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Emily Hirsh:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are doing amazing and having a great productive, focused week. I, on my last podcast, I’m definitely in a season of busy, mostly because I’m building a software. So that is definitely adding a lot to my plate right now. And there’s a lot happening on that side of things that I can’t share. I can’t wait to share the whole story and all the work that’s gone into it and the times I almost gave up and was like, what am I even doing? I’ll be able to share all of that hopefully very soon. And you know, there’s no good founding story. I feel like without the struggles. So it’s there and I am, I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying being pushed to very uncomfortable places because so much of what I’m doing is so new to me that I have to up level my skill, my understanding, lmy communication, it’s a whole new world.

So it’s really pushed me to grow a lot and also has made me feel like I’m in a season where basically I work, I sleep, I work out and any extra time I have is with my kids and my husband. And that’s it. Like, I don’t do anything else and I don’t have time for anything else. So today’s episode is inspired from the free challenge that I hosted last week and I had so much fun. I wasn’t sure how a challenge was gonna do, or if I was gonna enjoy it. Sometimes challenges could attract a little bit too much of the very beginner business owners or people who want you to just do it all for them and spell it out for them versus do the work. And that wasn’t the case. So we did a good job in our messaging. I feel like, and I loved the piece of the challenge, where it was so much about implementation and actually seeing a transformation throughout the five days was so rewarding for me, for people to be like, you know, I haven’t made this much progress in years or all the different things that they were saying was really incredible.

So there was a comment on one of my live videos, um, last week and the person who made the comment may listen to this podcast. So shout you out for this inspiration. And it inspired me to do this episode because it stuck with me what she said. And I think it represented, you know, maybe not exactly what everybody feels with Facebook ads, but what a lot of people feel and, you know, voiced it in a way that was kind of funny, but is actually true. And that was, she commented, it was like day three. Once we had had the ads live and now it was time to like see how they were doing and start to make optimization moves. We wanted them to sit for 24 hours and then there was some direction on making optimization moves, and she commented on my livestream.

And she’s like, I feel like Facebook is like trading on the stock market. And I think that is such a representation of how so many of you feel with your Facebook ad strategy where you feel like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, or it’s like, you have no idea if what you’re doing is good or it’s bad, or are you gonna lose a bunch of money? And I also witness like throughout this, a lot of people and the fear that comes up once they start at spending money on Facebook and kind of the distrust that people have with Facebook. And honestly, in some cases it’s rightfully so. Like I don’t love Facebook as a company. And the reality is, until everybody stops going on Facebook and going on Instagram and giving the platform all of the attention that it has, it is going to be relevant for business owners and for us to market on because that’s where all of our audiences are.

And it, you can’t replicate the experience that you can with the Facebook and Instagram ads on other platforms like Google ads, YouTube ads, they all feel like very in your face ads. Whereas Facebook and Instagram, you have the opportunity to connect, to put content in front of your ideal customer to build trust and often at a less expensive price. That’s beside the point. The point is I witnessed how many people have distrust with Facebook or fear once they start spending money that they’re gonna somehow waste all this money, or like Facebook is gonna charge them $500 or something bad’s gonna happen. And it makes them have anxiety and almost panic in some cases, cuz they don’t wanna mess it up. And I think this comment really encompasses that because it’s like a lot of times when you run Facebook ads, you don’t know if you have the right audience or where you don’t know if it’s gonna work or not.

And I’m gonna talk about how to get over that. But to the question of Facebook’s light is Facebook ads like trading on the stock market? My answer is no, I think there’s probably some similarities obviously on a different scale and I’m gonna compare it, but I want to empower you guys not feel like you are just gambling with your money. Well, because it doesn’t have to feel like that at all with Facebook ads and it shouldn’t feel like that. So if it feels like that you’re missing something in your process and your strategy. So for me, what I would say is the biggest difference between doing something risky, like investing, investing in stocks, investing in crypto, whatever every time you do that, you are betting on a lot of outside factors that are really outside of your control, right? When you invest in a company, when you invest, you know, buy stock, right?

Like who you are, it feels like a gamble because you’re not the owner of that company. Like you can’t say what they’re gonna do, the decisions they’re gonna make the successful. They’re gonna have the, you know, market response. There’s a lot of things outside of your control, which is why it feels like gambling, right? It feels a little bit like, look like we can make somewhat good decisions and invest in companies that, you know, Amazon, Apple, whatever that will probably do well. But you still don’t know. And you don’t know what’s gonna happen to the economy, which is why it feels like gambling. That is the, the difference between that and Facebook ads in my opinion is you are in the driver’s seat with Facebook ads. Like you get to control most of what’s happening in your marketing and Facebook ads. And I feel like that’s the difference that you guys need to grasp.

And here’s why you might be like, well, no, I don’t like what if my ad account gets shut down? Or what if my audiences don’t work for you? Yes, there are factors that you can’t control. We can’t control. When Facebook comes out with a new update, we can’t control when they take away audience targeting options. We can’t control exactly how an audience converts that is true. What you can control though, is your response to all those things you can control. When you go and turn off an audience and test a new one, you can control understanding, okay, they took away audience targeting options. Now I’m gonna strategically find new audiences to pivot and make these decisions. You can control looking at your data that you get and your numbers and making strategic improvements from there. So for example, if your ads are not getting clicks, you see that metric you’ve been running ads, you have full control to write new ad copy, to create new ad creative and relaunch it.

You are in the driver’s seat. It is absolutely not gambling. That is not gambling. Yes, it can be seen and should be seen as an investment oftentimes, but it’s not crossed my fingers and hope it works at all. Facebook ads and marketing is extremely intentional and should be treated that way. So that’s the big thing I want you to take away from this is if you have run ads or your running ads and you feel like, oh my gosh, this is like I’m gambling and hoping for the best in crossing my fingers. And it’s like trading on the stock market. I want you to think about things like, what are the components that you can control? And what’s the information that you need to receive in order to get in the driver’s seat. And so a lot of times for you guys, what this is is it’s it’s day it’s numbers.

It’s two things: knowing what numbers are important. And then it’s knowing what those numbers mean and what decisions you should make based on those numbers. If you can force yourself to do that, if you’re running your own ads or, I mean, if you are working with a company who’s not giving you numbers like run away right now because you cannot make decisions without numbers. One of our core values as a company is data and refinement. Like everything, decisions we make are based on data. And we con instantly like we send weekly reports and that is such a key thing in what I teach, because that’s, what’s gonna get you out of the place of feeling like you’re gambling is having knowledge and empowerment around your numbers. And so this is not a podcast to talk about all the numbers you should track and what they mean.

And the biggest thing I’ll say, like experiencing it last week in the challenges, a lot of times it takes just like getting in the weeds and practice and it takes practice, like trying to understand the numbers, trying to understand what they mean. And it’s gonna take some time. You’re not gonna learn it overnight, but also the only numbers you need to know are the ones that represent an action somebody’s taking. And if you look at numbers that way it’s gonna help you, because I know there’s a lot in like, you know, click through rate cost per click, which one do I look at? What do they mean? I get it. The first thing you can do is figure out what are all the actions that somebody takes from the moment they see my ad to they become a sale, like a map out your entire funnel, your entire customer journey, every single action as a number attached to it.

What’s the KPI? What’s the number that’s gonna represent the success of that action? Those are the numbers you need to know. Then when you see a number that is not good representing those actions, you can say, okay, how do I fix that number? How do I improve that number? What’s an action I can take to improve that number? And if you operate that way with your ads, you will not feel like you’re gambling. You are in the driver’s seat. You are in control. You are in control of how you respond to the numbers, to the results, to the success of your ads. So that’s the first big point. The second thing I wanna say, and to me, I was like, this is something I wouldn’t normally say because I feel like it’s obvious, but my eyes were open to the fact that this is not obvious for people who have never run ads before and how it works.

And that’s on me to own, like, that’s something that you’re always working on as a creator is like, what is obvious to you? Because it’s in your day to day that you have like blindfolds onto it and you, this is, this is something that I saw happen a lot last week, which was a lot of people. When they started ads, they had the fear that Facebook was gonna take all of this money from them. And it was like, I don’t wanna waste, you know, $500. And I had them set their daily budget to $15 a day. So I realized that there’s a disconnect in the understanding of this. And I want you to look at ads and understand the absolute worst, worst thing, worst case scenario that’s gonna happen is you’re gonna spend the daily budget that you spent and not get results. And so if you set a daily budget that is not gonna break your bank, if you don’t get it back then, you’re fine.

Like the worst thing that’s gonna happen, the absolute worst case scenario is you’re gonna spend that money and you’re not gonna get the results you want, but you’re gonna get data. So let me explain this to you. If you set a daily budget, let’s say $20 a day for your ads and you’re running them to a webinar. The worst case scenario is you’re gonna spend $20 and you’re gonna get zero leads. Now you’ve spent $20, the cost of lunch, and you didn’t get any leads. So that’s not great. Do we quit and turn off all our ads? No. Now the positive of it is you have data. So even if you get zero leads, you spent the $20. You tested audiences. And now, you know what ads were clicked on. Well, audiences got better costs per click. Even if you got zero leads, you’re able to see that.

How many impressions did you get on your ads? What does that cost? And now you can either keep your ads running, spend another $20, continue to get data, or you can start to make decisions and you can start to say, okay, I got, you know, 15 clicks, but nobody signed up on my page. Why is that happening? Do I need to change my page? Is it optimized for mobile? Could I write a better headline? Is there a disconnect between my ad and the page? And you see now you can go make decisions and you can make changes. Then you can keep doing that. And it’s super rare, super rare that if you follow this process consistently for a month, let’s say that you would make any progress. I’ve actually never seen that happen because as long as you are following this test, refine, repeat process, you will make progress and you will start to get leads.

And now the next hurdle is we need those leads to buy. Does it happen overnight? Absolutely not, but you’re not GA with your money and you’re not going to all of a sudden start Facebook ads and just have $500 taken from you. Like the worst thing that’s gonna happen is you spend your daily budget. So don’t set your daily budget for something that you can’t spend. Like don’t set it for $500. If you can’t spend $500. And I wouldn’t recommend that as a daily budget on new for the most part anyways. So if you set your daily budget and you treat that first month as a testing period, and you have low expectations, make your main expectation to be progress. Like I wanna make progress. I wanna get data. I wanna understand my data. I want to make decisions based on that data. And if you accomplish that in 30 days, think how much farther you’re gonna be than you are today.

Even if you don’t get leads, even if you don’t get sales, which you most likely will get some, will you be profitable? Probably not. In 30 days on a brand new funnel and brand, you know, brand new to running ads, but will you make progress 100%, 100%? Like I’ve never actually seen somebody follow this process and not make progress in that time period overnight, no, you won’t make progress overnight. It takes time to get data, but with ads you can be in control and should be in control. And that happens from understanding your numbers and then knowing what decisions to make based on those numbers. And if you are so overwhelmed by that, and you feel like I will never make progress doing this, then get some support, get some support from somebody who understands marketing numbers and can drive those decisions for you, because that will also massively speed up your success.

But regardless if it’s you doing it, if you have, you know, support doing it, if you hired a team to do it, this is what has to happen. They either have to do it or you either have to do it. And if you are feeling like your business is like gambling or trading on the stock market, I want you to step back and figure out how do you take back control? How do you put yourself in the driver’s seat? So it doesn’t feel like that. And that comes from the numbers, understanding the numbers and then making constant progress at decisions because you actually have control over the ad copy and creative over the offer. You’re sending your ads over the strategy that you’re using over the landing page, over the copy on the landing page, over the emails, over the experience you’re creating, unlike gambling and the stock market, which is a lot based on luck and other people, right?

That’s why it feels like that because we’re not in control really at all over our money and putting it in those places. Can you be super successful? Yeah. But can you also lose a ton of money? Yeah. Not with marketing like that doesn’t happen. And you go into it with a commitment like an investment. Yes. But you are in control and you are in control. When you can take back that power over the numbers and make your goal constant refinement. Based on those numbers, you will see success. All right, everybody. I hope this was helpful for you guys. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And I’ll talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to the, not for lazy marketers podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support with your marketing head over to help my strategy.com to see how Hersh marketing can help take your marketing to the next level, no matter where you’re at today, we help our clients scale faster than ever find hidden leaks in their funnel experiment with new creative marketing strategies and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible. Head over to help my strategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with team Hirsh.

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