What You Need to Know Before Running Facebook Ads

Dispelling the Myths Around Facebook Ads –

Do They Work? How Do They Work?

and Can We See an ROI On Facebook and Instagram Ads if We Do Them Ourselves?

About Jaymie Tarshis

Jaymie helps coaches, course creators, and consultants grow and scale their business by teaching them how to automate their lead generation and sales using the power of Facebook and Instagram ads. Her campaigns have generated hundreds of thousands of leads in a variety of industries and her strategies have helped clients scale their business to 7 figures in revenue in less than 18 months.

Here is the link to episode 105 about Facebook ads with Jennifer Spivak. The two episodes offer different perspectives on using Facebook ads for your business.

Return on Investment for Facebook and Instagram Ads

Can we run our own Facebook ads and see an ROI? Jaymie says yes, absolutely! But it is important to have support and really learn how to run them before expecting an ROI.

How To Use Facebook and Instagram Ads For Growing Our Email Marketing Lists

There are two main strategies that Jaymie uses to drive traffic to email marketing lists.

Using a Freebie – give free value or a free gift that showcases your talents and expertise and solves a pain point for your customer. You want to offer a solution to their pain point. After you have someone sign up for the freebie, you can offer a low-ticket item, something between $7 and $37. About 1% to 10% of your audience who opts into the freebie will purchase the low-ticket item and this is how you cover your ad cost.
Run ads to a low-ticket offer – these are also known as self-liquidating or slow funnel offers. These ads go to cold traffic, but it is so juicy and they want it that they will readily pay $7 to $37 for it. When you run an ad for a low ticket item, you often don’t make money, but may break even. This isn’t about making money, but building your email list. This strategy brings people in who are immediately buying from you and will immediately see how good your content is and be excited to take the next step to work with you.

If you have a good enough offer, you can sell to cold leads. If people need the solution, they will buy it.

Three Main Things You have to Nail to Make Facebook and Instagram Ads Work

Offer – know the pain point to offer the right thing
Audience – know the audience and know what their pain point is
Messaging – messaging targets the right audience and gives them clarity on the pain point you can solve for them

Learn as much about your audience as possible. What are their wants and needs? And what are they struggling with? If you are clear on what your audience needs, you can make ads work for you.

What Are the Secrets to Successful Facebook and Instagram Ads?

Targeting – knowing your audience
Ad Copy – the words you use around the ad. The copy is what convinces people that they need it and gets them to click.
Creative – image or video – the visual for your ad, the attention-getter. Jaymie likes to use bright colors to grab attention. The goal is to get your ideal customer to stop the scroll and click. You may need to use brighter colors than you normally would for your brand or bigger font than usual to grab attention. Do something at the beginning of your videos to grab attention. Jump out in the frame, use a big bold test, say “stop and watch”, and wave. For still images, use images of yourself. Our eyes are drawn to people, so use a photo of yourself. It will almost always perform better. Put a headline on the photo to grab attention and let people know what your ad is for.

Robyn emphasized you have to have a marriage between visuals and words. If your ad grabs attention, it will work.

The Back End Tips and Tricks for Facebook and Instagram Ads – the Key Components to Setting Up Ads

The setup piece is actually the easiest piece. You just need the step-by-step. Jaymie doesn’t use 90% of the buttons Facebook offers. If you keep it simple, your ads will perform better.

There are three parts to your ad campaign.

The first thing you are asked when you go to set up an ad campaign is what is your objective for the ad? When you run an ad you have three levels, the campaign, the ad set, and the ad. The campaign is the overarching structure. Your campaign is your goal. Facebook wants to know your goal or objective for the ad. When they know your goal, they will know what people to put your ad in front of.

The key if you want sales or leads, is to use the conversion objective. You have to have a Facebook Pixel set up for the conversion objective. If you don’t choose conversion, you won’t get clicks, and you might get a lot of traffic, but the traffic won’t convert and you won’t get email subscribers.

From the campaign, you go to your ad set. This is your targeting, placement, and conversion event, do you want a lead or a purchase? Where do you want your ad to run, Facebook, Instagram, or stories?

Then you upload your visuals and copy.

If you cover all of this basis, your ads should work.

When you boost your post, Facebook uses the engagement objective, and that is why you don’t see results or click-throughs.

What Do You Look For to Determine if Your Ads are Working for You?

Be very specific with your goal for the ads. Do you want email subscribers, if yes, how many subscribers? Or, do you want sales, to be very specific on the amount? Once you figure that out, reverse engineer your matrix.

You want to get a cost per lead of somewhere between $1 to $5 range if doing a downloadable PDF or checklist, something that is a quick easy thing. If you are running an ad for a webinar or something more of a time ask, you can expect your cost per lead to be between $3 and $10. If you are not reaching this cost per lead, you can look at secondary metrics, what is your ad click-through rate? This tells you if your ad is working. You generally want to see a 1% click-through rate for ads to cold audiences. If you are below the 1% mark, you can tweak your visuals or copy.

Most of the time you are targeting cold leads when running Facebook and Instagram ads. This is how you continue growing your audience.

The last metric to look at if you have a 1% click-through rate, is what your landing page is doing. You should have at least 30% of people getting to that page leaving their name and email. If not, then is it taking people too long to get to the box to put their email into, is there a disconnect in the copy from the ad to the landing page, the landing page, and the ad should be very congruent?

What is the Average Cost Per Lead?

This will be a projection. If you want a hundred leads per month and your cost per lead is between $1 and $5, say $3, then you’ll spend $300 per month. You have to know the goal of running ads to determine this estimate. You can take this one step further. How many course sales do I want and how many leads do I need to get that number of sales? We know that 3 to 5 percent of our list will convert. So if you want 10 sales, how many leads do you need? You can calculate this in advance.

Is There a Time to Boost a Post

Jaymie’s boost policy is this. There are only two times when she will boost a post. If you put out a post and it is doing very well, getting a ton of saves, then boost that post and get it out to more people. Or, boost an existing post to your warm audience. You are only getting a small number of people to see your posts, so if you see one doing really well, make sure that everyone in your audience will see it.

You can also boost a post that is doing well to more of a cold audience to get more followers. This is something you would only do if you wanted more followers, but Jaymie really only recommends boosting posts to stay front of mind.

Jaymie doesn’t recommend spending a lot of money on boosting posts, you can get results by spending a little if the content is really good.