The truth about using Facebook & Instagram ads for your business

Just about every Facebook ads manager or teacher will try to convince you that you need to run ads for your business, but do you really?

Inside this episode I want to have a frank conversation about who 'needs' to run ads and who doesn't. 

Surprise, surprise, not every business 'needs' to run ads and some shouldn't run ads yet. Let's look at when to run ads and what they will do for your business. 

Tune in 🎧

Connect with me

Website: www.newschoolofmarketing.com
Facebook: @newschoolofmarketing
Facebook group: @newschoolofmarketing
Instagram: @bianca_mckenzie

Learn from me:

🟣 FREE MASTERCLASS: Sell more of your online course with Meta Ads
https://www.biancamckenzie.com/masterclass

🔵 AIMFUL ADS ACADEMY: Tools, resources & 1:1 support to attract more ideal clients and make more sales with proven, easy to follow Facebook & Instagram ad strategies for any budget. https://www.biancamckenzie.com/aimful-ads/

🟢 FACEBOOK ADS PREP SCHOOL: Find out what you need to know and do before spending money on ads. https://www.biancamckenzie.com/prep-school/

🟡 INVISIBLE AD FUNNEL PLAYBOOK: A practical step-by-step guide to making a big impact with a tiny budget. https://www.biancamckenzie.com/playbook

🟠 FUNNEL FUNDAMENTALS: Building effective sales funnels that drive conversions and grow your business. ...

Transcript

Welcome to the new School of Marketing podcast, the place for smart, simple strategies that will amplify your business results. Sharing practical tips, insider knowledge and actionable advice. Because marketing is something that every business owner can do. Now let's get started. Introducing your host, Bianca McKenzie, mum, lover of snow sports, camping, horse riding and in demand launch strategist and Facebook advertising Knowledge bank.

Hey, welcome back to the new School of Marketing podcast. I am so grateful to you for tuning in. Before we dive in, I would love to pay respect and acknowledgement to the Palawa people of Lutrawita who are the traditional owners of the land on which my business operates. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. All right, I hope you are well, wherever you are. I'm in Tasmania and I cannot tell you how excited I was that we had rain this week. I know if you're in the other parts of Australia, you probably don't want to have rain. I heard reports of flash flooding and things like that, but yeah, we hadn't had rain for quite some time and living on a property where we rely on tank water, it gets a bit nervous after a while. So I'm so glad that we had rain and really the grass needs it. The horses are already on hay because there is just not enough feed. So yeah, I kind of did a little rain dance. I was so excited and thankfully it rained overnight. So I love it when like, yeah, you just kind of like wake up during the night and you hear that sound of rain on the roof. So it was great. I really loved it. I want to talk to you about using Facebook ads for your business and why not? Everyone needs to use Facebook ad, no matter what you've been told before. And I know it's a bit strange coming from someone who makes, well, who uses Facebook ads and like, yeah, I make my money from Facebook ads, right? I do that. This is what I do for clients. It's what I teach my students. But not everyone needs to use Facebook ads. It really annoys me. So yeah, I'm going to talk about whether or not you potentially need to use Facebook ads and if you do, how you can use them. So who needs to use ads? Businesses. Business owners who need a large amount of traffic to their website in order to make sales. They're the ones that need to use ads. So if you are in a business where you need a large amount of traffic to your website in order to make sales, you need to use ads. Obviously you need to be ready and there's a whole lot of kind of like a checklist of things that you need to do before you start running ads. But I do not subscribe to the idea that every business owner needs to run ads because if you don't need that volume, then you don't really need ads. You just need to do other marketing activities. So who are these businesses? Well, typically it means that they are e commerce stores course creators, the people that need a lot of traffic to potentially get a lot of sales and to get a lot of leads that they can nurture and sell their courses. So let's have a look at each of those. So e commerce and course creators and learn more about how Facebook ads fit in and how to use ads for your business if you have a business like that. So we'll talk about e commerce first. So if you have an ecommerce store, you will need a large amount of traffic to your website in order to make a certain amount of sales and conversions. And depending on your goals, and depending on the average order value and depending on the overall website conversion rate, you actually should be able to calculate the outcome of your ads when you start running ads. If you start running ads and it costs you a dollar to get someone to your website and you know what the average order value is and you know what the conversion rate is, then you, then you should know, should be able to calculate how many people to send to your website and what that, you know, number will equate to in sales and conversions. And many store owners invest too early and they just get burnt. One, they spend too much and they don't make enough back and then they basically lose one, interest. And two, the hope that Facebook ads actually can do something for them. So your website needs to be optimized and it needs to be converting well before you start sending traffic to it and before you expect a certain number of conversions. And look, of course you can use ads to send more traffic to it before you have it fully worked out. Like, you know, before you have fully worked out your conversions and your optimizations. But you need to know that this type of campaign would be a test. It'd be like marketing research in order to work out what you can then improve. And some store owners don't have a testing budget for their store, which is okay. But then you need to work out other ways to send traffic to your store without spending money on ads so that you can test it, optimize it, because essentially what is supposed to happen or what you know, what generally will happen is you send x amount of traffic to your site and a percentage of that converts. And this is where it just becomes simple maths. Like the more traffic, obviously the right kind of traffic, the more traffic you send to your website. If your conversion rate stays stable, the more sales you will make. So you need to know all this stuff before you run ads or before you spend a lot of money. So only once you know what your conversion rate is and you've made all the necessary tweaks to optimize your website, only then can you really invest in ads at scale to drive more traffic. And like I said, I'm not saying you can't use it before that, but you need to know that it is a marketing research exercise and that money that you're investing, you not to need to not be attached to that. If that is money that you don't have to spend, then I wouldn't spend it. If it is money that, you know, you say, okay, well, this is my testing budget. If I don't get it back, I'm going to be upset, but it's not going to put me in a difficult position. Then go ahead and use some money to test it. Obviously, if you have like $500 to spend, don't spend all of your dollar, 500 and then go, oh, well, that's gone. Now I can run, now I can look at, you know how to optimize it. No, you got to constantly look at it. You know, spend $100. Okay, what can I improve? Spend another hundred dollars, what can I improve? You need to look at all of that. Obviously it needs to at the same time, have enough traffic and have enough convergence and maybe $100 and maybe you won't get any results from it. Maybe you learn better how to run ads. So there's like different stages, but you need to know a whole lot of things before you actually start running ads at scale. Because when you know your numbers, it becomes much easier to predict the outcome of your advertising campaigns. And the same goes for using ads to sell online courses. So if you are a course creator and you sell online courses, you typically need a large number of leads and or traffic to your sales page to be able to convert a certain number of people. And the typical conversion rate for online courses is one to 3%. That means that if your online course converts at 2%, like, you know, let's be in the middle, be quite optimistic, 2%. So let's say your online course converts at 2% and you want to sell ten per month. You need to attract 500 leads per month to be able to convert that 2%. This is, you know, there's obviously lots of other things at play, but the numbers don't lie. It's quite stable across the board in terms of conversions. But if you are a new course creator and you haven't really tested all of this and optimized all of it, and you don't really know your numbers, getting a 2% conversion rate is completely amazing, I have to say. Most people who start fresh out of the gate fall below the 1%, and sometimes they get zero conversions. It's because they don't get enough traffic. So it's that sort of chicken egg kind of situation. What comes first? Obviously, you need the traffic. You need enough traffic. And at the start, it can be slow. It can be a slow burn, because if you don't get enough traffic, you don't get into that space of being able to get conversions. So if you don't get enough traffic, it doesn't mean that your offer is not good. It means that you haven't got enough traffic, that you're not quite getting to that point where there are enough people looking at it to even be able to get to that conversion rate. And it is possible to convert people direct to sale, but the price point of your product has to be generally at the lower end. And while it's possible to make money from a low ticket offer, it's often not very profitable, I have to say, and generally needs to be part of a funnel with a higher ticket offer. And I'm making a general statement here because I know there are people who run prime, profitable online businesses with a low ticket offer. But what I've found is not. It's not the norm. You can, but it's not the norm. Likewise, if you sell a higher priced offer, it needs to be part of a funnel that incorporates a free offer or a low ticket offer that is then followed by a nurture sequence or a live component. And that live component could be a webinar, it could be a challenge, could be a call with someone like, you know, getting on the phone. Rarely do I come across a high ticket offer that sells straight from the ads. People need to generally trust who is selling it. So there are a lot of things that come into play with running ads, and I see so many people investing ads either too early or too much too early, and then they go Facebook ads. I don't know what the hype is about. It's not. It's not that good, but you need to have something that already converts, and you need to know your numbers, and then it becomes simple maths, really. So, back to using ads. You need volume to be able to convert a certain number of buyers, which means that you need to attract leads at scale. And I have found that Facebook and Instagram ads are the fastest and the most efficient way to attract leads at scale. But the same as with an ecommerce store, you need to be ready. It's actually relatively easy to attract leads with a free offer. But if the rest of your funnel isn't set up to convert, if it's not optimized, then you have all of these leads who don't buy. And you need to keep working on your funnel and keep sending traffic through your funnel until you know what your conversion rate is, where your potential bottlenecks are, and every single step of your funnel needs to be scrutinized, and then you can make improvements. So, like I said, it's actually pretty easy to get leads, especially when you're having a free offer. But if your stuff is not selling, it's. One could, one reason could be that you're not having enough leads. You know, like I said, if you want to sell ten offers, you need 500 leads a month. If you want to sell ten offers a month. And I'm, like, using general numbers here, but, you know, going by that one to 3% conversion. And the other reason is that your funnel isn't optimized. So you drive all this traffic through it, but people are not convinced by your sales page, or people are not convinced by your emails, and they're just kind of like, yeah, cool, not buying. So then you need to go back through and look at, okay, are people opening your emails? Where is the drop off in? You know, obviously there's always a drop off, but is there, like, a massive drop off after a certain email? Are people actually opening your emails? And then how many people are actually getting to the sales page? And there's, like, all these stats and all these numbers that you need to know, and it's like, where can you make improvements? Can you make improvements in your emails? Can you make improvements in your subject line? Sometimes it is literally, like, the smallest tweaks, and you got to keep making these tiny little tweaks to figure out what is working, you know, and what is not working. And at, like, after each of those tweaks, you need to send more traffic through your funnel. Sometimes it might just be worth getting on a phone call with some of those people that you have attracted and haven't purchased. Get on a phone call and say, look, what? Why haven't you like, I'm curious. I'm not trying to push you into buying, but I want to know so that I can make improvements. So it could be that you're attacking the wrong clients. You know, certain things might not be aligned. So you need to know so many things before you can really start running ads at scale. Okay, so businesses that need a lot of traffic to reach a certain number of sales are in the ideal position to use Facebook and Instagram ads to support their goals to make more sales. And Facebook and Instagram ads are like a really effective, low cost way to attract more customers. If you have a different business and you want to use Facebook ads, let's have a chat about that as well. If you don't need the volume of clients or sales for your business, you don't necessarily need Facebook ads. So for example, service based businesses that offer done for you work, or people serving clients through appointments or project work, those kind of businesses don't necessarily need a large volume of leads or traffic. Most of the time they are local businesses serving a specific geographic area or a specific type of client. And basically the work they do is capped. So if this is what you're doing, if you're a service provider, you might be capped by the amount of time you or your team has. So a large volume of leads is not needed. It's not necessary. But that doesn't mean you can't do ads. So how can a local business or businesses that don't need volume use Facebook ads? I've already said that they don't need to. Because really you don't need to if you only can serve, you know, look after four clients a month, because you do done for you services, you do not need Facebook advertising at all. As long as you are actively marketing your business and you're getting the leads that you need and the conversions that you need, you don't need to run Facebook ads. But I do think that for some businesses it is good. So why do I think that it is good for some businesses to advertise on Facebook ads? One, it is good to be visible, to create brand awareness, and to be known for what your business does. And if you're a business that's, you know, investing in radio, magazine, newspaper, or any type of paid advertising, it would also be a good investment to be seen on Facebook and Instagram. You can obviously do this organically as well, but with ads, you just tend to have a little bit more control over who sees your contents. And if you're a business whose audience is on Facebook or Instagram and Instagram. And you want to be noticed and known for what you do, then advertising on Facebook and Instagram would be a good investment. So to look at the truth about Facebook and Instagram advertising and whether you need to be there or not, we've discussed it in this episode. I think that not everyone needs to absolutely do not need to be on. Be advertising on Facebook or Instagram. If you don't need volume, if you need a large amount of traffic, your website or your funnels to in order to make sales, then you definitely can benefit from using Facebook and Instagram ads. I honestly personally don't know how else you would get that amount of traffic without using ads or without using some sort of paid advertising. So if you're someone who's is struggling, you know, with their shop or with selling courses, because you've kind of like reach a certain plateau, like it's selling. You've done all that testing, you've like, it's selling, you know, your conversion rates, but you're just not getting in front of enough people, then Facebook and Instagram ads can be like really good for your business. But if you're someone who only needs like an handful of clients every month, then you don't need to advertise unless you want to, you know, be seen as that person, be referred to, you know, that kind of thing, then you can advertise on Facebook or Instagram just to be sort of kept top of mind, but you don't need to invest much. It could be like $2 a day just to have something running that gets in front of people that when you know so and so from over there asked, do you know someone who does xYz? They remember you because they've been seeing you in their feed, so they can, you know, recommend you. So I think this is what a lot of people need to know, is that you do not need to run Facebook ads for your business. There's so many businesses that do so well without Facebook and Instagram ads. But if you are an e commerce store and your audience is on Facebook and on Instagram, and you want to scale your sales, then if you need that volume, you can definitely benefit from Facebook and Instagram ads. And likewise with course creators. And this is what happens. One of my clients, in one of their launches, actually two subsequent launches. First launch, 70% of 74% of their leads came from Facebook and Instagram ads. Second launch, 76% of their leads came from Facebook and Instagram ads. They need the volume because they sell online programs. So without that volume. They cannot get in front of as many people as they need to to make, you know, to get to their target goal of selling. So if you're at that stage where you want to sell more courses, you want to scale, but you're kind of like, how do I do that? Where do I go? How do I learn that? I've got my free masterclass for you where I teach you exactly how to sell more of your online courses with Facebook and Instagram ads. It is on demand. You can literally sign up for it right now by going to Bianca mackenzie.com masterclass. And I really just dive into how you can set this up and start attracting more leads, start making more sales for your online courses, because at some point, your organic socials probably will tap out. I'm not saying that you cannot sell your courses with organic social media. I definitely recommend that that's where you start. But at some point, it'll be really tricky to get in front of enough people. So if you need that volume, if you need a large amount of traffic and a large amount of leads, Facebook and Instagram ads definitely are, in my opinion, the answer. As long as your audience is on that platform, of course. All right, I can rant on about this forever and ever. I just wanted to really jump in here to say that not everyone needs to be on Facebook and Instagram in terms of advertising. Really? I know it seems all like glam and sexy and it's like, oh, everyone's doing it and oh, so and so. And, like, you see ads, you know, that sell this kind of stuff, obviously. But I don't think everyone needs to be on Facebook and Instagram ads. I actually think some people are better off putting their marketing efforts elsewhere. So that's what I wanted to tell you today. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. I hope it was helpful. I can't wait to share more tips with you next week. And if you're ready to take your business to the next level with Facebook and Instagram advertising, make sure you visit newschoolofmarketing.com, where you can download practical, free resources. And remember, subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. I can't wait to go on this journey with you. Until next time, take care. And don't forget, market your business every day.