[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
What if I told you there was an amazingly simple and effective way to grow your warm audience, without having to exert extra time, effort, and energy?
The secret here, my friends, is to run visibility & brand awareness ads!
You’re already doing all the hard work and creating amazing content, whether it’s a podcast, blog, videos, social media posts, etc.
You can easily capitalize on that content by getting it in front of more people and building your audience with visibility & brand awareness ads.
In today’s episode, I’m walking you through all of my visibility & brand awareness best practices, including:
- What type of content you can use
- Determining your ad spend budget
- How often you should refresh your content
- Creating a new ad campaign vs. boosting a post
- Understanding ad objectives and when to use each
When done right, this is a very low cost way to create a massive impact in growing your audience, which will directly impact your sales and success of your business!
Share your takeaways from today’s episode that you plan to incorporate in your strategy with me over on the ‘gram (@emilyhirsh)! Yes, this IS me giving you permission to slide in my DM’s.
For even more insider intel and higher level Facebook ads and marketing strategies you can’t find anywhere else, click here join the Not For Lazy Marketers Club! Be warned: our founding member price of $27/month is going up soon, so lock in your spot today to take advantage of our discount!
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello my friends. I hope you are all having a fabulous week. I cannot believe we are a month and a half into this new year. I just feel like maybe it’s because I have three kids and time just flies every single day with them, and I feel constantly busy, even though I consciously unplug and hang out with them a lot, but it’s just, it’s nonstop choosing between chasing them around and running my business. Every day goes by so fast, and here we are already far into Q1 of this year. It’s crazy to me. I think this year will fly by, just like the last year did.
I recently came back from a trip in San Diego. I was filming videos for Social Media Examiner, so I’ll be on their YouTube channel for a whole series of videos we did. I have been doing a lot with their company recently, just doing trainings, and was on their podcast, and I’m always so impressed by their team and how organized they are when they go to create content. Mike Stelzner has been around for a long time and he definitely knows what he’s doing in his business and with his processes, and so I was honored to be a part of that. I’m excited to be featured on their channel, which gets lots of traffic and views.
So in today’s episode, we’re going to dive into visibility ads and how to run them, the best practices. I get a lot of questions about this whenever I do a webinar, or I talk about this in our process, and so I’m going to answer all those questions that I get and just put it all into one podcast. So first of all, visibility ads, brand awareness ads, are a step in our process that we recently rebranded, The Not For Lazy Marketers Process. And it means you take content that you create on social media that’s goal is to build relationships, build your audience, nurture your audience, build trust with them, and then you actually put some ad spend behind it so that new people are able to see that content. What that does is it builds your audience, it builds your fan base, and then it also creates warm audiences for you to be able to target to other components of your funnel. So that could be your webinar, it could be your product, it could be your self-liquidating offer funnel, many of things.
Building your warm audience, I recently did a podcast on the importance of that, and now this is kind of the tactical, “how to do it?” Because the problem with organic social media is you post and then your post, or your video, or whatever it is you put out there, it has a lifespan of basically 10% of your following. Not a lot of people are going to actually see that content, and so you’re very limited when you do that. I see a lot of people kind of spin their wheels because they create all this awesome content, and they record videos, they do Facebook lives, they put out podcasts, and then just a very small percentage of people are actually seeing that content.
So I believe you’re already doing the hard work of actually creating the content itself. Like honestly, let’s be real. That’s the hardest part. Creating content takes time. It takes energy. It takes thinking about it and creating something of value. Let’s get more people consuming it because that can only benefit your brand in the short term and the long term. So visibility and brand awareness is that content that doesn’t have an ask, it doesn’t usually have a call to action. It can have a call to action to go to something, usually free, but the purpose of it is not to sell or even get leads. The purpose is to build an audience, to get people consuming your content, engaging with your brand, and building that trust.
So the different types of content that I recommend in this phase are podcasts, being one of my favorites. That’s what we personally use. Videos. You could do Facebook live, or you could do prerecorded videos. I will say both Facebook and Instagram kind of prioritize and put more emphasis on live videos. So on Facebook, if you go live, although the content can be very similar to a prerecorded video, it will just be favored by Facebook. They prefer the more authentic, engaging content like that. Now you’ll be promoting it. So you would kind of treat the video as if it’s a prerecorded video. You don’t want to sit there and be like, “all right guys, I’m waiting for you to join,” and spend five minutes doing that, because then if you could turn it into an ad, nobody’s going to watch that because the whole beginning was boring. So you kind of treat it like a prerecorded video, but you’re going live. Live is generally favored in the newsfeed, and just on the platforms in general. You could also use a blog if you love writing, or a really great social post that you know is long form. I’ve definitely seen people who, and entrepreneurs who, that’s kind of their way of communicating with their audience and they’re great writers, do this really well.
So you kind of have to pick the form of content that you feel the most confident in creating. And for me, I love podcasts. I love creating the audio. I love creating the really short digestible topics, and so that’s my thing. I don’t really do, I don’t do blogs. I don’t really do a lot of video. Everything we do is stemmed from my podcasts. So that’s my choice, but those are the different types of visibility and brand awareness that you could choose out of those options. I do recommend that you really choose one and stick to that, and you make that your thing, you go all in with that. The last podcast episode I did, I talked about the marketing overwhelm and trying to be everywhere on every platform, and not recommending that.
So choose one and go all in with that and be consistent with it, put something new out either once a week, or like a minimum of once a week, once or twice a week is great. You don’t have to do everyday. That doesn’t even lead to more success doing five days a week, because the reality is if you put something out there five days a week, first, it’s really hard to create quality doing that as a content creator. If I had to create seven podcasts a week, my quality would suffer because I only have so many quality topics to talk about. And second, people don’t have time to listen to that much content, so then you’ll get people listening to only some of it.
So I think one to two times a week is a good volume and something that allows you to shoot for that and put the quality into what you’re doing. Then from there, you stick to the method. So if, let’s say you choose podcasts, then the frequency and you’re doing, let’s once or twice a week, and then you create those into ads. What that does is you’re able to target people who would not have normally seen that content, and then get that content in front of them to turn them into your warm audience.
Now, you don’t have to spend a lot of money here. I recommend spending about only 5% of your ad budget. It’s a very small fraction of your ad budget that you’re actually spending here because we want to put most of our ad budget into the top of your funnel, 90% of your budget should go to lead generation. Or if you’re in a physical product business, then to your main product or the top of your funnel, and 5% can go to brand awareness and visibility just to get your brand message out there to deliver content. Now, I want to be clear. This doesn’t mean like, “hey, like my page.” That’s not brand awareness and visibility. That’s, sure you’re getting some visibility, but where’s the value in that for the user? There still needs to be value for the user.
I don’t recommend like ads, or they actually have a brand awareness like objective on Facebook. When you run ads, I recommend using brand awareness through content and creating that brand awareness through actual valuable content. Telling someone to like your page or just like showing your business in front of people, they don’t care. Why would they care? They don’t know what you do for them. They don’t know the value of your content. They’re not connected at all to that. So don’t confuse that with the word brand awareness, with just like showing your brand and showing, you know, “come like my page, or follow me here, or join my join my group.” I would maybe joined your Facebook group, but still that’s not valuable content. That could be a call to action in a video, or a podcast, but the priority is that you’re delivering valuable content.
So people stress out about like, “oh, do I have to have a call to action? And I got to make sure I send people strategically to this next place.” The priority and the goal with brand awareness and visibility ads is that you’re delivering something of value as yourself. If somebody consumes that podcast or watches that video, what would they walk away knowing, or doing better, or having more awareness around, or learning something? What is that thing that they’re going to get by consuming the content? And that is the goal. Adding in a call to action, sometimes fine, as long as it’s to something with a low barrier. I’ll sometimes put our application in here. We’re talking about a lead magnet, but I’m not like, “hey, go buy my $2,500 course right here on the podcast.” Like it’s just too soon to do that.
So you can have call to actions, but that’s not the priority. My priority of recording this podcast is to deliver value for you guys to walk away with it. That’s the priority with your brand awareness and visibility. And then you’re spending that ad spend, about 5% of your budget, purely because you want new people to be consuming this content. If you just kept it to posting on organic social media, the actual growth of reaching new people is going to be very slow and you’ll be very limited because first of all, you’re limited to your following. Second of all, you won’t even reach close to half of your following. Organic reaches about 10% of your following, so you’ll be very limited with your growth and you’re putting all this work into creating great content. Let’s get new people seeing it, target audiences on Facebook when you create these ads that your ideal customer is hanging out with, whether that’s interests, or certain behaviors. You should find audiences where you know your ideal customer is going to be in. It could be lookalike audiences. If you have that data, target them 5% of your ad budget, and you should pretty much always have these ads running. There’s two ways you can kind of go about doing it.
So one way is that each month you kind of refresh the content. So let’s say at the beginning of every month, you put four new videos that you’re going to promote, or four new podcast episodes that you’re going to promote. Or you can run them for about one a week and then refresh it. I wouldn’t do any more than that. So if you’re creating content twice a week, I choose one of the two pieces of content to actually turn into an ad, and that’s why I say once a week is a good frequency on our end. What I generally do is I will choose four to five podcast episodes at the beginning of every month that we kind of rotate out and promote.
So this content definitely has a lifespan. You don’t really want to run it for longer than a month. So anywhere from like one to four weeks is the sweet spot because it needs to be refreshed. It needs to be fresh content frequently. The algorithm will favor it. People will favor it on Facebook. It’s obvious when content is like really stale. Obviously if you get a video that goes viral and there’s like an exception and you want to keep promoting it, that’s fine. But for the most part, this type of content, this brand awareness content, I would either refresh it in bulk at the beginning of the month. Or if you have a promotion and, or you put content out every week, you could, let’s say you release your podcast episode on every Thursday, promote it for one week until the next one comes out and then change the ad out to that. So those are the two ways that you can do it.
And it really depends on you. Do you want your content to be the most fresh content that’s being pushed out there? Or do you want to be more strategic with the episodes or the videos you’re choosing? I put two podcasts out a week, but I go through and I pick the most strategic podcast, the most recent strategic podcasts that I want to promote new people that I think will get the most attention and get people to consume the content. So that’s our preference, but again, you can do it either way.
Now when you run the ad, then one of the most common questions I get is like, do I boost the post? Do I promote an existing post? Do I create an ad? If it’s a Facebook live, you’re not going to boost, but you’re going to go into ads manager and actually create the ad and pull in that existing post. The reason why you’re not going to boost is because when you boost a post on Facebook, the default objective is engagement. It means you’re telling Facebook, “I want engagement.” However, with a Facebook live video, you actually want video views. So if you go create the ad from within ads manager, you have the ability to choose video views as the objective, which gives you more freedom and then you’re able to have multiple ad sets so you can have multiple audiences. Whereas if you boost a post, you have one option of an ad set.
Sometimes people think boosting is like totally separate from running ads in your ads manager. You can see the boosted post in your ads manager. It’s happening in the same place, it’s just, you have a lot less control when you do it that way. So I recommend creating the ads from within your ads manager. If it’s a Facebook live, when you get to the actual ad part, you’re just going to say, “choose an existing post,” and you’re going to select that Facebook live video as your ad set. So that’s if it is a Facebook live, that means, because it has to be on your Facebook newsfeed in that case then.
And if it’s not a Facebook live, so if it’s a blog, if it is even a podcast, if it’s a prerecorded video, I would recommend just having all of those be loaded and created in your ads manager as separate ads. So when we run our podcast ads, we’re not promoting existing posts. We are creating specific ads within ads manager to run those ads. The only other exception would be if you wanted to promote an actual post on Facebook, then you would have to say you choose existing posts. Like if you had an engagement for the most part, unless there’s a reason that you’re pulling it from your actual newsfeed, I would just create the ad within ads manager.
Now let’s talk about the ad objective. So if you’re running ads to a blog or a podcast, your ad objective will be landing page views. The goal is you want people to land on those pages and get tagged with your pixel, then they will end up being audiences you can retarget, you can create lookalike audiences of. So that will allow you to capture those audiences. Now you can’t send people and still capture the audiences to like iTunes. So if you have a podcast, you have to have a page. I have a page on my website for every episode that we can send people to, a show notes page. So you have to have a page that they are going to, and that way the pixel is getting sent back to your ads manager.
If you send them to a site you don’t own, so like Spotify, or iTunes, or somewhere else that your podcast is, you won’t be able to capture that data. You won’t be able to get that back to get those audiences, which is one of the major purposes of these ads. So if you’re doing a podcast or a blog, it’s basically the same strategy of you’re sending people to a specific link on your website that is pixeled. Then they go there and you get to capture that audience. If you’re doing a video, your objective is video views. That videos on your Facebook page and created in your ads manager, then you get to capture all the data of people who have watched those videos and all different lengths, 25%, 50%, 90%. And if you’re promoting an actual post on your page, your objective would be engagement.
So those are the different objectives that you would choose in your ads manager. You’d spend about 5% of your monthly budget, and I recommend refreshing either about four to five every month, or once a week, you know, if you want to put out your freshest content when you go to do this. Then once you’re able to start running this, you have audiences you can then retarget and create lookalike audiences with. So if I run traffic, for example, to my podcast every month, every day we spend 5% of our budget driving traffic to the podcast. Not only are we increasing our podcast downloads and our traffic to our podcast, which is positive, but now I also have an audience of people who have visited my podcast page, who have visited my podcast episode page. and I’m able to then target them to my webinars, to our Not For Lazy Marketers funnel that we just launched to our application in the future. They become my warm audience. So that is one of your reasons, one of your goals. And then you also can say, “hey Facebook, I have this audience, people who have visited my podcast page, create me a lookalike of that audience,” and then I’m able to use that for future targeting, whether it is for a webinar or for other components of cold traffic.
So those are my best practices with visibility and brand awareness ads. I think people sometimes get overwhelmed with these and you really can’t mess them up too much. Choose 5% of your budget, play with different content, make sure that the content that you create is going to clearly define the problem you solve. I would not be promoting content about how to grow a team. Sometimes on rare occasions, I do a podcast like that on here for you guys, but I wouldn’t choose to actually put ad spend behind that because that doesn’t necessarily attract my ideal customer and show them the one problem that I solve.
So all of the content I choose, I strategically choose content that would be directly related to the problem my business solves and attract my ideal customer. So that is an important piece, but otherwise, really can’t mess this up too much. I think people get too overwhelmed with like how much, and how do I set up the ads, and how do I refresh the content? It’s really about just getting a system in place for doing it because you have to refresh that content. But you test out different targeting, you’re spending a small amount of your budget. And your goal is to get engagement, to build relationships, to give value. So don’t over complicate needing to have a bunch of calls to action and strategic things in it, because your goal is to build the relationship.
So if you’re doing that, if you’re increasing the amount of people watching your videos, or downloading your podcast, or landing on that podcast page, and you’re increasing that number of audiences, you’re accomplishing your goal here, and you are achieving that building that warm audience through strategic strategic content. So those are my best practices for visibility and brand awareness ads. I hope you guys got something from that today and can incorporate in your strategy. I feel like it is a very low cost way to have a lot of impact and effect in growing your audience, which will directly impact your sales and success of your business.