Welcome to episode two of my “Marketing Questions Answered” series. Today’s topic is all about visibility ads. I’ll be answering a question from a listener who has been consistently producing a podcast for four years, but wants to grow her downloads even more using visibility ads. 

Visibility ads are an effective way to grow brand awareness and increase the number of people consuming your content. Listen in as I share my strategies for running visibility ads, tips on how to choose the best content to promote, how to create ad creative and copy, and how to budget.

WANT TO WORK WITH TEAM HIRSH?

Honestly, we’re more than a marketing team — we’re a tactical partner who will care about your business growth just as much as YOU (maybe even more)! We’re here to play the long game and help you create a powerful impact!
APPLY NOW!

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE NOT FOR LAZY MARKETERS PODCAST!

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.

READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

The goal with Visibility Ads is to grow your brand awareness. So yes, grow followers, but more importantly, grow people actually consuming your content.

You are listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 491.

Hello everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to episode two of your Marketing Questions Answered. I am taking questions that you guys submitted to me and answering them and picking the ones that I think will be the most relevant and helpful for the entire audience. So thank you to everybody who submitted questions. Today’s topic is going to be about visibility ads. I saw this question and I was like, you know, it’s about time that I talk about this. It’s been a while since I’ve shared this on the podcast, and this is a core piece of my process and what we do with clients and my own ads and that I follow for a really long time, and I haven’t really done a podcast on it in a really long time either. So this individual asked the question of the fact that she’s had a podcast for four years.

She’s been really consistent and her podcast downloads are growing, but she wants it to grow more. So what about running visibility ads to her podcast and how do you go about that? So I’m gonna turn this episode into basically what visibility ads are, how to run them, my strategies to run them and they are also great ads for people to start running in the beginning before you even have your funnel completely done. So let’s dive in. Visibility ads in general. Let me give a definition of what those are. Are running ads to content. So that can be ads to a podcast episode. It could be ads to a video, it could be ads to a blog post. It could be ads to a social post. And the goal with visibility ads is to grow your brand awareness. So yes, grow followers, but more importantly, grow people actually consuming your content.

And oftentimes with visibility ads, what throws people the most is there isn’t always like a very direct call to action. So there’s not like, Hey, go download my lead magnet or sign up for my webinar. Because the goal with these ads is nurturing, it’s getting people to consume your content, to listen to your podcast, to do those things so that you can grow your audience and you can grow the nurturing in your audience. And, and a lot of times, like we put all this work into content and then not enough people see it. And so this is a way for new people to see your content. So if you have a podcast, I’m gonna talk specifically about that and then I’ll share the other strategies like videos and stuff for visibility ads. So for a podcast, the best way to go about this is to choose specific episodes that you think is going to attract your ideal customer.

That’s the really important piece of this, is when you look at a list of your topics that you’ve done, making sure that you choose episodes that are going to attract the ideal paying customer and actually create the best experience for them and build authority and nurturing, because sometimes we create content that it’s good, but it’s not the best choice in if somebody just comes across us who doesn’t know who you are. Building that trust and that confidence and that credibility in turning them into a customer. So choosing that content that is going to most likely attract that customer. So I would choose maybe three to four different podcast episodes that are related to that and are going to attract your ideal customer and our topics that you feel like are strong enough to do that. And then you will need to have an episode page on your website because you’ll want to run ads to that actual episode page, that landing page.

You don’t really wanna run them to like iTunes or Spotify, first of all, because you don’t know if people listen, you know, on that platform or not. Second of all, once somebody goes from Facebook to let’s say iTunes, you lose the data, you can’t pixel iTunes, so you’re not able to capture the data of the people who landed on that page. If you use a page from your website that has landing page views, you are able to take that audience and say, now show me an audience. You put your Facebook pixel on it. Now show me an audience of people who have been on this page and have actually landed here. And so you’ll wanna choose specific episodes. And then if you don’t already have this or you do have this, you’ll wanna make sure your website, you have a web page for those episodes and then you’ll run traffic to those episodes.

You’ll have ad copy, add creative and the, and the call to action. And those you do have a call to action because it’s click to go tune into the episode. Now, as far as ad creative for podcast specific ads, there’s a couple ways you can do it. One, I sometimes like testing, pulling a clip from the podcast and turning that into some sort of ad creative or two. If you wanna record a really short, like 32nd video of yourself saying, Hey, I recorded this episode and, and touching on like the pain or the frustration or the desire related to the episode, click the link and go listen to it. I have found that for me personally, those videos do the best, but that doesn’t mean that’s gonna be the case for everybody. And then your ad copy can be somewhat on the shorter side because you don’t have to do a lot of like selling and convincing it’s go listen to this podcast episode.

Now let’s talk about budget before I talk about the other versions of visibility ads. So you’re not spending a lot of money on visibility ads, and that’s part of why you can do it without having like call to actions and generating leads and generating sales directly from them because they are just like a, a small, small amount of your ad spend budget that helps you build that brand awareness. And so typically with clients, we start people at about a hundred dollars a month. So that’s anywhere from like three to 10% of their budget. Obviously like if you’re only spending a thousand dollars a month, it’s gonna be a bigger percentage of your budget. So we usually start at about a thousand dollars a month and we use that towards visibility ads, whatever form that we create. And one of the other things you’re doing that’s really beneficial with this is as people land on the landing page or watch the video or engage with your social media, those are all audiences that you can create and actually then create lookalike audiences for your future ads.

So let’s say you get, you know, a hundred people to your podcast landing page, then you’re able to tell Facebook, Hey, go find me more of people like this. And that’s now my cold traffic targeting. So it’s good in the sense of gathering that data. You also can retarget those people to other areas of your funnel. Like let’s say you have a lead magnet or a webinar, so that’s specific to podcast. But you can also, like I said, visibility ads can be in the form of videos, social media posts blogs. Those are the main ones. And so if a client comes in and they don’t have, let’s say, a podcast or something regular that we can promote, then typically we have them record three to four specific videos that we call engagement videos. And we have those video topics focus on problem and desires.

So we pull out specific problem and desires that that ideal customer has and we just have the client record a one to two minute video on that. And then we use that for visibility ads and we run those actually as you know, video view ads directly on Facebook. There isn’t a call to action on those because it’s, we want them to listen to the video and then we’re able to take the audience of people who are listening to those videos and either create lookalike audiences or retarget them and leverage that data. So if you don’t have a funnel set up and you don’t have a regular form of content, spending a hundred dollars a month on visibility ads is a great place to start and using content that you can easily create or maybe you’re already creating it and then putting a little bit of ad spend behind it so that new people see it.

And that’s the biggest thing with this is you’re able to target your ideal customer through your targeting and get them to consume your content and grow that audience of people. So that is kind of my strategy for visibility ads. I think they’re great for everybody to run naturally. You’ll likely see your follower or your like count go up on your pages, but that’s not the goal. And when people ask me that, like, should I run like ads or, you know, is that good to have? I think it’s more valuable to get somebody to consume a video or click to watch your podcast or whatever action in your visibility ads than it is to just get them to click like on your Instagram for example. That doesn’t really have much of a relationship attached to it. And it doesn’t build a very strong connection.

They’re gonna likely not even remember that they clicked like on your page. So for this reason, I’m really against like ads. I would much rather have less likes, but quality and people actually consuming my content because that’s how I’m going to build a relationship with them. That’s how I’m gonna convert them into a buyer, get them in my world, nurture them, et cetera. A couple other things to note on overall just podcasts, cuz this question was around a podcast. I’ve obviously had my podcast, gosh, we’re approaching 500 episodes. That’s insane. I have ha also had my podcast for a long time and we’re constantly trying to grow it. So because you asked that specific question on growing your podcast, I am gonna provide you with a few insight, tips and strategies on that. Visibility ads are great. One thing with podcasts is it’s really hard to track.

 It’s hard to track if it’s actually increasing your downloads. The tracking with podcasts is really poor still. Like they don’t tell you, oh, you know, this resulted in 25 new downloads to your podcast. So you do, you should see a little bit of an increase with visibility ads, but you’re not gonna be able to attribute like x amount of downloads to it. So some other things that have worked really well for me in, in increasing downloads is one, trying to get on guest podcasts. If you get on guest podcasts of people who you know, their audience is your audience, usually people who are listening to podcasts will listen to other podcasts. So anytime I’m on a guest interview, I really push my podcast as like the number one kind of call to action when people typically ask like, Hey, where can people find more about you?

I share about my podcast and I share, you know, on the days that I release it and whatnot. So that’s a great way if you can build relationships and get on some guest podcasting. I I’ve seen people go too far with this and spend too much time on it and not get a lot of results. So it’s something that can happen through relationships and some intentionality, but it’s a really good way to grow your podcast. A couple of other things are, you’ve probably seen me do something like this, this podcast series. What that does is it does ha ha you have more episodes and so it naturally will increase your downloads on your podcast because there’s more episodes for people to download who are subscribed to your podcast. But what that does is it increases your placement on the charts, on the podcast charts because you have more downloads.

And so it can help you overall in getting found like organically on, you know, the iTunes podcast charts or Spotify or whatever. You also could do some sort of fun giveaway or experience where you’re encouraging your audience to share your podcast or review your podcast, which are both things that help your downloads. So I’ve done those every once in a while of just having people share it. You’ll hear me on here like ask you guys, Hey, if you love this, please share it and tag me so I can thank you. That’s obviously visibility and traction that I get, you know, and people then find out about it. So those are some ways. And then one other strategy is if you have any type of lead gen webinar, anything, you should always tie your podcast at the least at the end of the email series as a place where people can go back and continue to get content from you.

And so if someone new joins your list, and let’s say they come in through a webinar and they go through your entire email series and they finish that sales sequence, there should be what’s called a transition email that’s basically, you know, they haven’t bought yet, but where can they continue to hang out, where can they continue to get value from you? And your podcast is a great thing to plug in there. As well as sometimes it fits in nurture sequences to plug in specific podcast episodes, for example, and repurpose them for various things. So that’s a lot of strategies that I’ve tested and have worked in growing my own podcast downloads as well as bundled in with my overall concept of visibility ads, which I think everybody can and should run with a small budget. So hopefully you guys found this helpful and you are going to implement some visibility ads or maybe you have them and, and you got some ideas on what you can do with them. And I will be back tomorrow with another question I’m answering.

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 helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh 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 helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.

♥ LISTEN ON SPOTIFY