Facebook ads can be a powerful tool to get across to your target audience. But how can you leverage Facebook ads to get paid? In this episode, Kendra Perry reveals what you need to know before starting Facebook ads to find the right audience and send it to the right people. She emphasizes the value of doing market research to learn your target audience and breaks down some of the different types of ads that will allow you to build your email list. For more tips on what works best you’re your ads, join Kendra in this insightful episode. Make the most of your Facebook ads today!
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What You Need To Know Before Starting Facebook Ads
I’m super pumped as always to be with you. I’ve got a bit of an after-hike glow. If you guys follow me on Instagram, you know I love to be in the mountains and I love to hike. Usually every Monday, you can typically expect several stories on my Instagram Stories about all the cool places that I went to over the weekend. I went to an entirely new zone that I hadn’t been to before, which was exciting. What we did was we spent about 40 minutes hiking to this lake, which I’ve been to before. We camped there in 2022.
When we were camped there, we ran into a hiker who was headed up to the mountain above us. He told us that it was a pretty easy hike and you could scramble up to the top of that mountain. We thought in 2023 that we would go further and see what we would find. I was there with Ryan, my partner, and my good friend Elise. We hiked about 40 minutes to this lake and then spent about 20 minutes hiking around it.
We had to go up this little pass. It was rock debris but we were able to find a little path because this part of this area is part of a bigger hiking traverse that a lot of people do. It wasn’t a super big trail but it was good enough for us. We followed that to the next lake. The only thing that sucked was the bugs were so bad. I always joke that it has to take a lot of bugs for me to complain because I’m from the East, from Ontario. I used to do a lot of canoe tripping. The bugs in Ontario are next level. Nothing compares to the bugs in Ontario. I always laugh when I’m out West and people are like, “The bugs.” I’m like, No. This is not bad.”
The fact that I thought it was pretty bad means that it was bad. Just saying. It’s fine. We had to keep moving. Once we got to that second lake, we had to go up this little pass. There was a little bit of snow but nothing major. We were able to navigate up there. Once we got to the little pass, we dropped our heavy packs because we were going to spend the night. We hiked up to the ridge line where we had these unbelievable 360-degree views.
There’s nothing I love more than feeling so insignificant in nature like that where you feel this little point of attention on this massive landscape. Honestly, it makes me feel like my problems don’t matter. It makes me feel connected to God. I love it. We spent a bit of time up there, took all the pictures, saw all the beautiful views, and pick out all these different peaks. It was exciting. We hiked back down to the pass where we’d left our bags and then hiked over the pass and down to another little lake.
We found this epic campsite. It’s called Bear Grass. It’s like this thick soft spongy grass. It was the most perfect place to camp next to this beautiful little creek. It was so gorgeous. What happened the next morning was interesting. When we are camping in bear country, we always hang our food on a tree. Mostly, it’s to keep it away from the ground squirrels and the creatures but it’s also to keep it away from the bears. The truth is bears can climb trees and have this amazing sense of smell. I learned that apparently, grizzly bears can smell up to 30 kilometers, which is wild. They always know where you are. We hung our food and went to sleep.
The next morning, I got woken up by, “There’s a bear.” My friend Elise had gotten up, went to get the food, and came back to the campsite. She was trying to figure out how to work Ryan’s stove when she looked up and saw this baby bear on its hind legs, peeking over all curious. She saw a mom. It was a grizzly mom and two cubs. We don’t see a lot of grizzly bears. We see a lot of black and brown bears.
Honestly, I don’t worry too much about black and brown bears. We make noise. They generally stay away. They’re easy to scare but grizzlies are a different story. They’re bigger, can be more aggressive, and are more predators. It’s not the best to see a mom in her cubs. Any mama bear is very protective of her kids, especially grizzlies. I got up quickly out of my tent and was stumbling around. They saw us and luckily, they didn’t want anything to do with us.
Typically, if I saw a black bear or a brown bear, I yell at it like, “Get out of here.” I would yell loud. I would be quite aggressive with it. That’s how you want to act with black and brown bears but with grizzly bears, you don’t want to be too aggressive. You want to stay calm. This is something my dad ingrained into me from a very young age. Never turn your back and run from a bear ever. In any bear situation, if you want to get away, you always back away slowly.
With a grizzly bear, you still want to be dominant but you don’t want to be aggressive. You want to be calm but firm. It’s nice to use the base of your voice and be loud. Put your arms up to let it know you’re there but do not antagonize it and be aggressive and scream at it because you could fire it up. Elise did the exact right thing. Elise has tons of experience in the bush. She’s the most badass woman that I know. She’s been working in forestry for over a decade and has spent tons of time in the mountains. She knows what she’s doing when it comes to bear encounters.
Luckily, the mom saw us. She didn’t want anything to do with us so she walked away. What was unfortunate is they were right there but I didn’t get to see them because I had just woken up and I was still cross-eyed. My vision was blurry and I was looking directly into the rising sun because it was coming up right in the direction where the bears were. I didn’t even get to see them. I was so disappointed. Although maybe it would’ve fired up my adrenaline. Elise’s adrenaline was fired up for the rest of the morning.
Luckily, it was a great encounter. It worked out well and everyone is good. We had a nice cruisey morning. We had breakfast and then we hiked back to our car. Overall, it was an amazing trip. I always have this after-hiking glow because it’s so exciting. I’m already planning for the next one. If you guys want to see any of my hiking adventure photos and you care about that and all the beautiful places that I go to, follow me on Instagram. My handle is @KendraPerryInc. Check out my stories on a Monday because that’s typically when I’m posting that content.
Why Facebook Ads Are Powerful
I want to dive into the episode and talk a little bit about Facebook ads. I’ve had a lot of people come to me who have started running Facebook ads without taking any time to learn about Facebook ads, essentially not knowing what they’re doing. Facebook ads sound great. “I advertise. I’m going to get clients and more followers.” They are great for that thing but you don’t want to use them unintentionally or ignorantly. They cost money. You could waste a lot of money and not get any results.
With that being said, Facebook ads can be powerful. The reason for this is with social media, we have no control over who and how many people see our posts. We’re just throwing our content into the ether and hoping that it has an effect on someone. We’re hoping that it reaches the right audience. There’s a lot of hoping and a lack of control.
With Facebook ads, we can target who we are showing our content to. We can also determine how many people we want to see our posts or our ad so there’s more control over it. You want to know what you’re doing. If you are someone who wants to do Facebook ads and that’s never a bad idea, you want to know what you’re doing. You either want to hire a coach or take a course. Making an ad doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to get you results. They can be a little bit techy. You want to make sure that you have a proper strategy.
The cool thing is I decided to bring Facebook ads into Health Coach Accelerator. I’m hoping to release it in the next update. Hopefully, that’s going to release in October 2023 if I get my things together. The reason why I’ve decided to bring in Facebook ads, which is something I’ve been thinking about for over a year, is because organic social media has gotten increasingly more challenging. I still think organic social media is very valuable and businesses can grow without ads.
I have students who do it all the time but I’ve noticed a big shift in the market in the past couple of years. It has gotten increasingly more difficult. With COVID, many people came online. There is more competition. COVID drove a lot of content creators. We are out there competing with content creators or people who make content for a living. As someone who runs a business, wants to work with clients, and doesn’t want to spend all day on social media, it becomes difficult. I do believe that if you want to grow your business on social media, you do have to be posting a lot.
Some people love to do that. Some people are cool with posting often but other people don’t want to do that. I truly believe that if you are running Facebook ads, you have a good strategy, and they’re working for you, then you don’t need to be posting as much on social media, which is great. You can reduce your time. The tradeoff is that you have to pay for Facebook ads. Organic social media is free. It’s time versus money. Time is something that we have a limited amount of. You might have a part-time job or a full-time job. You may have a family or other responsibilities that prevent you from devoting a lot of your time to being on social media.
With that being said, you always still need some level of organic social media. Your paid content should work with your free content. The truth is people who see your ads are going to check you out on social media. If you have terrible content, your content isn’t well-branded, and you aren’t posting, then people aren’t going to take you seriously and they’re going to think you’re a scammer. You still do need to be posting but you can greatly reduce the amount you’re posting when you have a good paid ads strategy. That is why I’m going to be bringing it into HCA. I’m very excited about that. I’m doing a whole overhaul of the course and that update will hopefully release in October 2023.
What You Need In Place To Get Started With Facebook Ads
I want to talk first about what you have to have in place to even consider getting started with Facebook ads. I’m going to talk about a very simple Facebook ad strategy that I believe every coach needs and the tech involved. This is important. I know you guys have heard me harp on about having a niche, like a broken record, but if you are going to run Facebook ads, you need a niche. Facebook needs to know who you are trying to target. This is why I push my HCA students to not only choose a problem to solve but also to target a specific type of person that can easily be found online. I’ll have a student who’s like, “I want to help holistic-minded women.” “Okay, but how do you find holistic-minded women online?”
If you said, “I want to help new moms,” we can find new moms online. There are groups for that. New moms are looking for very specific products, reading very specific magazines and books, and listening to specific podcasts. It’s very easy to find that person online. That’s a good thing when it comes to Facebook ads because it’s all about finding the right audience and sending your ads to the right people. You have to understand your target audience. Not only the problem they have and who they are but their pain points, desires, and struggles. You have to understand that about your target audience or you will not be successful with Facebook ads.
When you’re starting Facebook ads, there are all kinds of different audiences that you can create and run ads to but you need a little bit of time to create them. When you’re brand new, you’re going to be primarily targeting something called interest-based audiences. You’re going to be thinking, “Who’s my person? What kinds of books are they going to be reading? What types of magazines do they read? What podcast episodes do they listen to? What influencers do they follow? What products do they buy?”
We’ll go with the example that you target new moms. You’d want to think, “How am I going to find new moms?” You could use something like ChatGPT. This is a great tool when you’re running ads. You can type into ChatGPT, “What are the top books that new moms read?” What you can do is find all the authors of those books, go into Facebook, and see if you can target them. Facebook doesn’t let you target everything. It’s super random. It’s something that has driven me crazy for years.
Facebook doesn’t allow you to just target any author. If you found 20 authors that your target audience might be reading books from, maybe you would find 5 of those authors. You could target people who have shown interest in XYZ author. You could also think about the big influencers that new moms would be following. You could see if you could target them. This is why you need to understand your target audience because you need to know their interests, whom they follow, what they read, what they listen to, and where they hang out online so that you can find them and send your ad to them.
You should not consider running ads until you are very clear on your niche, the person you help, and the problem you solve. You want to know all the things about them. A valuable exercise that I have 100% mentioned before on this show is to do market research interviews. That is to interview ten people who fit into your target audience and ask them about their pain points, desires, and struggles. This is something that I do in my business every single year. Every year, I sit down with ten people and interview them. I want to make sure I am still understanding their pain, desires, and struggles. This is how we have clear and concise messaging. You got to know that.
Create A Compelling Free Offer
The next thing you want is a compelling free offer that your audience wants. There are lots of different types of ads you can run on Facebook. You can run awareness ads, which you would be running ads to a video so that people would see it and then you could retarget those people later. You could run ads directly to a product. For you as an online coach, the simplest way to use Facebook ads is to run ads to a free offer to build your email list. Yes, you can run ads to get more followers on Instagram. You can do that. If you are going to be seriously investing in Facebook ads as a way to grow your business, the best way to do that is to run ads to a free offer.
This is why we need to know who our target audience is, their pain points, desires, and struggles. We need to figure out what free offer is going to resonate with them. I’ve talked about free offers on the show before but what we’re going for is something that is very high value but also relatively quick to consume. You can run ads to a webinar which is going to be longer to consume, no problem, but that is a more complex ad strategy. It’s going to take a lot longer to put in place. There’s a lot more tracking. It’s not a good type of ad to start with. The easiest one to start with is to run ads to a free offer.
That brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is the simple Facebook ad strategy that every coach needs. That’s lead generation ads. Leads are subscribers to your email list. Leads are not Instagram followers, Facebook likes, or LinkedIn connections. Leads are email list subscribers. Lead generation ads essentially help you get leads to your list. The best way to do this is to offer a freebie in the ad. The person will opt into that freebie and end up on your email list. You have probably done this before. Maybe you’ve even opted into some of my ads.
That freebie should solve a micro problem or a pain point. Something like a free guide, a checklist, or a cheat sheet, whatever it is, is not going to solve their entire problem. If we use the example of new moms who want to get back to their post-pregnancy weight, we’re not going to be able to do that with an entire guide. Maybe there is a quick win that we can give them with that freebie. Something that they haven’t heard before or something that they can execute tomorrow and feel better or feel a bit more in control. That is what’s going to work best as a freebie.
Have Patience To Test
Ultimately, you may have to test a few different freebies and see what resonates with your audience. That is a very simple ad strategy that every coach needs. They are a lead generation ad strategy. Something else you need, and this is more perhaps mindset related, is the patience to test. No ads expert will ever be able to answer the question, “What type of ad is going to work best for my audience? What freebie is going to be best? What image should I use? What copy should I create?”
The truth is it’s random. Things that you think are going to do well sometimes don’t. Things that you don’t think are going to do well sometimes do. Facebook ads are a testing game. You can’t just put one ad out there and expect it to work. Typically, when I start an ads campaign, I will be running 4 different ads to 10 different audiences so that’s 40 ads. I turn off the ads that aren’t performing and keep on the ones that are. You need this mindset that you have to test. If it’s not working, that’s fine. Test something else. Good Facebook ads managers do a lot of testing.
In terms of tech, what do you need to run Facebook ads? The first thing you’re going to need is landing page software. I would recommend something like FG Funnels. It is the one that I use. I love it. It has lots of functionality. I recommend it to my students. The reason for that is you want something that’s going to load quickly and also something that you can track analytics on. We want to be able to monitor our landing page stats and know how many people are opting in based on the number of people who land on the page. I recommend FG Funnels but there are lots of other ones out there like ClickFunnels, Kajabi, and all kinds of ones.
You are going to need email list software. I use ConvertKit but there are lots of good ones out there like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, or whatever you will want in email marketing software. The next thing you’re going to need is something called an email nurture sequence. What’s happening when you are running ads is you are pulling people who are considered cold traffic onto your email list. What that means is they don’t know you, they didn’t come upon you organically, and they haven’t been following you for a while. You are essentially just some talking head on the internet. They don’t like or trust you. They just wanted your free thing.
We need to allow them to get to know us. We need to warm them up and show them that we are worth following. Otherwise, they’re just going to unsubscribe. When they opt into your email list, they’re going to get that confirmation email but then you want to send out a series of emails. Typically, I recommend about 5 emails over 5 days, something like that, or maybe 7 emails every 7 days. There are all kinds of different ways you can do it where you introduce people to your philosophy.
You provide value and send them to some of your longer-form content. For example, in my email nurture sequence, I recommend a lot of episodes because it is very intimate. It’s my longer-form content. I believe if people read my content, they’ll get a good sense of my personality, philosophy, and how I work with people. That’s going to make them more likely to stick around. You’re going to want that email nurture sequence.
Weekly Nurture Strategy
The other thing you’re going to want to have in place is a weekly nurture strategy. This is the weekly email that you send out to your list. Once they go through your email nurture sequence, you don’t want them to never hear from you until you tell them to buy your program. I recommended at least one email a week that you send out to provide value and tell a story, whatever it is. It works to nurture your subscribers.
The final tack that you are going to need is Google Analytics. Why do you need Google Analytics? You may not know this but I remember it because I was running ads at the time. iOS, the operating system that runs iPhone, did an update at the beginning of 2021 and it messed over Facebook ads. You may have noticed that when you download a new app, open that app, and install it, there’s a little popup that comes up. It asks you if that app is allowed to track you and you can say, “Allow the app to track,” or, “Please don’t track,” or something like that.
That was an update that came out in 2021 and that screwed over Facebook. People can opt out of tracking. The reason why we are able to reach our audience on Facebook is because they track everything. We think tracking is all creepy and stuff but as a business owner, that’s what allows you to reach your audience. When iOS did that update, it negatively impacted small businesses. When it’s harder to track, what that means is you need a bigger budget to reach your audience. That change favored big business.
What Walmart, Target, and Canadian Tire did was up their budget because they have the budget to blast their ads out to anyone. Whereas you as a small business have to be intentional with your targeting. You don’t have a big budget. You can’t just send your ad to everyone. You have to be targeted with your audience. That made it difficult for Facebook ads to track. When you go into your Facebook ads dashboard, you were only relying on that tracking data. What I mean by that is it tells you. When we’re looking at ads, we want to know which ads are performing best. The only way we can know which ads are performing best is by tracking. Facebook ads tracking is so bad because of this update that it might only track 30%.
As an example, I was running ads for a webinar in the spring of 2023. I was frustrated with this ad because I was paying about $12 per lead and I didn’t want to be paying that much. That’s what Facebook was telling me that I was paying $12 for every person on my email list, which is quite high. I was frustrated but then I got Google Analytics set up. Facebook was underreporting so as it turned out, I was getting a much better cost per lead. I was getting a $6 cost per lead so it’s much cheaper. You do need to set up Google Analytics to track your ads. Otherwise, you will have no idea what’s going on because Facebook ads tracking is terrible.
iOS screwed over Facebook with that update but luckily, we can still track through Google Analytics. You will need to have Google Analytics set up to do your tracking. That is essentially what you need in place. This might sound overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be. Once you understand how it works and you get all the tech and everything in place, it’s not that difficult. We will be bringing Facebook ads into HCA in the fall of 2023. I’m very excited about this. HCA is going to double as a Facebook ads course.
If you are someone who doesn’t want to spend all day on social media, you don’t want to have to post tons of content and you’re okay with putting a little bit of money behind it to reach more people and get more people on your email list, then it will be a great time to join HCA. Just so you know, even if you join now, you will get access to that update in the fall of 2023. There are a lot of things you need to do first, as we talked about in this episode before you can consider running ads. If you join, then you will get your things in place.
By fall, that would be a perfect time to start your ad. If you’re interested in joining HCA, DM me the word Biz Audit on Instagram or Facebook. My handle is @KendraPerryInc. I’m going to take a look at your stuff and I’ll let you know if you are a good fit for the program. I hope you enjoy this episode. As always, it’s been fun hanging out with you. I will see you same place, same time where I help you become wealthy AF.
Important Links
- @KendraPerryInc – Instagram
- @KendraPerryInc – Facebook
- Health Coach Accelerator
- FG Funnels
- ConvertKit
