[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
Maybe your ads are working on a small scale, earning you a bit of profit, and starting to gain traction!
If so YAY! That’s amazing! *virtual pat on the back*
Celebrate, but don’t think this is all it takes to keep the momentum going…
Because, I hate to break it to you but, you can’t just let your Facebook ads sit for months and months and expect them to keep magically “working” and scaling for you.
It’s true that scaling doesn’t come easy… but it also doesn’t have to be this scary and mysterious process!
So if you’re in a position where you’re ready to scale but don’t want to mess up along the way, this is the podcast for you.
In this episode I’m going to lay out the FOUR MOST COMMON MISTAKES I see people make when scaling ads + exactly what you can do to avoid them … and make scaling less scary!
As you listen to this 20-minute episode, I encourage you to take a step back and think,
“Am I holding myself back from scaling my business to its full potential?”
I’d love to hear your thoughts + experiences on scaling! When you’re finished listening, head over to Instagram (@emilyhirsh) to comment on my latest post!
And if you’re ready to work with a marketing team that can help you custom-build a strategy to fit YOU + your brand, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with us!
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Let’s talk about marketing today. I am excited. So, because we just don’t have enough going on in my life, we decided to remodel our master bedroom or not our master bedroom, our master bathroom. It just feels so crazy. Now my house is like a construction zone, but I’m so, so grateful to own my house. We bought our house at the end of last year. So I’ve only owned it for less than a year. And it’s just such a different experience to be able to do these projects in a place that you own and you can make it yours and customize it. And I picked out the bathtub and the tile and everything, and it’s just so much fun.
But my dad came into town and he’s an entrepreneur who has a construction business. So he’s like, crazy knowledgeable and also loves working. Is that a surprise? If you know me I love working and having projects. So he got here and he’s like, let’s do it. Let’s go. So they demoed it. They took everything out. They’re working on it now. I’m going, like, no, I didn’t have enough going on with a newborn and a business and lack of my normal house help because of everything happening and all of that, let’s add a remodel! But I’m super excited actually for it to be done and actually grateful that I don’t have to do the work because that is not my zone of genius. I just get to be the boss about everything that gets put in and how it looks and the yes, and no decisions. And then they do it for me. So I’m excited, very excited.
Today I’m going to talk about the common challenges and some solutions for scaling ads. So this was a question I got on one of my most recent live trainings. I always go back through those live trainings and read through the questions because you guys basically tell me what you need support with. And then I come on here and help you solve that. So if you’re in a position where you’re trying to increase, not just your ad spend, but also your revenue from ads, because you’re, you know, maybe it’s working, but on a small scale and you would like to scale it, then this podcast will be super helpful for you. And it really will. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to scale, you know, a hundred dollars more every week or $10,000 more this’ll be relevant. It’ll be the more you’re trying to scale. The more extreme you have to go in paying attention to these things, but it’s relevant for everybody.
And I’ve just been seeing a lot of people between our Facebook group and my free trainings talk about trouble scaling. So I have four common challenges that I think that people run into every single time with scaling. And to be completely honest with you, a lot of these challenges are a result of trying to run your own ads when you’ve hit a point when you shouldn’t be anymore. And I know, you know, I run an agency and I’m biased, but I just was talking to someone, I was doing my avatar interviews and I was talking to an ignite student who is spending about $5,000 to $7,000 a month on his ads and he’s running them still. And he was like, well, I just like, “I can’t keep up. You know, I can’t keep up with what I need to change.” And he was listing out to me, all the things he wanted to do and that his ads, like every time he’s increasing them, their results go down. I’m like, “You just need to hire your ads out. Like that’s the straight up truth because scaling your ads and increasing your ad spend increases the work that you’re putting into your ad.” It’s part of the reason that the way we set up our fees for a premier package, I charge a percentage on ad spend because that just tiers it for me. Like the more you spend, the more you profit, but also the more work it is. And so if you’re all, “I just want to put that out there.” If you’re hanging on to you doing your ads, but you’re in a position where you’re increasing your budget because your funnel is working, but you’re hanging on to doing your ads. You’re probably costing yourself money doing that.
Because if somebody who did this all day long, took it over, they’d get you better results faster, and therefore you’d make more money. Like there’s just things that you can only hang on to so long until you’re hurting yourself. So you should check yourself there and make sure you’re not in that boat because I see that so often where people are, are running their own ads and then they keep doing it because they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to spend the money. I don’t know if I’m there yet. Like when do I make that decision?” Which actually I’ll link in the podcast I did, I have two different podcasts about an in-house ads team and the problem with it and then the differences between an in house ads team and an agency. And people often get in that, like, “I don’t know what decision to make.” And I have opinions on that, that I’m not going to get into now, but just check yourself and make sure you’re not in that position where you are hanging on to doing your own ads, which is actually slowing down your overall growth and progress.
Okay. That wasn’t one of my four things, but now we’re going to go through my four things. So common challenges, scaling ads, the number one challenge. The number one thing I see people struggle with, they asked me the question and I find this as usually the problem is, enough ad creative. When you’re scaling ads, you have to pump out new copy and new images really frequently. It depends how much money you’re spending to know the frequency. Clients who we have, who are spending hundreds of thousand dollars a month. It’s every two to three days that we’ve got a new ad version going for clients who are spending $5,000 a month, you know, $3,000 to $4,000 it’s at least once a month. It’s a minimum of at least once a month, because here’s why, here’s how it works.
First of all, Facebook will reward new creative. They don’t want people seeing the same ad over and over and over again and letting it get stale on the feed. So an ads lifespan used to be able to last like six months, like a long time. But in the last year to two years, it lasts like a month. Like it really doesn’t last that long. And sometimes you can cycle it back in, but you’ve got to cycle it out. So Facebook rewards that. But what it means for scaling is this. If you have an ad set with an ad and you’ve scaled that, and you’ve got it up to, let’s say a hundred dollars a day, I’m going to go low because it’s a hundred dollars, thousand dollars a day, whatever you’ve got it up to that level. You’ve scaled it. Now, if you just let it sit there and keep going and you wait until it starts to saturate and costs start to go up and get more expensive for your ads. Then you have to then go and replace a new ad in there, but you can’t always start it out at a thousand dollars a day.
We’ve got to start ads a little bit lower. It throws off the wonkiness of the optimization. You know? So usually you start out, it’s a little lower than you scale it. Again, It depends on budget. How much you start your ad at. I know I’m going to get that question of like, well, what’s the, what’s the go-to. This is the real problem with that. There is no, there is no way for me to be like, start every single ad set at $10 a day and do this, do that, do that. Like, that’s just not how it works because some things work in one account that don’t work in another account. And usually your budget is determined by your daily budget that you’ve created based on your monthly budget, but you don’t typically start ads at a thousand dollars a day. I’d say the most that we start a new ad at is maybe $250 a day, but usually more like a hundred a day. And then we have a lot of ad spend, you know, to equal our full budget. That would be my guess.
So if you have this ad that let’s say has got up to, I’m just going to go with a thousand dollars a day. You’ve scaled it up. I know that sounds like a lot to some of you guys. So just put it to whatever that number, that that number could be a hundred dollars a day for you. And you start your ads at $5 or $10 a day. Like maybe that’s your scale. You’ve got that ad up to that amount. Now you’re just letting it kind of run. And you’re like, yes, it’s working, it’s working. And it goes on for a couple of weeks. And then it starts to go up in cost and you’re like, well, maybe it’ll go down. And it goes up in cost and it keeps going up in cost and you’re like, shoot, what do I do? Then you go put out a new ad, right? But you’ve got to start that at lower. So if you’re at a thousand dollars a day, maybe you start that at it $200 a day. Right? Well, that ad is only spending $200 a day. Now you have this ad that’s not working. It’s starting to saturate and have poor performance at a thousand dollars a day.
Okay. So now, and then you’re going to have to turn that off. That takes away a thousand dollars of your daily budget, replaces it with a $200 a day budget. Do you see? So you’ve taken five steps forward and three steps back. Like you see what I’m saying? So here’s why we constantly pump out new creative, because then we always have backup options so that when we have to actually fully cycle out that ad that we have scaled to a thousand dollars a day, we’ve got backups right there that have already been scaled. They’ve already been optimized already working in the feed and we never turn off anything that’s not working. And so I also get that question where people are like, “Well, what do I do with my new creative? Will you load it in as an additional ad you’re scaling?” So if you’ve got an added a thousand dollars a day, you leave that one.
And then you load this new ad in for $200 a day, a hundred dollars a day. You let that run and you add budget to that. And you keep adding budget to the thousand dollar one. But knowing that that one will saturate at some point, so you’ve got to have backups in there. So the number one issue I see people making is they don’t have enough creative with their ad. They’re not pumping out enough copy and images and new, fresh versions with their ads to match what they want to do with their scaling. That’s one of the biggest things, like I’d say the biggest thing. And most of the time when people bring this issue, I’m like, well, how much creative are they pumping out? “Oh, not much because I’m writing my own ads,” is the, is the number one response I get, you know, “so I don’t have time for it.” And that’s why, you know, we have a creative team literally because sometimes it’s every three days we need new versions of really good copy and good images are good mini videos.
So having enough creative is the biggest common challenge with scaling. And what’s going to hold you back. And I want to explain the reason why, because people like, well, if my ads are working, why would I need new creative? Those ads will saturate. And if they saturate and you have to fully turn off your number, one, performing and spending ad, you’re going to set yourself back to where you were two weeks ago with your spend and never be able to get it above what you want to spend and actually scale.
The second thing is again, a time like, so my, my summary here for you guys is time. Like a lot of times people’s trouble scaling is cause the wrong type of people are working on the account. Either you or someone who’s not experienced enough, but time spent optimizing scaling takes time. You have to spend more time in an account when you’re spending more money because you have to optimize a lot more. So you have to blow new audiences, test new lookalike audiences, read more data, turn more things off, create new ads, load, new creative versions, replacing things you have to act fast and a lot. And you have to spend time. You know, we have some of our biggest clients count on the roster is like two clients because the ads manager has to spend so much time optimizing their account. There’s not really a way to just let Facebook ads just sit for months and months and work like that just doesn’t happen with Facebook ads. You’re constantly having to watch the numbers. Test new audiences, use new data because you’re getting new data as you go and test that. So time spent optimizing is another really common challenge that people have.
Now. Here’s the other thing with optimizing that people make this mistake when they’re scaling the review period that you look at your account. So the date in your account, when you’re looking at their results, a lot of times people look at like the last 30 days or the last even seven days, and they’re looking at those metrics to make decisions. Now it’s really important that you also look at the last three days, so you can notice trends of costs starting to go up before it even happens. So let’s say I have an ad and it’s my number one, performing ad. And it’s a webinar ad. And when I filter the last 30 days, it’s converting at $5, a webinar registration, great. Like it’s hitting my numbers and it looks like it’s doing great.
When I look at that filter of the last 30 days, maybe when I go the last seven days, it’s like five 75 registration still. Okay. We’re still, we’re still in my range. What I want to pay for a webinar registration. But then if I look at the last three days, it’s $8 a registration. That is an indication for me of this ad is going up in costs. And it’s pretty rare that it goes up, up, up like that. And then back down, it means it’s saturating. It means you’ve got to make a change with that ad set. So when you’re optimizing, you’re not looking at the last three days, the last seven days and the last 30 days to compare all of them, you’re going to miss important metrics that will tell you what to do. And what you want to do is catch that that ad is starting to rise, starting to rise before it does like you want to catch it as soon as it starts happening and starts moving in that direction. So you have new creative, new ads and you’re ready to go. So time spent optimizing and really looking at that data and those different viewpoints is a really common challenge. And mistake people make when scaling their ads.
The other mistake people make is actually knowing your numbers and their budget. So here’s a scenario that a lot of times I see with scaling, you have to remove the emotional connection that you have to spending the money. Because if you’re scaling ads, you’re going to constantly be spending more money. Ideally, then you spent the month before on your ads. And that can feel scary because it’s like, I’ve never spent this amount on ads before. Now that for you could be a thousand dollars next month. And for somebody else that could be $30,000 next month, it’s still a new scenario, a new situation or a new experience where you haven’t spent that amount of money on Facebook ads.
And it can feel scary when you see that amount of money and you make that decision to spend it. But the key is that, you know, your numbers. And so that, you know, If I’m going to spend a thousand dollars or $30,000 next month, I’m going to make 60,000, 70,000 or $3,000 or whatever it is like from the profit of your ad spend and you know, those numbers. So you can make the decisions to spend on the ads. The key with scaling is knowing your numbers because here’s what you have to do is you, you’ve got a number, you know what? You can pay cost per lead. You know, how many people of those leads should purchase, you know, how much you’re going to pay for those purchases, you know, how much you’re going to spend and how much you’re going to make.
And that way, if one of those things get off while you’re scaling, you know where you need to put your attention. So if your cost per lead starts to go high, that’s easy. We fix the ads, we get the cost per click back down the ad costs back down. We refresh the creative. If your purchase conversion starts tanking. We’ve got to figure it out. And usually when you scale, it’s because you’re putting more cold traffic in the funnel, and then they’re not converting to purchases as fast as they previously were. So you’ve got to find the balance of how do I scale and keep converting the cold traffic, which ties into having a very constant and consistent visibility strategy. So you’re always getting enough of a warm audience. I actually run into that problem a lot with our scaling, where we’ve got it down with our webinars, like my, my live webinars convert, my cost per registration converts.
And in theory, I’d like to just double my spend each time, but we have to balance, like if we get way too many cold, cold traffic applications, they don’t convert into sales as fast. And so there’s this balance I’m constantly playing, of having enough runway to warm my audience up and then send them to the webinar. And then, you know, the big picture is get the application. So I play the balancing game too, with that. And knowing your numbers is super important when you’re scaling so that you know how much you’re going to spend and the results of that spend. And if anything is off, you can take action to fix it. So you have to know your numbers, which removes the emotional experience from it, where you are scared to spend that, you know, that amount that’s new to you. It should just be about numbers. And then if something gets awful, then we pull it back a little bit. We stopped scaling until we fix that. And then we scale it again. Okay.
The fourth common challenge and mistake with scaling ads honestly, is not being aggressive enough with your cost per acquisition. So I think a lot of people move too slow when scaling their ads because it’s like everything’s converting. And then they still are hesitant to spend because of that emotional connection. I’ve talked to a lot of people who are like, well, I spend about $4,000 a month and I make about 15,000. And I’m like, well, why aren’t you, you know, why, why aren’t you spending 8,000? And they almost never have a good answer for me. Well, I don’t know, like, that’s just what I’ve been doing. And that’s my budget. That’s what I’ve allocated to Facebook ads. And I’m like, yeah, but you’re profitable.
So if you spend $8,000, you would make like $25,000 potentially more than that. If I did that math right, really quickly if in my head, and so they, they don’t have the reason why, and they’re not aggressive enough. And so if you know what you can pay to acquire a customer, and you stay below that amount, why can’t you just keep scaling infinitely and just keep going until you go above. And then we pull back a little bit until it gets fixed and we fix the issues and let me do it again. So a lot of times people are almost holding back with their Facebook ads because they don’t, they’re not aggressive enough when something is working and they don’t, going back to point number three, know their numbers and their budget well enough to really scale effectively. And that’s a common challenge people run into is they, they, it ultimately comes down to number three, not knowing their numbers, which causes them to not be aggressive enough with their cost per acquisition.
But I can tell you the people, the clients and the people who have the mindset of, and this is especially for physical products, but really still for digital products. There’s just more steps than a digital product, but of, you know, I can pay a max of a hundred dollars or $200 to acquire a customer. And as long as I’m under that number, I’m going to keep on adding budget and keep doing that and keep tracking my numbers throughout the funnel. But I can just keep adding that budget. And that is the mindset you need to be in to scale effectively, knowing the numbers of not just the ads in the entire funnel will allow you to see when something gets off so you can go fix it.
So those are the common challenges with scaling. I do want to reiterate one of the biggest things is just time put into it because the more you scale, the more time it is in creative and optimizing your ads. And so for a lot of people, what holds them back is they’re not outsourcing their ads, whether that’s an in house team or an agency. I’m not just saying that. I see that very, very often people are sitting on potential and losing it because they’re holding on too tight, or they’re too scared to make that jump. So check yourself there and make sure that’s not, what’s holding you back. Otherwise go through these common challenges and see what you can improve in your business to effectively scale even more.
Thanks so much for tuning in today guys. Hirsh Marketing is amazing at scaling ads. That’s one of our specialties, I think because we do act with such urgency and aggressiveness, and we’re so obsessed with numbers. We do this really, really well. So if you need support with that, if you want to take those ads to the next level, with her scaling, you can go to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify to work with us. Thanks so much for listening and being here today with me.