When should you run them?

How do you know they are the right choice?

Do you outsource them?

These are all questions that we get not only from coaching clients who are growing their businesses, but also ad management clients in my digital marketing agency.

And the answer is: it's different for every business, every business has a different lead generation strategy, every business is bringing in new customers in a slightly different way. There's not a formula for ads. There's a lot of questions that go into this, and that's totally okay. But the key thing that I really really stress to anyone who ever asked me about ads is you cannot advertise your way out of a shitty strategy.

I think this is something that some people are surprised to hear me say, because we offer ad management in the agency. But the truth is, if you are running ads and you're putting budget behind ads, and everything else about your strategy, everything else about your purchase funnel is crap — those ads are not going to be as successful as they should be. They're not going to perform as they should for you.

For example, if you're running ads to a website that is getting you mostly mobile traffic, and your site isn't mobile optimized. That's a big problem. If you're running ads from social media, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and you have no social media presence whatsoever, those ads aren't going to be as impactful. If you are running ads to get leads and they fill out a form on Facebook for you, and you're never getting back to them. That's a problem. If you're running Google ads to a website that doesn't give anybody information about how they can buy from you. That's a problem.

These are all issues that you want to make sure you look at and you consider when you're making the decision whether or not right now the right time to run ads, because ads can work for pretty much any business. I truly truly believe that, but you do need to get your ducks in a row to a certain extent.

Can ads not work at all if you have these issues? No, but they're going to cost more money. You're going to have to run more ads, have more people seeing your ads, more people clicking on your ads to get the desired result versus if you're making those improvements. You can make the cost of your ads and the ROI, that you're seeing cost less for better results, and that's why it's so important.

So when you're thinking about whether now is the right time to be running ads for your business — Think about your audience and how you can reach them where you're reaching them. And if you are reaching them via ads, what would that purchase journey look like?

So, ads are fantastic for people with group programs, memberships, courses, or digital products. We really look at how big is your existing audience and whether we can leverage your existing audience on social media or your existing customer base or your existing email list for our ads. Can we do that by retargeting those people or creating lookalike audiences based on those people? And if I'm speaking gibberish to you right now you don't understand that this that's totally okay, I'm going to dig in a little bit more into some common terms that you hear of with ads in a different post.

But the key is to look at how can I leverage what I have already? If you don't already have the facebook pixel installed on your website, stop listening right now and go get it onto your website. That is so key even if you're not sure if you want to start ad advertising ever. If you're not sure if right now is the right time, it doesn't matter — get that facebook pixel onto your website immediately because that's another way that you can leverage your existing audience by leveraging the users who are already coming to your website. And there's a few different ways that we can do this, again by either retargeting those people - so those are the ads that you see following you around the internet, or you can build a lookalike audience off of those people which means, you see these people ,Facebook, and I know you know everything about them, Facebook. I want you to serve my ads to people who are similar to those people. This can be a really powerful way to get your ads converting better without having to spend as much money.

Now you might say, “Well, I'm starting a new business and I don't really have a super established social media presence. I don't have a big email list. I don't have a lot of website traffic.” That's okay. But think about what you want to get from ads and what your overall goal is for ads, what you might need to do is run some ads that get you building awareness with that audience. So that might be running an ad to a freebie that they can get. So you can show them, “Oh hey here's some value for you” or running an ad to some sort of free video training. This is how you build trust with them and get them to know you, and they're seeing the value that you're providing so that then when you retarget them with an ad for your paid product or service, they're like, “Oh, I remember her video training was so good!”, and they’re so much more likely to click on it and so much more likely to buy, because you've primed the pump, they're warmer already, they know you, they've seen value from you. They're much more likely to buy versus serving an ad to a cold audience.

And that's where getting super clear on your goals for ads and your budget for ads is really important because if you don't have a super established audience, that doesn't mean you can't run ads, that doesn't mean they're not going to work for you, but it's going to take a little bit longer.

So when we're working with clients that don't really have an established audience and we need to run some of those ads to build awareness, you're going to need to run those for a month or two before you can start leveraging that new audience that now you've built through those ads.

If you have a really tight budget of $300 a month and you're needing to build awareness - that means that you might need to run those awareness ads for a three or four months before you get a large enough audience to be able to leverage that audience into sales. If you have a higher budget, you might be able to shorten that timeline, one month or two months. This also has to do with how specific your audience is, if you're in a super niche market that's great for ads because we know exactly who we're targeting, but it might take a little bit longer to get those ads seen by that really specific subset of people, versus if you're casting a wider net. You can do that in a shorter time span. So these are all things to consider. It's not just asking yourself, should I start running ads right now.? It's what kind of budget do I have around this, what kind of turn around do I want to see from the ROI from my ads?

We do not work with clients who will not commit to at least 90 days of ads, because ads really act as a snowball. And they gain momentum, and they gain social proof and they will perform better and better and better for you. Yes, you're making tweaks, yes you're optimizing them, yes you're improving them, but having them run is super important.

We don't ever want a client to not see the results that they're looking for after two or three weeks, and pull the plug.

At that point, you might as well have not run any ads at all. So give yourself at least a 90 day span. Think about what you're really wanting look and really ask yourself those questions when you're trying to decide if now is the right time to start running ads.