Hey there, my friend, welcome to episode 319 of the Small Business Made Simple Podcast.

Thanks for leading me your ears right now – I know you have lots of other things you could be doing or listening to – so I appreciate you.

With Black Friday, Click Frenzy, Cyber Monday coming up soon, and just the need for more sales, today I thought it would be a great idea to talk marketing WITH money! Paid ads and specifically ads using Meta.

But before we get into that, did you have a chance to listen to last week’s episode? It was a tough one and it clearly resonated with many of you. It was titled “When is Enough, Enough” – when to call it quits in business. I talked about the difference between being persistent or stubborn. I’ve had so many people reach out and appreciate the conversation – so if that was you – thank you. If you haven’t listened in, take a listen to episode 318 on your favourite podcast app or here: www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/318

Also, have you grabbed yourself a copy of my book Small Town Big Impact with 107 Simple Marketing Strategies for Regional Business Success. If you haven’t got a copy yet, go to www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au and get a copy. It is available on Amazon – so you can get a kindle or hard copy there too – but I’d prefer you get it from my website! I have just picked up the next print run of the book – which means, holy cow, that’s there are already a thousand copies of my book out in the big wide world (and some have even gone overseas!).

As I said in the intro, this time of the year I see lots more businesses experiment with paid digital ads and specifically, Facebook ads. Facebook ads are powerful – so gosh darn powerful – but also a great suck of your money if you’ve not careful and don’t know what you’re doing.

There’s 3 mistakes I see online marketers (yep, you are a marketer – no squibbing, if you’re in business, you’re in the business of marketing), make constantly with their ads. 

Actually, frankly, the first one I see people make offline as well.  And it’s just so important. 

1. START WITH THE END IN MIND

It’s so important that I want to yell it from my roof.

It’s not just another quote or motivation saying.  One day I’ll do an episode that will be all about the “quotes or inspirational sayings” that have got me to where I am today – and this is certainly a massive one.

If you know the goal, you know the road to get to the goal.

If you don’t know the goal – then how on earth will you know if it’s been successful or not.  If you run a Facebook Ad for say 5 days with a budget of $10 per day and after that 5 days you have x result – if you haven’t set any goals at the start of what you wanted to achieve, how do you measure that $50 bucks success or failure?

But let’s go a little deeper with Facebook ads and starting with the end in mind.  If you’ve ever looked at Ads Manager, you’ll know the first thing you need to do when setting up your Facebook Ad is choosing an objective (**ahem, an outcome, **ahem a goal) – anyway you see where I’m going with this!

If you haven’t got the end in mind, the end goal, then how are you going to chose or even start your ad – you’re stuck here, straight up.

So, this is mistake number 1.  The thing that trips so many online marketers up.

But before I go onto number 2, just wanted to make the point that, the goal doesn’t always have to be money – like if I spend $50 on ads I will get $100 into my business.  The goal might be around increasing subscribers to your email list or get x amount of people through your business’ door or have x amount of people engage with my ad.

WHATEVER THE GOAL – JUST MAKE SURE YOU SET ONE!

2. THE WRONG MESSAGE TO THE WRONG AUDIENCE AT THE WRONG TIME

That’s an extremely negative statement isn’t it – sorry!  But I was going for dramatic!

Lots of Facebook Ads experts talk about targeting.  Making sure you know who you are targeting and that you know your ideal client avatar and who your who is – and trust me, it crucially important but that’s not the mistake I wanted to highlight here. 

Something not enough Facebook Ads experts talk about is where your ideal client sits when it comes to their buyer journey with you.

If you know your avatar, the people you’d like to attract more of in your business because you know if you get more of them, then your business will soar, but those avatars still sit in 3 different audience types::

• Cold audience
• Warm audience, and
• Hot audience

COLD TRAFFIC: These are the people who have never heard of you or your brand.  They have had no interactions or dealings with you at all – ever!

WARM TRAFFIC: These people at least know who you are.  They may have liked your Facebook Business Page or followed you on Instagram. They have some idea of who you are and what you offer.

HOT TRAFFIC: These people are your fans! They engage with you on social media, they are on your email list, or they may have already purchased something from you.  

So even though you know your avatar, you need to make sure you are serving the right ad with the right call to action to them where they are in the buyer’s journey – the buyers’ journey being from learning who you are, to buying from you.

There’s no use serving an ad to complete cold traffic saying “click here to buy my $1000 program” – they have literally no idea who you are or what you do or if you can serve them whatsoever.

To a completely cold audience you might be better off serving them a video ad with some amazing information based value to get them to watch it, to then perhaps retarget them with a follow up ad with a different call to action, because now they at least know who you are and a little of what you do and your expertise.

So, to spin my very negative heading of “The wrong message to the wrong audience at the wrong time” on its head, you need to make sure you are serving the right message to the right audience for where they are in their buying journey with you.

3. CHECK YOUR ADS!

This third mistake is so common it makes me want to cry – literally cry.  I absolutely know what it takes to make money/earn money as a small business owner, the highs the lows, and it makes me want to cry when I see this hard earned cash go to lining Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket – trust me, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need any more of it!

Marketing has never really looked like this.  Never have we really had the opportunity to place an ad somewhere and then once published, go back and tweak or fix or stop altogether.

You place an ad in a newspaper – once you’ve approved the draft, that’s it – you can try and measure the metrics or outcomes from it (because you’ve started with a goal – with the end in mind) but you certainly can’t change it, well not unless you want to republish it and repay!

So, we aren’t in the habit of checking what we’ve done when it comes to marketing and paying for marketing – but we need to start.

SOCIAL MEDIA PAID MARKETING IS NOT A SET AND FORGET STRATEGY – and that sentence was in capitals in case you missed the emphasis!

When you place an ad on Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever online, please oh please go back about 48-72 hours later (depending on the platform and targeting required) and check it.  Make sure it’s hitting the goals you set for it, make sure it’s working and if not, switch it off altogether or edit it and set it going again.

I say you need to give it some time – 2 to 3 days depending on targeting.  Take Facebook ads for instance, you have asked it to target women aged between 26-54 who live in a 50-mile radius of your business, who like cats and dogs but hate birds (just for instance)!  Well you need to give the algorithm a couple of days to find those people – the more targeted, the more time needed perhaps – but definitely no longer than 72 hours.

Not checking your ads is the best way of lining someone else’s pocket!

So please promise me, if you undertake an online paid marketing strategy, that you’ll set yourself an alarm to go back and check in with that ad after a couple of days to see how it’s performing.

If you’ve never ran a Facebook Ad before OR you have with no success OR you simply get confused every time you try and create engaging, lead generating, sales driven Ad copy then, please head to www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/ads and go download my eBook the Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads.

These little critters are so powerful.  It’s my goal to get every small business owner with a vision to grow their business, either online or offline to see the power in this type of marketing.

The targeting capabilities are amazing, you get to tweak what you’ve done and change it if necessary, as your ad is running and, my favourite part, you learn so much about your ideal client and their challenges etc, by the huge array of metrics available to you once you start running successful ads.

But I get it, they are scary. If you’ve ever had a look at them or run an ad with limited or no success, it’s because the choices are endless and if you hadn’t done your research, it’s so easy to get wrong.  Not to mention that “Boost” button is so prevalent and makes life so much easier (or so you think!) that it’s easier just to press that and put some money behind it.  We need to stop that by the way ….

Got questions?  I’ve got answers! Let’s continue this conversation in my Facebook Group – Like Minded Business Owners. Not joined yet.  Well welcome … let’s do that!

I’ll be back next Thursday with some more marketing know-how in episode 320. 

If you’re enjoying this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this with a friend.  And maybe leave me a rating and a review wherever you listen in.  Those things are like gold for podcasters like me!  PS – you can leave more than one rating and review – just saying!

If we aren’t hanging out on social media then let’s get social on social – you’ll find me on Instagram, Facebook, and my fav LinkedIn.

But whatever you do,

…….. remember small business peep, as my opening song says, there’s no point in dreaming small!