565: How To Strategically Leverage Paid Ads In Your Business

In this episode, we are diving back into some marketing content. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode yet, make sure to do so because I was able to share a little bit of a different side of me, outside of what I have to offer with marketing. The response from all of you was so overwhelming and so appreciated and it was going through those messages that I found the inspiration for this episode. 

One of the common misconceptions that I see from entrepreneurs is the thought process that happens when they feel something isn’t working in their business and they attach expectations to one thing– and that one thing is what they feel will “fix” or “save” their business. For many I see this happening around implementing paid ads, however I’ve also seen it happen with social media strategy, or even signing up for a program or course.  

If you are feeling that pull to take your business to the next level, are wanting to generate more traffic, and are thinking about adding paid ads into your marketing strategy, join me in this episode to ask yourself these important questions from auditing the basics of your marketing foundation to exploring what the true power of paid ads can do for your business. 

Key Points: 

• Take note of what your business’s reality currently looks like

• Do you currently have a marketing strategy?
• Are your expectations solely relying on one product or action? Or are they driven based on your marketing strategy?
• Get clear on what is currently working in your business (and what is not). This will be amplified with any paid ad strategy. 

• Audit your marketing foundation

• Take a look at your current offer and ensure it is clear and holds current value to your audience.
• Your messaging needs to be clear around your offer and your customer/client’s journey 
• You need strategy behind your lead magnet. What happens after your audience opts in? 

• The true power of leveraging paid ads in your business 

• You are able to amplify what is already going on in your business 
• You are able to strategically refine the messaging based on the customer journey to make it more powerful instead of confusing them. 
• You have the ability to impactfully generate new angles by rewrapping what is working in your paid ads and giving it a fresh and innovative feel. 

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh: 

Hello everybody welcome back to the podcast happy Thursday happy October it’s gonna be a good month I can feel it especially here in Texas because finally the weather is cooling down I’m so excited. I’m almost ready to put my fall seeds, we have like 40 different seeds to plant in our new greenhouse and our new garden. Um, it was a lot more work than I thought it was going to be to get the beds filled with soil especially where our greenhouse is because you have to like go down this hill. So I got a little defeated about it over the weekend because it was like ° outside and I was dying trying to get it all filled and I’m like no, we’re just going to get some help I can’t do this It’s too much. Um, so I’m very excited to plant our garden and have it continue to be fulfilled my vision for it. We are going to get back into some marketing content today Tuesday’s episode was a very personal vulnerable not marketing related episode about my trip to Costa Rica and I appreciate the overwhelming amount of response and messages and text messages I got in acknowledgement for that episode and my vulnerability. So. Thank you guys if you did resonate with it and if not that’s totally fine I am going to stick mostly to marketing content still on here.

But more to come on that there will be an additional platform and channel where I can um, continue to share on the non-marketing related things because I feel I have a lot more to offer that goes outside of marketing. So today. We’re going to talk about how paid ads should be used. And this is actually inspired by a conversation in my Dms and I love conversations in my Dms that make me inspired to do a podcast episode because when I feel that I know that there’s so many more people who are thinking and going through the thoughts that this person was going through in their head. Um, when they dm me so I use it as an opportunity to bring it here and create a podcast around it. So this is centered around a common very common misconception mistake that I think people have with paid ads and other things. In their business in general and it’s very easy to slip into this place without even realizing that you’re doing it. So we’re going to talk about it. So the root of this is that I think oftentimes entrepreneurs turn to paid ads. Because they want it to save their business or save something that isn’t currently working and so they get in their head that they need to get paid ads going and get paid ads working and if they do that then.

Their business will start working Again. They’ll get leads. They’ll get customers like things will start moving and so they assign an expectation to paid ads that will equal them getting success and oftentimes people turn to paid ads when they’re not. Currently successful. They don’t have a lot of Momentum. They don’t have a lot of traction and they’re trying to find something that’s going to save the current situation now entrepreneurs do this with a lot of things like you can say paid ads but I have also seen people do this with social media. I’ve even seen people do this with a platform they’ve said well if I just sign up for Click funnels and I use their templates and I use you know their strategies then things will start working. They will do this with ah a program they need to buy a coach fill in the blank. Right? People will find something that they believe is going to be that like magic bullet to getting them out of the current situation. They’re in so fixing the problem or creating the results. They’re not currently seeing. And so here’s the problem with that whether it’s paid ads or anything else If The foundation is not solid. Nothing. You do is going to turn what you currently have into Success. So Look let’s look at this from the perspective of paid ads if right now.

Your business doesn’t have a marketing strategy like if I sat down next to you and I was like what’s your strategy. How are you generating an audience. How are you generating leads and how are you converting those leads into paying customers if you didn’t have that in place and defined and in motion and being built or already built. How are paid ads going to help. They’re not because I’m going to say this a few times in this episode but paid ads are an amplifier all they do is they take the foundation that you have the strategy that that you have and they get more traffic more eyes to it. So if you have no strategy paid ads will not work. This is also true for a social media strategy. This is true for hiring a business coach. This is true for signing up for a program. All of those things if you don’t focus on the foundation First. Nothing is going to turn your current situation from not successful to successful and so I oftentimes see entrepreneurs go okay I need to run paid ads I saw Xyz do it and they were they are successful right now running paid ads. I heard it at a business conference. My coach said I should run paid ads whatever you name it. So I’m going to focus on getting ads live and running paid ads. That’s where the mistake happens because the focus isn’t about turning your ads on and getting ads live and then everything is going to start working.

Your focus first needs to be your strategy your foundation. What’s part of a marketing foundation your offer your messaging and your strategy those 3 things have to be dialed in for anything else to work organic. Paid ads pr you name it if you don’t have those things dialed in everything else you do is not going to work. Okay, so this is why when people sometimes ask me like what we do. Like this happened to me at Crossfit the other day. Someone’s like what do you do? and I said I’m a marketing agency and I never start by saying oh we do Facebook and Instagram ads because to me that is a percentage of what we do that is how we amplify everything else we’re doing. It’s what we It’s what I believe is the fastest way to increase traffic and momentum in a business. But only if the foundation is there first we help either in a done with you or done for you capacity make sure the offer the messaging and the strategy is nailed down. Now the offer is usually by the time someone comes to work with us. They have an offer but sometimes the positioning the bonuses those components of the offer need to be adjusted so we spend in our done for you. It’s oftentimes the first two to four weeks is spent on this foundation.

And I would say it’s pretty rare that we get a client even if they have existing funnels and they are maybe even a 7 figure business owner already. It’s pretty rare that we get a client where we’re like yep, we don’t need to do anything with your strategy like most of the time we’re either developing it from scratch. The ground up or we’re making some big adjustments or we’re building a strategy that gets tested against something that they’ve used in the past in our done with you and essential this is the first this is the thirty forty five days of essential because they’re doing it on their own with our support. So. It takes a little bit longer for people in that boat because we’re not doing all the work but still this is the most important thing of your marketing. So if you have it in your mind. That in order to be successful in that to save your business’s current reality. You need to get paid ads live and paid ads are going to do that for your business or any medium is going to do that for your business I want you to pause. And ask yourself if the foundation is solid because all paid ads and organic earned media paid media organic. All of it is going to do is amplify what you already have and most people have big gaps and opportunities.

In their marketing foundation. So that means your offer is it an irresistible offer I have a specific process I follow around this are you able to position it and sell it in an effective way that connects to emotions. And that checks all those boxes you’re messaging. Do you understand the emotional components of your ideal customer and can you communicate and connect to that through your copy through your content through the experience you create and then your strategy. How are you going to grow your audience generate leads and convert those leads every single day in your business. Once you have that which again it shouldn’t take that long like this can be done in 2 to four weeks depending on who’s helping you execute it. But once you have that then you are ready for ads. Now ads can amplify your business. So this conversation in my Dms with somebody who um, was in a place where she didn’t have a lot of money. She wants to work with us. She didn’t have a lot of money and she said that she.

Launched ads on a different platform and she was going to try to learn how to launch ads on Facebook and she’s hoping to be able to generate more revenue to then be able to work with us. But upon me, asking some more questions and digging a little bit deeper I realized she had no strategy. Like she was launching ads somewhat randomly like her content was just what she thought would do well her strategy was a lead generation strategy but it had no follow-up email sequence. There was no experience. There was no intention behind it and it was not a complete strategy. So I said you. You’re wasting. You’re trying time trying to get ads live until you figure out this strategy. So I think it’s really really common and really really easy in business to try to find that silver bullet that shiny object. Again, we do this without realizing that we are doing this? Um I’ve seen people do this with coaches and programs I’ve also seen them do it with hiring different like contractors or even agencies or different consultants. Like okay if I just find the right person they’ll answer the question and they’ll tell me what to do and then that will solve all my problems but the problem is if the foundation is not solid then nothing is going to work and I’m not saying you have to figure the foundation out all on your own.

But here’s where there becomes a problem I have a problem with a lot of the agencies out there who don’t address the strategy in the funnel because I cannot wrap my mind around how you could be an agency that just runs ads to get traffic. But doesn’t look at the actual strategy you’re running the ads to and the customer journey and the experience and the messaging and the reason that they do that is because they don’t have to take accountability then they can say oh well, we’re getting new traffic and leads and it’s your job to convert them and so that’s not on us. And I just have never been able to work that way because they go so hand in hand and the strategy in the customer journey is so much more important than the ads to be honest with you like that is what requires more work and more messaging refinement and more strategy optimization and constant. Refinement and adjustment and fine tuning and optimizations and also coming up with new things and fresh wrapping paper like that’s the majority of what we do with clients and then ads are very important I’m not saying they’re not important. They’re the number one way that we support our clients in getting traffic. Because they’re the fastest when you compare it to organic and other ways to generate traffic but that traffic is useless if you don’t have the foundation in place and so I’ve never understood agencies or consultants who only support with us apart.

Because they all go so well together and they have to all be working cohesively and again the strategy in the customer journey has to be addressed before the ads. So If you’re thinking about running ads or currently running ads. Or you’re in that position where things aren’t working how you want them to or you’re just not getting enough traffic or momentum pay attention to that foundation. Ask yourself how what actions can I take and how can I move towards making sure my offer the way I sell my offer the positioning. My messaging and my strategy can be solid. Rock Solid does it mean perfect I’m not saying perfect because there’s refinement that’s going to happen Once you do start to get the traffic and then that traffic gives you feedback based on where they do and don’t take action. But what can you do to improve that. Which is oftentimes not the fun part like having to build a funnel and strategize and do deep messaging work and improve your offer is boring sometimes but that is the work that’s going to move the needle the most and and do most of the heavy lifting. And then the other components become a lot easier then you move into paid ads. So This is what we do in the beginning with every business we work with it’s why when I launched essential my done with you program I changed it from my previous done with you program and I said we have to do.

Strategy 1 on one for these businesses like we have to we have to figure out a way to be able to charge less and deliver a one-on-one custom strategy to these businesses and messaging support because that’s the only way that they can go in the program and then have success with ads. And that’s why that was like 1 of the most important things to me in creating a way that we had a done for you experience with the strategy in our done with you program because this is what we do to onboard all the clients and it’s the most amount of work. It’s what we have the most amount of in-depth process and constant refinement and improvement around because it’s. The most important and the biggest needle mover so use paid ads to amplify a solid foundation and I explain what a foundation is so check your current foundation is it. Cracked is it going to be leaky. Because nothing can be built on a cracked or a leaky foundation. All right? everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast and I will be back next week!