Show Notes

Paid ads, or Boosted posts? It can definitely be confusing, especially if you are DIY’ing your marketing strategy. In todays episode, I’m walking you through the difference between paid and boosted ads, and offering suggestions on how to make your DIY marketing work for you.

Spoiler: It’s a little more than pushing a few buttons.

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Hey there. Thanks for listening and welcome to the marketing matchmaker podcast. If you're looking to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact all while staying true to who you are and the people you serve. This is the show for you. I'm Jennifer Tamborski, digital marketing strategists, fractional CMO, and founder of Virtual Marketing Experts. My team and I work with six and seven figure coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs who are tired of playing the guru game of one size fits all marketing. They're ready to create a business and marketing strategy that actually builds relationships with their ideal clients creates massive shifts in their business and rapidly increases their revenue. As your marketing matchmaker, I'm going to help you find the perfect marketing match for you. This show will teach you how to reach your ideal client, connect with your audience, build that perfect relationship and generate more revenue. All through a process I like to call dating your ideal client. Now let's go have some fun!

Hey there, welcome back to the Marketing Matchmaker. I talk about paid traffic a lot to my clients and my prospective clients and my audience in general, because they work. And I often think people forget just how powerful ads can be in your business, especially when they're trying to DIY ads. They can seem really complicated and confusing and overwhelming for people.

However, reality is, if they're done right, you can create a massive change in your business using paid ads. And the one thing you want to avoid is spending money on ads uselessly. So in order to make ads effective for you and your business, you really want to have a strategic plan behind it. I talked about strategic plans in a lot of our episodes over and over again, because people often forget to create one, and to implement it, and to follow it.

Which means that they aren't getting the most bang for their buck when it comes to their overall marketing, especially if they're running paid ads. I know in a previous episode, we talked about some of the things that you needed to have in place before you started running, paid ads. Just a quick overview, make sure that you have some kind of funnel to send them to, make sure you have a call to action, make sure you know who your ideal client is, and that you are ready to invest in order to scale your business.

Recently, I was chatting with a potential client. She is amazing and has an amazing product that she well, service, that she has really helped her clients with. And while we were talking, I was asking her about what she'd done previously. She said that she had tried running ads before and just didn't get any benefit from it. She didn't get an ROI. And so she really didn't think that running ads were for her. So of course, I start down asking questions, because there are really specific questions that you should ask. And you can see really quickly, what happened with her ads.

My first question was, how did you run your ads? Did you do it yourself? Or did you hire someone help you? Her response, I did them myself. Now given that she's not a marketer, and doesn't spend all of her time in social media and in paid traffic in general. That's Mistake number one. Unless you're ready and willing to invest in learning how ads work, you are going to end up wasting money by trying to DIY it. Seriously, you would never expect to be able to file your own taxes without some kind of training behind you. And yet, so many people think that running ads is just a push of a few buttons. So they go ahead and they push those buttons. And then when it doesn't work, they assume it's because of the platform, not because they didn't really understand what it was they were doing.

They make the assumption that paid ads just doesn't work for them or for their target market.

After having audited her account at after having audited her account, I understood what it was. That was the problem. And the reality is like half after having been audited by the IRS because I had my taxes done by someone who didn't quite know how to file taxes for a growing business, I would never try to do my taxes myself, nor would I hire anyone that wasn't a certified CPA to do them.

So the whole point of that little rabbit hole is just to remind you unless you're ready and willing to do some serious training on how to run paid ads, and then after the training, spend some time in your ads manager actually actively paying attention to the ads and making sure they're working. I would highly suggest hiring someone that knows what they're doing. So often coaches especially when they first get started start running ads without any kind of idea. of what they're doing, and they end up wasting money.

Back to my potential client. My next question to her was, did you put? Did you boost your post? Or did you run an ad? Her response?

Um, what's the difference?

That my friend is Mistake number two. And this is a really big one. A lot of times people simply boost a post because they don't understand that there is a difference, a huge difference in the results you get from boosting a post versus running an ad. It comes down to the data and how the ads are set up.

The difference between a boost and an ad is that with a boost, you're just sending that message out to the masses, you're not targeting directly, you're promoting your post. And oftentimes, you may not have a post that should be promoted. When ads, with the ads manager running a Facebook ad, it really tells you a whole lot more than how many clicks or impressions you got. Clicks and impressions are great if you have a call to action for them to do something with. So if you're boosting a post, and I've seen this happen before, where it's simply a message from you, or quote from you, or something like that, it's not going to get the return on the ad spend that you think you're going to get by doing that.

So with ads, you can see the exact dollar for dollar return, as well as the outcome your business has from the ads themselves. And that's not something that you're going to get from a boosted post, you also have the ability to target much more effectively. And that is the key, or one of the keys, to effectively running ads, knowing your target and being able to target them on Facebook or LinkedIn, or Instagram, or wherever you're running ads. Being able to target your audience is the key.

That's one of the things I love so much about Facebook ads is well, I'm gonna be honest. I love Facebook ads over pretty much other any other ad platform. That being said, they're all very valid. Facebook has just been around for a really long time and allows you a whole lot more flexibility and really diving into that target market.

Facebook ads are a fantastic way to know exactly what your return on investment was. If they're set up correctly, you can learn a lot about your ads such as how much you spent, yes, you can put a limit on your boost where you only spend $50, and you don't know how much you're return would need to be. Sometimes, depending on what kind of lead or what type of conversion you're looking for, you're not sure about what that is. And you can find that out by running actual ads as opposed to a boosted post.

You also get to know how many emails you got from those. How many sales came from these ads, and just so much more information about your audience, how much does it cost to put your ad in front of somebody. All of that information you will get from an ad versus a boosted post. Ultimately, whatever your goal is, there is a way to measure what that return is for your business. Whether that return on ad spend, your exact dollar for dollar return. Or maybe like I mentioned earlier, it's your return based on how many email subscribers joined your business.

One of the things that is most beneficial about ads versus boosted post is the fact that with ads, you can have a strategic plan in place. You're not just trying one audience. You're not just trying one ad copy or one image. You get to see from that data, what's working and what's not in your audience. You can try multiple versions of your message so your message gets sent out to multiple audiences. You can also try different images versus videos versus a static graphic versus copy, all of those things really tell you a lot about what your audience is going to engage with. An important thing to keep in mind is, it's not just about seeing a return on your paid social media advertising, it's about getting the best return possible.

If you weren't trying out multiple different versions of your ads, you're missing out on an opportunity that one of the things that you try will work better from then another. And that's something that you can't get from a boosted post. You really can't figure out what is bringing in the results, and which ones what needs to be tweaked. And how that coincides with your overall strategy.

So if you're boosting posts, I encourage you to hit pause and hold off unless you have a plan in place that coincides with your Facebook ads as part of your comprehensive marketing strategy.

Here's an example. So that potential client I was telling you about earlier, we decided her ad account, we decided to get her ad account set up. So getting all set up in business manager and doing all of those things creating a strategic plan to run ads to her target audience. Which means for her, we're running her ads to a webinar, which leads to a discover call where she gets to sell them their partner product service or solution. This sets up the opportunity to start that strategic plan. It's about building her email list, creating a return path for our audience to purchase. And by using ads and each step of our funnel, we're able to measure what is effectively working, and where we have opportunities to improve.

That is what the power of ads can give you. It can really help you to determine if your marketing message is hitting your audience in a really short period of time. You can try three headlines, or three messages or three images, or a combination thereof. And by looking in the ads manager, you can see which one is actually the most effective, which allows you then to streamline that and make that ad, the one that brings in all the leads, which allows you to then start decreasing your cost per lead or your cost per conversion are your cost per sale.

In the end, my suggestion to you is one, if you're going to DIY your ads, make sure you find a really good course that teaches you how to do that. And number two, if you're going to DIY your ads, make sure you're actually running ads, and not just boosting the post.

Boosting the post is not going to give you the data that you want in order to make sure that your marketing is successful. Running paid ads can help you to grow your business, increase your income and scale your impact when they're done right.

Thank You for listening to the Marketing Matchmaker podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear your feedback. Please head over to iTunes and leave a review so we can hear from you. And if you are a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact connect with me at yourmarketingmatchmaker.com. I look forward to hearing from you.