How To Know When To Start Running Ads - No Fluff

Welcome to the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast. I'm your host, Sam DiNicola, owner of the digital marketing agency, Sam DiNicola Digital, and coach for entrepreneurs looking to start and grow their own small businesses. This podcast is for anyone who wants to market their business effectively, without huge budgets, massive teams, or burnout and overwhelm. I'll be cutting through all the noise to give you straightforward and actionable tips so you can apply my knowledge and expertise in your small business. I truly believe that anyone can start and grow a business. So if you're ready to set aside the excuses and the fear, and to start making the moves you need to be able to successfully promote your small business.

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Today we're going to talk about how to know when it's the right time to start running digital ads for your business. And I think this is something that is on a lot of people's minds this time of year when you're looking at how are you going to grow your revenue and scale your revenue next year? Or if you are getting towards the end of the year, and you aren't hitting your revenue goals and you're trying to figure out how can we get to those goals? How can we bring in more revenue? How can we be scaling? And I think being super clear on how you should start running ads, when is the right time to start running ads is something that a lot of business owners struggle with, and usually leads them to run ads in a really half assed way that gives them crappy results. And then they get a bad taste in their mouth about running ads. And it's like you get stuck in this vicious circle, that you're now telling yourself the story that ads don't work for my business because we've tried to run ads in the past and they didn't work. But the reality is, you may not have been ready to run ads, you may not have had these things in place before starting to run your ads. The other thing is, is if you were trying to run your ads on your own, or if you were trying to pay bottom of the barrel prices, to have your VA run your ads for you, those aren't necessarily going to get the results that you really want from your spend, it's not going to get you the ROI you're looking for.

So here's how to know when is the right time to start running ads in your business.

The first thing to know is knowing where your ideal customer is spending their time. And the reason that this is really important to get clear on is because there are so many places that you can run digital ads. Obviously, Facebook and Instagram. And so many people are running ads on there. But is Google the right place to run ads? Should you be running ads on TikTok or Snapchat, or Pinterest? There are so many different places that you can put ad spend behind now. And so knowing where your ideal customer is spending their time online is really important to decide on where you should put that ad spend whenever you feel it is the right time to start running ads.

The other point is knowing how your ideal customer makes a purchase decision. What I mean is knowing how your customer, your potential customer needs to feel before they're making a purchase decision. Knowing how they gather information in order to make that purchase decision. Do they need to talk to anyone before they're deciding to make that purchase? All of those things are really important to know. Because that is going to dictate to you the ad strategy that's going to work for you. And so let me give you an example of this. If you are selling coaching or a course or any sort of education based content or anything like that, your customer might need more information from you, might need more content from you, they might need to do some research before they're ready to decide if they want to make a purchase. And if they want that purchase to be made to you, right if they want to give you their money. And so that is something that's really important. And this has to do with both price point and the type of product or service you're selling. So the purchase decision process, and the amount of information someone needs, before they're ready to buy a $7 product, it's gonna be really different than what someone needs before they buy a $3,000 product, right. So knowing what they need to find out from you, what information they need, what sort of information gathering process they're going through, is going to be super important for you to know, because that's going to show you, okay, how warm do I need to get this potential customer? How warm do they need to be to my product or service to me to my business before they're going to be ready to make that purchase decision. And what's really important about knowing that is you're going to start to know timelines there, you're going to start to know how long it's going to take for someone to find out that you even exist until they're ready to purchase. And it's also going to help you know how many touch points you need before that customer is ready to make a purchase. Because once you know that, you might know “Okay, great. So we need to target this cold audience for our ads with some sort of informational product”, it might even need to be a freebie, right? So you're going to serve an ad to that cold audience that's promoting your freebie. And that's going to tell them who you are, who you're about. And it's going to start to build trust, and it's going to help them to get that information they require in order to start moving towards that purchase decision. And then you might see, “Okay, great. Now what needs to happen is, I might need to retarget that person to start to make them into a warmer audience with lower ticket items with that $7 digital product”. And then I might retarget them with that higher level of service or coaching package, or you know that higher level product. That might need to be the route that your ads need to take, the strategy you need for your ads versus just trying to run ads to a cold audience for your $3,000 product right like that might not be how your ideal customer makes that purchase decision. They might need more time, they might not need more time, right? It might be like a Peloton? The purchase decision around a Peloton might be a much faster purchase timeline. It might not take me as much time I might not need as much information before I decide if I want to purchase that Peloton or not purchase that Peloton, right? Even though that's a high ticket product. It might just be okay. Do I want this, Yes or no? Right? You might not need more information. I might need more feeling I might need more value, right? Being able to safely work out at home on my own schedule. And, you know, with instructors that make me feel really good. With belts on I have a belt on just got one if you can tell. So I know a lot about this. But they might not need more information, they might need more of that feeling, right? But they might not need that many touch points. So these are all things that are really important for you to start to understand before you're going to be able to know if it's the right time to start running ads, because it's going to help you to not have unrealistic expectations for your ads. It's going to help you to not sit here and say, well, I've spent $100 on ads that are running to a cold audience promoting my $3,000 product and they've been running for two whole weeks. Why haven't they converted yet? That might be an unrealistic budget. That might be you targeting ads to a cold audience when you need to be targeting to a warm audience. That might be not giving them enough touch points with you before you're trying to convert them. There's a lot of things that go into that. So getting familiar on those things are starting to get are familiar on those things is really important before you start running ads, and then you're going to be able to test those things with your ads. But having base knowledge and base understanding around how your customer makes that purchase decision is really, really important.

So the next item that you're going to need to know, before you you're positive and confident in now is the right time to start running ads is going to be, again, how long it takes you to build trust with that new customer. How many touch points, right? And this is going a level deeper than that? How do they make that purchase decision? Right? How long do they need to know about me how many times they need to see me or hear from me, or learn about something, read something from me, before they feel that I am trustworthy. And before they feel confident that whatever product or service that I sell them is going to be valuable for them is going to get them that transformation that they want to have. And that's really important. And so many small business owners have no freaking clue how long this takes, right? And so they're promoting themselves even organically on Instagram posting consistently on Instagram for 30 days. And they're wondering, why am I not getting leads? Why am I not getting results from Instagram? But it's because they don't know? Oh, wow, newsflash, your potential customers actually need 60 days or 90 days to get to know you to start to build that trust in it in order to be able to really easily and confidently purchase from you. But if you don't know how long that is, how the hell are you supposed to know how long you're supposed to stick with that strategy for it to work. And this goes back to having an unrealistic expectation about how long ads need to run, before they start converting for you, right? Having an unrealistic expectation about how many touch points and how many times someone needs to see your ad before they click on that ad. And before they convert. And so getting to start to know that now and pay attention to that now is only going to be able to help you to know, are my ads actually working? Or are they not working? Because I haven't given them enough time to live and breathe, right? This is so so important to know about your customers. And if you're not already tracking how long you're doing things, if you're not already tracking those metrics, if you're not asking leads, how they discovered you and trying to figure out how long they've kind of been in your orbit consuming your content and getting to know you that you're never going to be able to answer that question.

So the next item is know what content connects with your ideal customer. And the reason that this is really, really important to know, is because it's going to guide you, and help indicate to you what type of content is going to be the most successful for your ads. So if you know, for your audience, listing out really actionable tips for them to do in your content, if you know that they go freakin bananas for that shit, then think about how can I present that in the form of an ad and lead them to that thing that I want them to purchase, that product or that service that I want them to purchase? So if you're running ads, for your course for your online course and your audience connects really well anytime you do content around that thing. Here's how to implement this thing. And it's kind of like a high level version of the course. Right? It’s a small snippet of the course it's not the full course. But it's a little bit of actionable piece of information that they can actually implement now in their business and understand now in their business, even without purchasing the course. If sharing that content organically, it does really, really well and it performs well with your audience. Think about Okay, in my copy in my graphics in my video for my ads, how can I pull that through into those things? And basically, you're just using your organic content to confirm what works, confirm what your audience likes and doesn't like before you put budget behind it, before you start to spend money on it. That's all that is, but so many people view creating their copy and creating their graphics and images and videos for ads as a completely different thing as a completely different strategy as, okay, I'm sitting down in writing and Instagram feed post, okay, I'm sitting down and recording an IGTV. And that's just going to mean that when you're testing what ads are performing well, what ads aren't performing well, you're just pulling from a batch of content that you know, has already performed well, organically. It doesn't have to be the same content, but it should inform that ad content strategy.

Another item that you really need to know in order to know when it's the right time to start running ads is when your organic strategies are working. And you're ready to scale beyond what you or your team can do. So if you're at a point where that those organic strategies are working, your organic lead generation is working, your content is working, you're getting leads coming in, you're making sales, you're adding people to your waitlist. But if you were ready to scale and get more leads coming in, sign more clients, get more people on your waitlist, but you're going to tap out on the time and bandwidth you have or your team has, in order to continue scaling up those organic strategies, that's the time where you need to think about if ads are going to be the solution for us to continue to scale. Right? You cannot spend your way out of a shitty strategy, you cannot run ads that are successful and convert well on top of something that doesn't perform organically. You can spend so much money and yet it might convert, but it's not going to spend your way out of that shitty strategy. And this is what is so so important that a lot of small business owners think running ads is just like the magic bullet, right? Nothing else is working. So we'll just put money behind it, we'll just put ad budget behind it. There's so much more that goes into it that you need to make sure is working. And then you put the budget behind it. And that is what makes it successful. Right? If your organic strategies and your content marketing are getting people to the table, and you're not able to convert them. Why do you think ads are going to be able to convert them better? You need to look at where are they dropping off. Where are we losing that conversion Is it something about the website? Is it something about us making it too difficult for them to buy from us, right? Is it too difficult for them to pay us is there anything in that process that needs to be improved, that needs to be tightened up, because that process is still going to happen even after ads, right? Ads show your content to more people. And they show it to them more often in a way that you're more in control with, you're more in control of it because you put budget behind it. But your ads are not in charge of taking your payment, right, your ads are not in charge of having that form get filled out. So if you're running ads, to a website, or to a landing page that sucks, I guarantee your ads aren't going to perform or convert for you as well as you want them to. Because you need to get that landing page or your website tightened up and improved so that those conversions can happen. And this is probably the most important thing, if you're thinking about running ads, but your organic strategies aren't working for you. You probably need to improve other things in your purchase journey before you start putting that budget behind ads. And this is where people start running ads before they have this tightened up. And then they don't convert. And they just say, well, ads don't work for us. We don't see any value from them. They weren't converting for us. They weren't converting any more than our organic strategies ever did. So we don't run ads for our business because they don't work. Right. That's bullshit ad work for anyone. If you know that your back end, if you know that after that ad is running to that page or that form or any or whatever. If you know that well after that point. It is working everything after that point is working. I guarantee you can run ads for your business, any business can benefit from running ads, if they have these other things in place first.

So if you're wondering if now is the right time to start running ads or if you've run ads in the past, and they haven't worked for me for you, and you don't really know why. And you're reluctant to start running ads again, reach out to me, and I can get a little bit more information from you. And then we can see a light, I'll tell you straight up, right, no, no fluff, if it is the right time to start running ads in your business, it might be a no, I might be like, No, you need to get this, this and this locked in, you're not ready to start running ads. But there might be some really simple things and improvements you can do in order in order to be able to start running ads for your business and start putting your sales on autopilot. So if you have questions around that, you can book a free discovery call through the contact page. Or if you have other questions, come find me on Instagram here and we can definitely chat there. I will be happy to answer any questions that you have. And if you found this episode beneficial, make sure that you subscribe and leave a review. Also, I am giving away a free coaching call once per month to some lucky person, some lucky lovely person that leaves a review for this podcast. So if you like this podcast, make sure you subscribe, leave a review and get a chance to get a free coaching call for your small business.