You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 192.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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Hi My Strong Friends.  Hey are you feeling some eclipse energy?  We’re just a handful of days away.  I’ve seen several people posting about feeling extra tired or feeling like crying for no reason.

I can relate.  I’ve felt that way too.  In fact, I’ve been having what I call “Hard Dreams” where I’m sleeping like a big heavy log.  Waking up is like coming out of a coma.  My head is foggy and I feel heavy.

This is making me crave more of the Magic Mind Productivity Shots.  I’m all out.  I need to order some more.  Magic Mind is this episode's sponsor.  I’m so grateful that our paths crossed.  The Magic Mind Productivity Shot really does help clear brain fog.  I’ve never encountered something that does that.  Not even coffee.  Now I understand why they offer subscriptions of the Productivity Shots.  I really do want to have one each morning.  I get a clear head, more energy and a boost in my mood.

My weight loss coach and I were recently talking about the sugar in my coffee creamer.  I may have more energy if I didn’t have sugar in my coffee.  Maybe even drink it black.  Eww.  Then I came up with the great idea of completely replacing my coffee with the Magic Mind Productivity Shots.  The productivity shots only have 3g of sugar.  Whereas my coffee creamer has 10-20g depending on how much I pour.  Plus, Magic Mind has Vitamin C, D3, B2, B3, B12 and Potassium.  And other magic ingredients that help with mood, focus, clarity and energy.

This might be the Level up I needed.  Each shot costs significantly less than a Starbucks cup of coffee.  Especially when you use the special link and coupon code I’m going to give you.  When you go to www.magicmind.com/MYFREEDOM you can get up to 56% off your first subscription.  You can also use coupon code MYFREEDOM20 to get 20% off your first purchase.  This special is good for the next 10 days.

It’s so great to have a solution to an elusive problem like energy.

I wish solving business problems was that easy.  Do you ever wish you could just throw money at a problem to fix it?  I bet you’ve done it before.  We all have.  It’s usually the quickest way to solve the problem.

That’s why Facebook Ads are so appealing.  There’s a belief that paying for an ad will create a sale.  Or better yet, lots of sales.

That’s possible.  Absolutely possible.  But, I hate to burst a bubble.  That result doesn’t happen on the first try.  Especially, when you don’t know the ins and outs of Facebook ads and how they work.

The first time you do FB ads is like buying lottery tickets.  You buy, you fantasize and get really excited.  It feels like you’re going to be a huge winner.  And then you crash down with disappointment.

Luckily, Facebook ads are not a game of chance like the lottery.  Facebook ads is a series of data based experiments to discover the final solution.  Data always reveals the answer.

That’s why this month I’m doing a full series of podcast episodes all about Facebook ads.  

First, I want to stipulate that I do not consider myself a Facebook Ads expert.  I don’t run a Facebook Ads agency.  I’m not a copywriter either.  I can’t tell you exactly what will work for your business.

However I am a Data Analysis expert.  And I’ve been running Facebook ads for 4 years.  I also help my clients to use Facebook Ads.

What I can teach you is 

1. All the ways you can use Facebook Ads
2. Give click by click setup instructions
3. Show you how to use the result data to make everything work

Let me give you a preview of this month’s FB ads series.

Ep 192 - Introduction to FB ad types, costs and surprise purposes

Ep 193 - How to make FB ads work - The 4 magic ingredients

Ep 194 - How do you know if your FB ad is working - Metrics Demystified

Ep 195 - How a Meta Pixel helps you find a needle in a haystack

Ep 196 - Use it, Don’t Lose it - Ad test planning &  data organization

All of this is leading up to a Special presentation I’m giving within the Platform and Profit Summit happening May 1-3.  I’m going to teach you how to use $4 FB Ads to Validate your Sales Funnel before you build it.  I’ll share more about the Summit over the next few weeks.

Today, let’s get your feet wet with Facebook Ads.  We’re going to cover

1. The purpose of FB ads in general
2. Understanding the cold vs. warm audience concept
3. The types of FB ads
4. How to get FB Business Page likes w/FB ads

I know some of you will want to jump in and Setup and Run FB Traffic Ads after this episode.  I have a special offer for you.  I created a Click by Click Tutorial Video to Setup and Run FB Traffic Ads for customer polls and Website traffic.  This training will be sold for $47.  But for right now, I’m giving it away for the low cost of $17.  Even better, when you decide to enroll in one of my other programs, I will give you that $17 back as a credit for your next purchase.

Go to my Homepage at www.myfreedomgrove.com  You’ll see the special offer at the top of the page.

THE PURPOSE OF FACEBOOK ADS

I know the majority of people think the purpose of a FB ad is to get sales.  That’s not exactly the purpose of the ad.  That’s why people feel so much disappointment.  If they don’t get a sale, they think “my ad isn’t working”.

The primary purpose of the FB ad is to drive traffic to a page.  If the ad got the target number of ideal customers to your page, it worked.

It’s your page’s job to do the next step.

If your ad is sending people to your Home Page, your Home page’s job is to take them on the Customer Journey.  The journey may be short to a purchase.  Or it might be a longer journey depending on what you offer.

Your ad may send people to your podcast or blog page.  As long as the traffic got to that page, the ad worked.  It’s now the job of the podcast or blog’s description to engage the person to consume it.

Your ad may go to a webinar or workshop registration page.  As long as the traffic got to your page, the ad worked.  Your registration page has the job of getting people to sign up.

Your ad may go to a Sales Page.  Yes, you can influence the sale with your ad.  However, the ad’s job is to get people to your Sales Page.  If the traffic got to the sales page, the Ad worked.  It’s now up to the Sales Page to sell your product/service.

We appreciate that FB ads can send traffic to our online store.

A few other purposes the ads can serve include - Helping people to remember your brand.  And a quick, data driven way of doing Market and Customer Research.

You know how you might do a poll to see how many people vote for something?  A FB ad can be used that way too.  People vote by clicking on the ad.  For example, if you want to know which result your ideal clients want most, you could ask friends and acquaintances.  But, they may not be your ideal clients.  They will guess at the most desired result.  The guess might not be right.

With friends and acquaintances, you might only get a handful of answers.  This is a pretty big decision, do you really want to base in on a small number of answers?

30 data points is statistically significant for making decisions.

Isn’t it better if you have enough data and that the data came from your Ideal clients?  That’s where FB ads can be a fast and affordable way of polling.  In the How to Setup & Run FB Traffic Ads Video tutorial, you’ll have everything you need to set up your polls and start getting answers right away.

COLD VS WARM AUDIENCE

How do you know that your ad is being seen by your Ideal Customers?  That’s where Audience selection is important.  You may already understand the concept of your business having an audience.  Especially as you are building up your online marketing presence.  Your audience includes everyone that can see your posts, read your blogs, watch your videos or listen to your podcasts.  For the most part, all of the audience finds you organically.

FB ads allows us to purchase an audience.  FB has collected all sorts of information about all of their users.  Some of it was entered directly by the users.  Some of it was based on how they use Facebook and how they interact with content and ads.

With FB Ads manager we can customize the audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and other people’s audiences.  Other people’s audiences can be very helpful.  For example, Mindvalley is a Self Help company that’s been around for a very long time.  If you want to reach people interested in Self Help, you may add people interested in Mindvalley into your audience.

You may have also heard the terms Cold Audience and Warm Audience.

A Cold Audience is a collection of people that have never heard about your business.  Using FB Ads to bring in brand new cold audiences is great.  The more eyes the better.  Once you get the eyes of the cold traffic, it’s up to you to nurture them so they’ll buy.

A Warm Audience is a collection of people that already know about your business and have a varying degree of know, like and trust of you.  Your organic audience, that sees all of your content, is a warm audience.  If they are already on your email list, they are a warm audience.

It’s possible to put your FB ad in front of your Warm Audience.  These individuals will have a higher chance of purchasing from you because they already know you.

FB Business Suite allows you to upload your email list to use as a warm audience.  If you have a FB Pixel setup, you have even more opportunities.  The FB pixel keeps track of the people that view your website and interact with your content on FB.  I’ll go into more details in Ep # 195 in a couple of weeks.

TYPES OF FACEBOOK ADS

There are 6 different types of Facebook Ads.  Within each type you’ll be able to specify your objective from a drop down list.  Here’s an introduction to those.

Awareness - This type of ad is used to help people just be aware of your brand.  Think about TV commercials.  The more you see a TV commercial, the more you remember the business and their products.  An awareness ad is shown to people many times.  You can customize how frequently you want them to see it.  The purpose isn’t to drive traffic to your page.  Rather, it’s to create a billboard in their memories.

Traffic - This type is used to drive traffic to your page.  This is popular for freebies and webinar/workshop registrations.  The audience here is likely to click on a link.  Some will even enroll.  Traffic & Lead Ads can both be used to get people to sign up.  The difference is the likelihood.  For example, out of 100 people that click from a traffic ad, 1-2 will sign up.  For a lead ad, 100 people will click and 3-4 will sign up. Traffic ads are cheaper per click than Lead ads.

Engagement - This type of ad is to generate people reaching out to your business.  They may reach out through a message, phone call or directly scheduling a meeting.

Lead - A lead ad is targeted to an audience highly likely to sign up for what you are offering.  They may sign up from your Opt-in page, a Form on FB, send a message or book a call

App Promotion - This type of ad is targeted to an audience most likely to download and use your app.

Sales - This is targeted to those most likely to buy your product or service.  They can buy right off of your website or book a sales call.

These are listed according to price.  The Awareness ads are the cheapest.  The Sales ads are the most expensive.  For an apples to apples comparison on price, let’s consider the Cost per Click.  An awareness ad may cost 5 cents per click.  A Traffic ad may cost 50 cents to a dollar per click.  A Lead Ad may cost $2 - $50 per click.  A Sales Ad may cost $25 - several hundred per click.

Remember, the job of the ad is to send traffic to a page.  The clicks indicate the person going to the page.  How much are you willing to pay for 1 person to go to your page?

Why would these different types of ads cost a different amount for the click?  It comes down to audience.

Remember, I mentioned that Facebook collects information about how people interact on the platform.  If a person tends to make a purchase after seeing an ad on Facebook, they are tagged as a “buyer”.  If someone tends to click on things out of curiosity, but never signs up or buys, they will stay in the general “traffic” audience.

As you can imagine the general audience of everyone on Facebook is extremely large.  It’s inexpensive to show the ad to them.

The number of people that sign up for freebies is smaller, so it costs more to advertise to them.

The number of people that buy is the smallest group.  They are the most valuable group to advertise to, so that audience costs the most.

That’s where having a well designed Sales Funnel can help you.  You can pull traffic in using an inexpensive ad then let the rest of your funnel do the nurturing and selling.

If you don’t have a well designed funnel or sales page, your results with the less expensive ads will be pretty frustrating and disappointing.

HOW TO GET FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE LIKES/FOLLOWS WITH FB ADS

Our last part for today’s episode is about FB Business Page likes.  If you already post content on your page for Organic marketing, you’ll understand why the number of likes and follows is important.  They represent your whole audience.  I wish that FB would show the posts to everyone in my audience, but the algorithm keeps it much smaller.

However, the more people that interact with your organic posts, the bigger the spread.  If you only have a few hundred followers, only about 30-50 people will see your posts that get a lot of engagement.  However, if you have 3-4 thousand followers, a great post will be shown to >1000 people.

We know that adding hashtags to your post helps expose you to non-page followers.  They may choose to come to your page and follow you.  That’s one way to grow your audience.  It can take a little while.

One way to speed that up is by using Facebook Ads.  When an ad gets a lot of likes/loves you can hover over them to see a list of who those people are.  Facebook also adds an invite button next to each name.  So anybody that liked/loved your post, you can invite to follow your page.

With my first FB business page I boosted a post.  That’s a quick and dirty way of doing an ad.  It works, although you will have more precision using the Ads Manager.  Anyway, one boosted post went viral.  At least, to me the number seemed Viral.  I had over 1000 likes and loves.  Guess what?  I invited all of them to follow my page. 

Now days, I do the same thing.  I invite the people that like/love my posts to follow my business page.  However, I’m a bit more selective.  I will view their profile first.  If they are a good fit, I’ll send them the invite.  If they are not a good fit, I don’t.  I’m willing to do this effort to improve the quality of my following.  If the FB algorithm is going to limit the spread to a small subset of my audience, I want that subset to be the most interested possible.

Alright, that was a big episode.  Lots of info.  You can reference the transcripts at any time.

Next week I’m going to go over the 4 components that make a FB ad work.  In the meantime, go pick up your copy of the How to Setup and Run FB Traffic Ads Video Tutorial from my website.  You get forever access with that purchase. It’s click by click.  You watch a few minutes, you do the step in FB.  Then you watch the next step and do it.  By the end of the video you’ll have your ad running.

If you want some Done with You help, I have some 1:1 spots available.  We can design your FB/IG testing strategy, execute it and adjust according to the data.  If you want to explore what that looks like, sign up for a free consultation on the contact page of my website at www.myfreedomgrove.com.

Alright my strong friends, have a wonderful week.  Remember, don’t look into the eclipse with your bare eyes.  Stay safe and give yourself grace with the eclipse energy.  I’ll talk with you next week.  Bye Bye.

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