you just take what's already working in your business. So you already know an Instagram, that's basically your source of new followers. That's how you get more eyeballs and more visibility. So we're just going to take that and amplify that by putting a few dollars a day on that particular post, that content that you've already created, and we're going to get it, going to get it in front of more people that are highly likely to be interested in your video. And then something that everyone who's listening might not know, there's a reason that you're going to do that, and that's really so that you can collect people who have watched that video and put them in a custom audience.

And wait a minute, wait a minute. We've got to make it clear because I think that there's a huge understanding of I'm not running an ad to make a sale. I'm running this ad to collect the viewers of who's watching this ad and then I'm going to retarget them later and then I'm going to nurture them and then I'm going to sell to them, right?

Yeah, success in these ads looks like somebody watching 15 seconds of your video.

That's it.

Yeah, success is what's called a video throughplay, which is 15 seconds or 95%. So if you have a 15-second video, it's even less. And that's success. That's a win. Somebody watching that much of your video. And those are the people that you're collecting and putting in an audience that you can retarget. And here's why it's so, so important to do that. When you do that, when you have an audience of people, this nice warm audience of people who's watched some of your video, they could have watched some of multiple videos, those people are twice as likely to click on your thing when you ask them to click on your thing. If you ask them to click on a link that goes to your sales page, if you ask them to click on a link that goes to your e-commerce store, if you ask them to click on a link that goes to a giveaway you're running so that you can collect a lead. Those people, it's proven, are twice as likely to click that link than a cold audience, people who haven't ever seen you before. And so what happens is when you retarget those people with your thing, say it's a giveaway, when you retarget them with that, you're going to get way more results and it's going to cost you less to get those results because the people that you're targeting already know you.

Yeah, they've already seen you. It's like that recognition. They may not recognize your brand right away, but they're gonna recognize you or what you're showing, or maybe that box that they saw, that 10-second video, and now that box is in my feed in a static form. So they're gonna start to recognize you.

Yeah. You're a perfect example of that, Sarah. So I, when I look through my feed, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, I almost always see you with a stack of boxes behind you. And so it's that constant recognition that makes people say, oh yeah, I was interested in that, I gotta stop. And they're gonna click and find out more. Whereas that cold person is only seeing you maybe for the first time. And so they're so much more likely just to scroll on by. And so if you do get someone to click, that click is usually considerably more expensive, like could be up to double the price of a click from somebody who already knows you, which all sounds super technical, but it's actually really simple. Make a video, take all your videos and make sure you add them to your video view audience. So it's collecting people from all the video content that you do. And then when you're ready to run an ad, maybe for a giveaway or maybe for your sales page or maybe for your waitlist, when you choose an audience to show that ad to, that's your audience, that video view audience.

Yep. You've already warmed them up for pennies, right? Because this can be pennies per view, like a penny per view, really. Yeah.

And if you think about it, I mean, I'm simplifying it, but if you think about it, it's almost like a penny for a person.

Yeah.

And these ads, if you run one of these ads for 7 to 10 days, it's highly likely that in that pool that pool of people it was shown to, that 20 to 50% of those people over that time will watch that video. They might get shown it twice, not watch it the first time, but then watch it the second time. But it's that consistency of seeing you in their feed, whether it's Instagram or Facebook, seeing you, it makes them say, oh yeah, I do want to look at that. I have time now, I'm gonna, I'm gonna click on that. And so It really is truly the fastest, easiest, most scalable way to build this really big pool of warm people that you can retarget with whatever your offer is.

So I'm thinking about this for our subscription box owners, and I'm thinking about their video needs to have their box in it, right? So we need to start building some recognition. It could have them in it as well, but it doesn't have to. It could be a boxing, like you're putting the things in. It could be an unboxing. It could be something fun that has the box there and the products. But we have to get people interested, and we have to create like a, a point of recognition. And that box is typically a point of recognition for them. And so if we can create this video, how long should this video be?

So I think you can go anywhere from 30 seconds up to 2 minutes.

Okay.

I think you try a variety of videos and see what resonates with your audience and the way you would— I mean, the way you measure it, because that's another thing that people really struggle with. People who are afraid of running ads are like, well, I just feel like I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall. I have no clue what any of this means. But when you do a video view ad, really there are only 2 things that are important: the number of through plays that you get and the cost per throughplay. How many people am I getting? Number of throughplays. How much is it costing me to get a person? And so that's all you really have to measure in those video view ads because you just clearly your best ad is the one that gets you the most video views, most throughplays for the least amount of money.

I know that this question came up inside the group, so I want to ask it here, but there was a question of like, How many of these ads should I run at once and how, how long should I run it for?

Yeah. So I think there's two ways you could go. You could run every ad you do, every video you do, you could put a couple of dollars a day on that ad and let them run for a week or two. And then over time you will probably identify videos that get even more viewers than average for less money. And I think that that's where it, becomes super scalable, right? Because then you could say, hey, okay, so I'm gonna peel back my work a little bit and I'm gonna take this video because this is getting me a lot of people watching it and I'm gonna just put $5 a day on that and that is my main audience builder. And then I will just do a couple of bucks a day on some other videos to add variety. The other thing I see, and certainly with our members in the Inner Circle, I see these videos that tell a story do very, very well. So they're not necessarily like I'm packing up orders and shipping them out the door, but they're more like a video with a voiceover the video talking about, you know, talking about maybe their why or who it's for or teaching someone. Like we have a video from one of our members. It's actually Kathy Hayhurst who has a vintage china business. About how to make the perfect cup of tea. And so it is, it's a video, but that one has text overlay rather than voice overlay, but it's really, really successful. There's another one that is, uh, her name is Nicoletta, Keepsakes by Nicoletta. She has the most interesting business. She actually makes, uh, jewelry out of ashes. It's memorial jewelry. And so she has a video that's, I think it's a little bit over a minute, and it shows her making the jewelry, just her hands, and she has a little bit of low music on it, and she talks about how she feels so privileged to be making this amazing jewelry out of the ashes that someone has sent her. But that video tells you in a few seconds literally the whole story, everything you need to know about that business. And that is almost impossible to achieve with a static image. Yeah.

And you know what both of those examples really brought to mind is that they're evoking a feeling.

Feeling.

Both of those videos that, you know, with Kathy's video, maybe you're reminiscent of when you had tea with your grandmother or some, you know, vacation that where you drank tea or whatever that place may be, but it's taking you back to that feeling. And the same with Nicoletta's, you know, video of— that's very deeply personal and it's very deeply emotional. And so they're both creating feelings in a very short way, and they're showing the best part of their business.

Yeah, but I think about— I think about way back when you and I first met and how you had a moment where you realized what your box did for your clients and the way you talked about it, and you still talk about it now. That would be really good for one of those videos, right? Like just showing the box being packed, showing them all the boxes going out the door, and a voiceover talking about what you're delivering to all those women every month. Yeah, that would be a powerful video. That might be the giant audience builder. And anyone making that— you're making a note, I can see it.

But anyway, writing that down right now because it is— because truly, sorry for anyone listening that doesn't understand, but I have this huge like epiphany in my business that I was the influencer in my business.

Yes.

I wasn't a size small because I wasn't 20 years old. And, and I really wanted to create a subscription box that helped women feel beautiful. So that is in the t-shirt and the bag and the accessory that goes with it. I know I can put that on every day and walk out with my head held high and feel confident, and that confidence propels me in everything that I do. And I want that for every one of my subscribers. So just putting that in a little bit of B-roll video with me talking about that, why That's, that brings that emotion that we just talked about.

So powerful. And that subscription box model is perfect for this kind of video, this storytelling video, because there's every one of your listeners who has this, a subscription box, has a story about why this is, why they've chosen this.

Yeah, exactly.

Think about all the amazing stories in your group.

About why. Yeah.

So take that thing, slap $5 a day on it, and start attracting your perfect people.

I'm on it. I'm on it.

Okay. And you know, sure, make sure there's— it's captioned too.

Everybody knows that. Yeah. Write that down. Captioned.

Yeah.

Um, so Susan, if you are a Launch Your Box member and you're listening right now, Susan recorded 3 very valuable lessons that are in your training library inside Launch Your Box. Just go to the audience building module. You'll find it. But also I wanna take it a little bit deeper because you're hosting Ads Made Easy Week and that's coming up. And, and you've talked, we've talked about video ads here, but I wanna talk a little bit more about what this week is. It's a whole week. It's kind of like my coaching week if you guys have been to my coaching week. But she's taking that week to go deep with getting people who maybe have never ran an ad before. Or have ran ads in the past and just feel like they weren't doing well or really had nothing to measure. So I want to talk a little bit about Ads Made Easy Week and what you do during that week.

Yeah, for sure. So don't you agree there is nothing better than doing? Yeah, there is nothing better than doing. And so in this week, we're actually not going to— it's not a talking head week. This is where we give everyone one job a day to do. And what we're doing is we are setting up one ad together. We are looking at what works for our business because sometimes we can't see really what— like, we only know what we know, and so we don't see what the outside world sees. So we're setting up one ad for our business together. You don't even need a business manager. You can do it. We're going to show you how to do it. Simply and easily right on the page. You'll do it with myself and our coaches. And so we'll show you what generally works best. We'll show you lots of examples of people's successful ads, and then you will create yours. You're going to run that ad for 3 days at a budget of $5 a day, and then we're all going to analyze our results together and we're going to know our next steps. So you'll get to do that in this group with all these other people who are working on the same thing. And what's so fun, Sarah, is they all post they're creative. So you get to see what's worked for someone else, and it could give you that aha moment.

Or that it's just— you're stuck, you're going to get tons of ideas, so much inspiration about what other people are doing, how you can take that idea and conform it to what you do. Like, and I heard this saying earlier this week, and I don't even remember where I heard it from, but it was something about how people are sick of the DIY, but they don't really want the done for you either. So they want something in between called done with you.

That's exactly it. Yes.

This is what I was thinking when you were talking about it. Like, they want to do it, they want to do the DIY, but they need some direction and leadership. And they also need the accountability of like, okay, we're going to take this one week and we're all going to do this together in this one week. So I'm gonna do it with you. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it, and I'm not gonna do it for you. I'm gonna do it with you. And people are just ready for that for sure.

Because there's, there's no better way, at least for most people, no better way to learn than actually doing it yourself. But if you do it yourself and you don't have any support or any community, when you get stuck, you're just like, yeah, I'm not doing this anymore.

Yeah.

You know, if you're me, you're going to look for the cookie. Or something when you get stuck. But when you're doing it in an environment like this, when you get stuck or you have a question where you're like, "Ooh, should I do this or this?" You can ask it. I mean, I'm in that group, of course, our Coaches are in that group, but there's also hundreds of other people in there who have already been through this program and done it successfully and are just there for a refresh. And so there are so many ways you can get encouragement and support, but also get your, your questions answered. In, in like a form that isn't general, when somebody can actually look at your stuff and say, oh, okay, this is what I would do.

Yeah. And I love that there's very clear outcomes for the week, right? So if I'm gonna come do Ads Made Easy, I wanna know, like, can you tell me what I can expect for my outcome to be at the end of the week?

Yeah. So at the end of the week, you will have completed one ad. You'll have analyzed your results and you'll know what you need to do next. And so what we— we'll show you how to build this audience. So you're collecting all your people. So you'll start collecting your people during the week too. So you'll be set up for that. But we'll leave you with, okay, so now this is what you've done. You've set up this one ad, you've tested it, you know what works. So now we want you to go ahead and test who you're showing this ad to. We're going to show you how to make it better because success first is to get an ad up and running and figure out what image is going to stop people in the scroll. I heard you say it the other day, we were talking to some friends and you said, what's the scroll stopper? We want you to identify what's the scroll stopper in the first test, and then in the second test you're going to identify, okay, Who are the right people? How do I find the right people to target? Because that's such a problem. Yeah, it is. So we have bonus training for that, but our experts are in there to help you find that audience. So that is the next step. And so that's where we're going to leave you, is that, okay, now you know what your scroll stopper is and you know what's normal. So you don't have to listen to someone who comes screaming into a Facebook group telling you how they made $5,000 on their one their one ad. You can start with that. We'll tell you what the normal people get because they might be making it up anyway. We'll tell you what's normal so that you can, you can measure your results against what's normal. So you don't have to sit there and say, well, this doesn't look like what I saw on some other Facebook groups, so I, I probably stink at this.

Yeah, now what?

We're going to say, well, no, actually, this is what's normal. I, I don't know about you, but I see all the time, you know, when I'm on a call with one of our members, they'll say blah, blah, blah, blah. My leads are costing XYZ. And I'll say, oh, that's really good.

Yeah. They don't realize they're doing a good job. I see it too. I see it when they say, oh, I had this many people click the thing and I only got this many members. I'm like, you have a 9% conversion rate, right?

Yeah. So that's what we want to share with people is like, let's learn by doing. Let's look at our results. Let's talk about what our results mean to us. And then let's tell you, okay, here's what's next. Here's the next step for you. And now you already have the power, you have the knowledge of where you're going with this. And, and so, you know, you can move forward feeling confident that you're clear on what's supposed to happen here and the steps you can take to make your results better.

Yeah, I love it. And, and I know, um, we've got the, we've got the link for you in the show notes today so that you can go over there and, and check out Ads Made Easy and start to make some progress. Because it's all about audience building. We're not talking about you running ads and making sales. We're talking about really building a strong, healthy, big audience that you can propel you into 4th quarter, into the next launch, into showing up and selling subscription boxes or whatever you've got coming up. But this is something that's tangible that we can do every single week and every single month in our business to continue to grow our audiences. We've got to keep growing them to keep getting new subscribers. So there's— this is such an easy way to really get started. We're already making the video, and let's put a little fuel on it and let's get it working for us instead of just keep producing more and more content that maybe a few people see. Let's produce one nice video and let's let a lot of people see it instead of spinning our wheels creating content every time we blink our eyes, you know?

So I agree, I agree. And, and what I wanted to just leave everyone who's listening with is that Even though it sounds amazing to be able to throw money at ads and get sales, we all know that things change. We don't control that, and that's not sustainable. But when you build an audience of your people, you know, not— I told you that those people are 2 times more likely to click on your thing, but they're also 2 times more likely to become your buyer down the road. And so when you invest some time and a little bit of money in that, even though, you know, you aren't going to be able to go screaming into a Facebook group telling people you sold $5,000 from your ad, 5 years later you will still be there and you'll be saying, well, I actually don't have to spend money on sales. Like, when I think about my, uh, my big business, WeSqueak, people were always floored that I only spent 6% of my, my sales on advertising. That was unheard of, but it was because I'd built this audience. I've nurtured that audience. I was looking at making sure I had lots of people on my email list, and so those people were so much warmer than what someone who's relying on ads is attracting. So just keep that in your mind, guys. It's the long game that will get you a vibrant business for the long term, that business that you can get a good paycheck from.

Absolutely. Now, Susan, I have one more question for you.

Sure.

We started this episode with maybe there's somebody that hasn't been running ads and they've listened and they're still here with us. They've never run an ad because it feels scary. Or maybe someone has been running ads but gave up because they felt out of control. They didn't know what they were even measuring. What advice would you give them as we're sitting here today?

So I'm going to say just put on your brave pants. Come to Ads Made Easy. We're going to hold your hand, walk you through the process, because frankly, unless you find a way to become more visible and get your product in front of more eyeballs of, you know, that are in heads that are interested in your product, unless you do that, it's, it's going to be a slog for you. Like, I don't think that there's another way to grow your business that will get you the results that you need. Like, you, you really have to increase your visibility. It's almost like taking a store from down the dark hallway or dark alley in some small town and putting it in the mall in a giant city. Like, you really need that visibility to get people to, to be interested and ultimately subscribe to your box.

I love that analogy. It's very visual. Alright, so if you've been listening, let's go over to Ads Made Easy and let's get to work. Few dollars every single day just to collect people that are watching our videos. That's all we're saying. There's not some big goal there. There's not some big thing that you have to do. You have to create video ads that will attract your perfect person and start growing your audience. Susan, thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, see you in Ads Made Easy.

You will.

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