00:00:01 You are listening to the Scaling to Freedom podcast and if you are an online coach or course creator, you are in the right place. I’m your host, Christina Bernhard. I’m an Ads agency owner that gets an inside look every day on what’s working and what doesn’t in the online coaching space. I’m here to share with you what we see works in our agency, as well as what we see happening and changing in the industry. Stay tuned to up level your coaching business to have the freedom you want. Let’s get started.

00:00:31 Welcome to episode 190. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about what we’re doing this year in 2023 and how we are getting a return on our clients ads. And the reason that I wanted to talk about this is because so much has changed, which most people are aware of, but it’s like, what has changed in what ways? And also what are we even doing about it. So a lot of people know about the iOS updates, how that has impacted things a couple of years ago, but a lot has even changed since then.

00:01:03 There are different things with audiences and I’ve talked about a lot of that on this podcast. So I’m going to go over what we’re doing in the agency, what we’ve been doing this year, what we’re going to continue to do, and we make a million different shifts all the time, but these are the biggest things. So things are changing every day, every week, every month, for sure. Seasonally, the market is changing, all kinds of things are changing. That’s one of the reasons why I love doing ads and really just being in marketing at all, because everything is so different all of the time and it does require you to be really on top of things.

00:01:40 And I like a fast paced environment and so I love this about it. But I also understand that this could be a downfall for a lot of people if you aren’t super into it, if you’re not geeking out over these things, it can actually be really frustrating and it can have some big impacts on a business and on revenue. So I will go over these main things because again, there are tons, but ads are definitely, absolutely still working. There’s a lot of attention still on social media. I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast as well.

00:02:13 Still having these active users, you don’t have to worry about ads like not working. I even recently did an episode of whenever someone says that ads aren’t working, what it might actually be. So go ahead and check out those previous episodes about that. But here today, we’re going to be talking about the actual things that you can do. So I’m going to give you five specific steps on what you can do that might be different this year or the last couple of years versus before.

00:02:41 So the very first thing is I’m going to address one of the biggest changes is to fix your tracking. So that’s going to be the first step. We need to at least be comfortable and a little bit more confident in our data. Now you’re not going to be able to get perfect data. It’s not going to be 100% perfect, but we have lost visibility over the years and it has gotten better. But if you are still relying 100% on your pixel for data, you’re definitely missing out. There’s going to be a gap there that’s larger than it needs to be. And so you want to update your tracking. But at minimum, before I even go into that, you want to make sure that it’s set up properly. So there is a way that you can test your events in your Events Manager.

00:03:27 And you want to always be testing your tracking. And by testing I mean going to the test events and going to your website and you can actually pretend purchase something or opt in or register on your opt in page or sales page and see in Events Manager which events are popping up. That’s really important to do and you don’t want to just do it. We do it before every campaign, but we also do it every now and then as well because things break. And even if it’s set up properly to begin with, sometimes things like a link changes or script gets lost, things like that.

00:04:05 We want to make sure that it’s continuing to work and nothing has changed. So always test that. Set that up. At minimum. If you are struggling with that, definitely hire someone. Like make sure that this is done properly. Because we also want to make sure that Facebook is getting the right data as well. It’s not just for our visibility because we can manually track some of these things like look at how much you’re spending and then look at your email marketing service or whatever and see how many leads have come through, do your own math, that sort of thing. We don’t want to just do that. I think gathering manual data, it can still be really helpful.

00:04:42 But we want Facebook to also have that data because the algorithm is going to be using it right? So if this one person does opt in or purchase, facebook will take the data points of that particular person and match them with other people that are just like that person and send the ad to those people and so on and so forth. So the algorithm is going to get more and more sophisticated and smarter the longer the ad runs. But it needs that data to be able to do that. It needs to know who is actually opting in or purchasing. So with that we also want to make sure that you are installing Conversions API. So we always use Conversions API and what that is, it’s server side tracking. If you’re confused by that. There are some videos, podcasts, things like that, that kind of break this down if you care to understand it. But basically on a basic level, it’s where servers are talking back to each other.

00:05:31 So it’s where, let’s say if you use Kajabi, then if this is set up properly, then what Kajabi will do is when someone opts in onto one of your Kajabi pages or forms, Kajabi will send a lead event back to Facebook and tell Facebook, hey, so and so just opted in. And that’s just one way to have that tracking and it’s more secure. It’s not based on the pixel, so you don’t have to worry about the different filters and things like that. So that is probably the best solution that we have right now as far as getting information back to Facebook is having the servers communicate with each other. So there are some software solutions that you can install and purchase that will do this for you.

00:06:20 And one of them is Hyros. That’s what we use in the agency the most. And then there’s also Wicked Reports is a common one that I see. There are tons of them, like so many, I’ve done a lot of research on different tools and I do them every now and then just to see if something better comes along. But so far those are the two main ones that I know people who have used them. I know people who use wicked reports. But also Hyros, we use a lot in the agency. I love Hyros. So I’m a big Hyros fan. But again, there are others. Hyros can be on the pricier side, depending on what your budget is, but it’s pretty good. I really like it. So that’s the first thing is fix your tracking. The second thing is, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, but up your marketing game. So that’s the second thing.

00:07:15 Because there used to be a time where you could get away with really weak messaging on the ad platforms. You would just put out an ad, even if it was a sh**** ad, and it just performed really well. That’s how it was. Whenever I started ads in 2014, they just worked. They were really cheap. There wasn’t a lot of competition. Also webinars and things like that were still kind of up and only I only was aware of the bigger people like the Amy Porterfield and things like that, doing a lot of webinars and it wasn’t so crowded. Whereas now there’s just like everyone has a webinar, but it doesn’t mean that webinars are like it’s too saturated or they don’t work. That’s absolutely not true. I can tell you that doing this for a living, that they absolutely do work.

00:08:01 But you do have to be more dialed in with the messaging. It has to be super clear. You just can’t get away with really weak marketing, honestly. And so you want to focus a lot more on your creatives. There’s a lot of focus with ads on the actual ad strategy which is important, but you don’t want to just focus on that and then put together just some random copy and a graphic or a photo of you and just see how it does.

00:08:28 You really want to be intentional and spend a lot of time on the creatives or hire it out, get them to be professionally done that way they’re really good. That’s how the ad is going to perform the best now. So that’s the second thing is up the messaging dial that in, do the market research you need to do, do the testing you need to do on that messaging and really have that very strong. This has been a trend for a while, so this isn’t anything specifically new but it’s just that every year it becomes more and more important. So you definitely want to go back to the basics, go back to the foundation of marketing, understand that and really have that reflected in your ad.

00:09:10 Copy your creatives that you’re using, no matter the media. So make sure that the creatives are very strong. The third trend or shift that we’ve made over the past couple years is more broader targeting. So it used to be where we would try to get as niche as possible and with tracking there were no privacy issues or no one opting out of tracking. So Facebook had a lot of clear data on people’s behavior and they still have a lot of that data but just not as much as before.

00:09:41 So it is actually we’re finding that broader targeting does really work in a lot of scenarios now with as far as how broad, it depends on too many variables. So you have to be careful too when you’re hearing advice on how broad. If you have a lower ticket ecommerce product that’s going to be such a different strategy than a coach with a high ticket mastermind or it’s going to be just very different. So you have to make sure that you get custom advice for you and your budget. Budget plays a big role too in how big you want that audience to be and also just custom to your goals and what exactly you are promoting on ads.

00:10:22 So I do want to preface with that but we’re basically letting the algorithm find the audience and we’re utilizing the strong creative to do that as well. So the creatives support the algorithm in finding that audience. So having that broader targeting used to be really specific, now the algorithm just needs more room to find that. So some examples of this broader targeting is grouping different interests together so you can take lots of different interests and group them together. I do like to still have the interests be similar to each other when you’re bundling those, but before we used to do more of an umbrella interest and then we would maybe have multiple layers, and I still use layers, but in a much different way.

00:11:11 So they’re just more broad, right? They’re just bigger. And then you can also try things with higher percentages of the lookalike. So whenever you create a lookalike, you can choose the percentage that you want of how alike this source audience is to the audience that Facebook makes from that source audience. And so it used to always just be like 1%, unless it was a really tiny audience and you needed the higher percentages to create a good cold audience. So if it was like DMs or something like that as your source, then people who have DM’d you, that’s going to be a smaller audience. So you might need a higher percentage. But now we’re using higher percentages for a lot of other source audiences that are decent sizes already. So you can try that again. These are all things that you have to test.

00:11:57 There’s no standard strategy that always works 100% of the time. It can even be the same campaign but a different year. So everything is always needing testing. So just understand that and then also just going more broad with just larger interests. So even if it’s a single interest, it’s perfectly okay to choose those interests that just have 100 million people or something and just test it out and see if it works again. Get some custom advice for your own budget and your goals and what exactly you are running ads to. But going broader is something that we’ve been doing over the past couple of years and it really works. It’s working well for us. So that’s the third thing. The fourth thing is to increase your sales conversion rate.

00:12:44 So a lot of misconceptions about ads that they sell for you. They are a really great lead generation tool, but that’s what they are, they generate leads. Now, there are ways that you can use retargeting ads to help your conversion. And you can use ads for all parts of the funnel. But overall, what most of you are going to be using ads for is for the lead generation part. That top of funnel really like expanding out your exposure and getting more people into your world. So with that, they do not sell for you. Your funnel has to convert, your sales process has to convert. And to understand the importance of this, I recently did an episode on whether you can afford ads. It’s like, can you afford ads?

00:13:26 And I break down the impact of this sales conversion rate. If you aren’t already familiar with the impact of it, I break it down. And I also break down how you can figure out which metric you need to adjust to actually get the conversion rate and the return that you need. So I also have a free resource for that, which is the ROAS calculator that I’ve talked about a few times in the podcast. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

00:13:51 It’s completely free, but it’s basically a spreadsheet that I put together that has all of the calculations and formulas of how to figure out what the different metrics you need to get the return that you want, or what kind of return you would have based on your current metric. So in there, it’s very easy to use. I walk you through which fields to use, how to use them, and what to put in which field, or in each field, and then it calculates it for you. So that’s a big piece of overall getting returns. In general, this is not unique to 2023 necessarily, but I always have to put this in there because it makes such a drastic difference in your actual return.

00:14:34 So in the performance of the Ads, when you’re basing the performance of the Ads on the return, this is a huge part of that equation. So that is the fourth thing is increasing your sales conversion rate the last thing that it’s again, not super specific to 2023, but it’s becoming even more important because and I’m referring mostly to the coaching space, it is getting more I’m hesitant to say saturated because it’s not necessarily saturated. There’s so much room for coaching still or coaches still in the space, but it’s just more saturated than before, right? So there is more of the same of similar messaging and things like that. So this one is to improve your offer.

00:15:21 And a lot of people don’t want to go here all the time. It’s hard to sometimes take the feedback that it’s the actual offer, but that’s often what it is. Sometimes it is the offer and the offer has to be dialed in. The best thing that you can do is to gather market research and figure that out. But if all of your funnel metrics are lining up where everyone is actually responding to the messaging of the top of funnel, they’re engaged, they’re getting all the way to the sales page, but they just are not purchasing.

00:15:54 There might be something off with your offer. So you do want to have conversations with people, figure out if you can find any trends of objections and also do more market research of what people want in the market. Even if you have maybe you initially did this whenever you launched this offer, the market is changing. Your competitors are offering different parts of their offer that might become more standard or more expected just based on within the space. Like maybe people are just kind of expecting a different baseline or there’s lots of different things that you can do to change up your offer.

00:16:27 I do also have a podcast episode on how to increase the value of your offer. And there I go into different details of things that I’ve seen, of different offers that I have seen do really well, and just how you can kind of re-craft things and what that means whenever I say offer, because it’s not just the content inside or your actual coaching. It has nothing to do with that necessarily. It is the messaging, it’s the price of it, it is the container that it is in and the details of that container, the type of support that you’re offering, the frequency of support, all of those things make up your offer. So sometimes it takes tweaking your actual offer and not just the funnel or the ads.

00:17:11 So wanted to include that one in there as well today. So those are the main ways that we make sure that our clients are getting a return. These are the ways that we are, some of the ways that things that we’re tweaking this year that we have been tweaking and that have really worked again, there are so many more. I literally do this for a living because there’s so much to learn and keep track of. My continuing education is kind of insane.

00:17:40 The amount of content that I have to consume to stay on top of this industry. I love it, it’s exciting, but it is definitely a lot. So I think if you can nail these five things, then you’re going to be in a really good place. So the first one, fix your tracking, make sure that your visibility is pretty trustworthy, install conversions API or get a really good software that can install this for you and really track those things properly. The second thing is up your marketing game.

00:18:10 Make sure that your messaging is super dialed in. We just can’t get away with weak messaging anymore. And it really is just coming down to these Evergreen Foundational marketing practices of speaking to your ideal clients at the right place at the right time. And the third thing is the broader targeting, letting the algorithm give some space to actually work and gather that data and perform better and better, increasing your sales conversion rate. And you can use different tools to figure out what that will entail because there’s lots of different steps in your sales process.

00:18:45 So figuring out which step needs the improvement, maybe focus on one place at a time until you are improving all of it. Don’t try to do it all at once. And then the last thing is improving your offer. So I hope that you found this helpful. I hope you all have a wonderful week and I will see you guys next time. Thank you for listening to the Scaling to Freedom podcast. If you are a seven figure coach looking for ads management with an agency that partners with you to get your work out into the world and amplify your impact, see if we are a good fit by applying for a spot in our agency at christinabernhard.com/apply. Find the link in our show notes.