[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
“Retargeting ads are so sexy.”
That’s probably what you’ve heard anyway, because everyone in the Facebook ads and marketing industry hypes them up so much.
And they do work. Retargeting ads allow you to reach an incredibly hot audience for a minimal amount of spend…
But they’re only effective if done right.
There’s a lot more to running effective retargeting ads that convert, but nobody seems to talk about that piece because it’s not as sexy.
Join me for today’s episode of the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast as I share:
- What you need in place before you start running retargeting ads.
- What problems you’ll experience if you run retargeting ads on a weak foundation.
- What to watch out for once you do begin running retargeting ads.
I don’t want you to go on believing that retargeting ads are going to make or break your success, because that’s not the case.
Retargeting ads are like the icing on the cake. They have to go on top of a solid foundation in order for them to work!
Spill your biggest takeaways from today’s episode to me over in my Instagram DM’s (@emilyhirsh)!
If you need help scaling your biz success (retargeting ads included), join me for my FREE pop-up podcast series, Scale & Slay. You’ll walk away with a step-by-step plan on exactly how to leverage your current success and scale to new audiences so you can finally break through your growth plateau and soar to your next level of success. The series is LIVE now, and expires on March 14th, so race to the registration page to save your seat!
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello my friends. How are y’all doing? Welcome back to the podcast. Welcome if you are new. Let’s talk about retargeting ads today. So I was inspired to do this from a couple of questions I got on our most recent Not For Lazy Marketers Club workshop, which is our monthly workshop we do for those club members that we do a new topic every month. And at the end, I do questions and hot seats on anything people want for their marketing, support with their marketing, with their Facebook ads. They can ask me anything and I’ll personally answer their questions. Something that comes up, it came up on this, and it comes up on a lot of trainings I do it where people have questions, is about retargeting ads. Because I think that out there in the industry, from the various people who teach Facebook ads and marketing, and courses, and content that’s out there about it, people hear how great retargeting ads are and they sound so sexy and cool. And I’ve got to have retargeting ads, and they’re going to make me all this money because so-and-so said it.
And they do, retargeting ads do work. They are a small amount of money that you have to spend to reach a very hot audience, when done right, to then convert that audience into your ultimate goal. Whether that’s retargeting potential buyers who have been to your website and put something in their cart, whether that’s retargeting webinar registrants, whether that’s retargeting webinar attendees, whether that’s retargeting someone who’s abandoned their application. Those are all great examples of creating successful retargeting ads. But here’s what people don’t talk about, and there is a lot more people who fall in this boat then who fall in the boat where it’s like, oh, you’re just leaving a bunch of money on the table because you haven’t done any retargeting ads, because there’s a time and a place for them. And that is, if you don’t have enough traffic to retarget, you should not even be worrying about it or trying to put your budget into retargeting nets.
So you need at least, in my, in our opinion on my team and also backed data, but you need at least 500 to a thousand people in your audience to retarget. So if you have a funnel and you’re spending $25 a day on your ads, you will not have an audience to retarget, because let’s say you’re running it to a webinar and you’re getting $5 cost per lead. You’re going to get five people signed up every day, which is fine. If that’s where you’re at, put all your money into getting those registrants, because actually getting those registrants, getting them to the webinar, getting them to watch your webinar and buy your offer, 80% of the success of that is going to come from just the foundational piece, hopefully the foundational piece of getting someone in there, and then do they convert on your webinar?
If you are so quick to create retargeting ads, and then you try to create them and you don’t have the audience to target them to, number one, you’re going to potentially waste budget, and time, and effort on creating these campaigns and these ads, when the front part of your funnel is not even working because you haven’t proven that the webinar itself works. And number two, you’re gonna take away from the lead generation. So if you’re in the boat where you haven’t proven your webinar yet, you haven’t proven that core foundational piece of your strategy works, don’t worry about re-targeting ads yet.
Retargeting ads should be icing on the cake. They should go on top of a solid foundation. They are not for, they will not make or break your success. I think sometimes people think, well, my ads haven’t converted, or I haven’t seen success on Facebook ads because I haven’t run re-targeted ads and once I do that, then they’ll work. And, you know, I wish I could tell you, yeah, just running retargeting ads will fix everything for you. But if you don’t have a solid foundation, re-targeting ads are going to do nothing for you. So everyone is so quick to make sure they have retargeting ads, and overcomplicate their Facebook ad strategy, and build in all these layers, and it sounds so cool, and they create all these different campaigns. And then what happens is first, a lot of times if the audience is so small, Facebook doesn’t even spend your budget. So then you’ve allocated ad budget and it doesn’t even get spent, and again, it’s being taken away from your core campaign.
So that’s the first problem is if your audience is too small, you’ll set up a campaign and Facebook won’t spend it. If that’s happened to you, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But then number two, you’re taking away from that lead gen campaign, the front end of your funnel, it could be lead gen or product. This is true for any funnel, even if you’re going straight to a sales offer. Unless you’re getting, you know, your re-targeted audience would be people who land at least on that sales page. Unless you’re getting 500 to a thousand people within a month timeframe on that page. it’s not big enough to retarget, so anytime you take away that budget or you take away from that, you’re taking away from creating the solid foundation. So put 100% of your budget and your effort and your time and energy into getting traffic to that front end.
For some people that will be a webinar, for some people that will be an actual product, for some people would be a lead magnet. You don’t know if all of the pieces after that are working until you get enough traffic to that front end, you see that it’s working, and then we build in the re-targeted ads. So everyone’s so quick to have these and they pull budget from it and they create these retargeting ads. And then they’re like, well, Facebook’s not spending my budget. And then that’s the actual problem. So while re-targeting ads are very effective, they are only effective when done right. One of the first rules to them is that you have a big enough audience to retarget. That audience should be about 500 to a thousand. So again, if you’re on a $10, even $25 a day budget, you’re not going to have a retargeting audience yet.
Hopefully the foundation of your funnel starts working, and you start getting sales, and you can put it back into your budget, increase the budget, therefore increase the audience to be able to then retarget. But nobody talks about this because it’s not as sexy. Nobody says, oh, don’t run re-targeted ads. You know, people talk about, you have to, they try and sell their services with them where – I’m not saying they’re not effective. They are step four of the new rebranded Not For Lazy Marketers Process. I’ll stop saying new once I’m used to it, but previous Hirsh Process. Not For Lazy Marketers Process step four is your retargeting ads. It is essential to a successful strategy, but you’ve got to have the foundation. You cannot add in retargeting ads before you have that foundation.
That’s like saying, let me make sure I have all my followup emails before you even have leads to get those emails to. Yes, you want the follow-up emails and you want to make sure they’re effective in their converting, but you can’t say, oh, my funnel’s not working because I don’t have emails. No, your funnel isn’t working because you don’t have leads coming in. And the emails, yes, will impact your sales. Yes, will improve your overall results. But only if leads are actually coming in to get those emails and to be impacted by those emails. Those emails are icing on the cake, they are on top of a solid foundation. Re-targeting ads are like follow-up emails. You can’t have them until you actually have leads receiving those emails. You can’t have retargeting ads until you have enough leads to show those ads to.
Now, once you start running retargeting ads, and if your audience is really small, the one thing you have to watch for is what’s called the frequency score, and that means how many times has the audience seen your ad on average in the audience. You don’t want that to get above three. So if your frequency score is like seven, that means everybody in your audience on average has seen your ad seven times. That’s going to get pretty annoying to that audience. So if you have an audience of a hundred people, that would probably happen in like one day. Which is why Facebook doesn’t even spend your budget, because they don’t want to create that experience for their users. They’re like, this is not enough budget to spend to reach this audience, so they just don’t spend it. So get your audience, your base core audience that you’re going to retarget to that 500 to a thousand a month. That means 500 to a thousand webinar registrants, or people visiting your sales page, or people opting into your lead magnet, whatever you want to retarget. Then look at retargeting ads. And then if done, right, those just increase an already successful funnel.
When we get clients who come to us and say, I have organic success, or I have a little bit of ad success and I’m profitable, but I’m not running any retargeting ads, that’s like a gold mine because the key is I’m profitable without them. I’m making sales without my retargeting ads. The foundation of my funnel is working, and now I can create retargeting. We can support them in creating the retargeting ads and even increasing the volume coming through their funnel, and the success and the return on their ad spend should just improve and get even better. So that’s an exciting experience. If you have somebody who, or you are somebody who’s like, well, I have run ads and had zero sales and had 400 people go through my funnel and had zero sales, there’s a core foundational issue there and retargeting ads are not going to solve that. That’s not the missing piece to the puzzle. That foundation, you know, the foundation is your messaging and your strategy. Those have to work before retargeting ads, follow-up emails, upsells, down sells, all those things will have any impact.
So that’s the truth about retargeting ads. And my advice is to put 100% of your time, your effort, your money, your budget, all of those things, into one funnel with one front end, which means one main product or one main opt-in, webinar, challenge, video series, one of those. Put all of your effort into that, all of your budget into that, get that foundation working, and then add in the bells and whistles, add in the extra things. Layer it on top of a solid foundation, and then you’ll achieve success, wild success. Then it creates a snowball effect because you have this hot, amazing audience you can target, and you don’t have to spend a lot of money because they’re so small and targeted and you get a huge return on investment and return on ad spend.
So what people say about retargeting ads being effective, and kind of promoting them and talking about how great they are, it’s all true if you have the audience, if you have the foundational success. So anybody who’s had a lot of success with retargeting ads has that foundational success, because if you don’t have that, there’s nobody good to retarget. You won’t see that impact. You’ll just actually take away. You’ll almost go backwards because you’ll be taking away from creating the foundational success. You’ll be taking away from the foundation itself.
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