- Paid ads can be a really great way
to grow your handmade business.
They can speed up your shop's growth,
bring in new customers
and turn one-time customers into repeat customers.
But if you don't think through your paid ads strategy,
you may end up wasting your money
and adding no results to show for it.
So, today I want to talk to you,
about seven common paid ads mistakes you want to be sure
to avoid if you are investing in paid ads
for your handmade shop.
Ready, let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Bonjour, my name is Deb
and I'm the funder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop honours,
just like your fabulous self.
You can learn more about our community, sorry,
Tizzit HQ via the link below this video,
but for now,
let's jump straight into to today's conversation,
seven common paid ads mistakes to avoid
in your handmade business.
Last week, we talked about how to decide
if you should use paid advertising for your handmade shop.
I'll leave the link down below case you missed it.
In that video,
I talk about some important questions,
you want to ask yourself that help you determine
if paid ads could help you
and if you are ready to make that time and money investment.
If you have decided to dive into paid ads,
it is extremely important that you spend your money wisely.
Too many handmade honours make mistakes
when spending their advertising money
and end up spending a lot of money
and getting a little to no results,
which obviously we don't want.
So, the first mistake I see handmade shop owners make
is not keeping at it for long enough for your ads to work.
Many handmade business owners expect paid ads
to work like this or fairly quickly.
When in fact it does take some experimenting
to find what works.
It's important to remember that experimenting
with different ad campaigns will take time,
before you find the best ad strategy.
As you run your ads,
you'll start to see
that certain things work better than others.
You may find that a certain product
is very successful to advertise
or that targeting a certain market
for a certain product has great results.
But you will also see results
that show you product ads or add strategies
that don't work as well as you had hoped
and you will need to assess and adjust your strategy,
run the new ads
and then see how your revised ads are working.
This trial and error takes time
and if you stop too early,
you don't give yourself time
to find what ad strategy ad are successful.
If you don't go into it with the right mindset,
you may stop just before,
you figure out how to make them work for your business
and your shop.
So you'll end up,
it'll end up being a waste of time and money,
which we definitely don't want.
Next, let's move on to mistake number two,
which is not budgeting appropriately.
This is related to point number one,
because in order to take the time
to figure out which ads work and which ads don't,
you have to have a budget that allows
for the very important experimenting
that we just talked about.
You have to be willing for a little while,
maybe a couple of month to throw money at ads
and not really see results,
until you figure out what really works and what doesn't.
You also want to budget
for how long you want to be trying ads.
I rarely recommend just throwing money at ads
for a week or two,
and then nothing again for a year,
it's better to budget to run your ads for a few months,
so that you have the time to experiment,
see what works and then scale
and put money behind what's working.
This will lead to much better results in the end.
The next paid ad mistake I see is boosting a post,
instead of using the platform's ad manager.
While boosting a post is a term
that's really used for Facebook ads,
every platform has like a quick setup option
for an ad campaign where they pre-select options for you.
And they make it really easy to create
and start an ad from scratch quite quickly.
The problem with that
is you're not completely in charge of all the settings,
which can make your campaign completely inefficient.
My experience has been that when makers tell me
that ads are not working for them in the majority of cases,
it's because they've used the the platforms boost the post
or quick-starter ad campaign setup
and didn't take the time to actually set up the strategy
for the campaign themselves.
This is so common and so important
that I actually have a video about it
that I will link to down below.
In it I'll show you the problems
that occur when you use quick setup ads
and then I'll show you how very important it is
to go in and the campaign from scratch
with your full strategy in there
and not just go with the presets
that the platforms pick for you to make it easy,
because even though it makes it quicker,
it also makes it a lot more expensive for you
and you won't get good results.
The next mistake that I see handmade shop owners make
is actually not having a strategy.
Often when you use a platform's quick setup option,
you are advertising without planning an ad strategy.
And that's why those ads struggle to get results
and momentum behind them and to essentially make a return.
So, what you wanna do is avoid running paid ads,
before thinking through your ads strategy.
Your ad strategy will be centred around a clear goal
that you need to define.
Ask yourself what you want this campaign to do
for your business in the big picture.
Some ad campaigns will have a goal to directly make sales.
Others may be to create brand awareness
or get more subscribers on your email list.
Some goals won't instantly make you money,
but will result in more sales down the road.
For example, if your campaign goal
is to get more subscribers onto your email list,
the campaign itself won't directly generate sales,
but it will create increased sales,
thanks to the email marketing
that you send your new subscribers that your ad generated.
Some campaigns may have a goal to retarget,
which means showing the ad
to someone who's already interacted with you
or purchase from you,
because you know that those people are more likely
to buy from you again.
So, for example if you sell,
handmade soap you may have an ad campaign
that targets past customers at about the time
that current stock order will be running out.
That ad is much more likely to result in sales,
because you are sending it to customers
who already love your products.
So, basically your ad strategy
is going to tell you how this campaign fits,
within your marketing plan
and each ad campaign will have a clear goal.
Part of your ad strategy will be to define
who you are targeting,
which leads us to the fifth mistake I see,
handmade business owners make,
having a poor understanding of targeting.
Targeting means who is going to see your ads.
And it is one of the most important things to consider
when you set your ads up.
Many makers don't understand all the different options
that are of available for targeting.
Basically, if you intend to start ads on any platform,
you should be able to pause this video right now
and say out loud what the main targeting options are
for that platform.
If you can't,
then you're not ready to run your ads quite yet.
You need to go and do some learning,
about all the different targeting options that exist
on that platform.
And if you're just now learning what targeting means,
then you definitely need to gain a better understanding,
before you run any ads.
Because poor understanding of targeting,
will result in ineffective targeting, poor results
and a lot of wasted money.
This is so important that I made a video,
specifically about effective ad targeting.
Although the video talks specifically,
about Facebook ad targeting,
you can use the knowledge and apply it
to whatever platform you are advertising on.
The link will be below.
The six common mistake I want to talk about
is not testing your ads enough.
What this means is that,
you are either not testing different products
to see which one has a better response in ads
or you're not testing the best pages
to send people from your ads.
So for example, maybe you are sending people
to a blog post instead of a product page,
or maybe you're not testing,
which blog post gets the best response.
And when you set up an ad,
there are many, many choices you have to make.
You have to test different products,
different blog posts, different pieces of contents
that you want to send people to.
Some of the data that you want to test
in your ad campaigns and track which works best,
are testing different images inside of your campaign
to see if one image gets more click than the others,
testing your copy to see if one headline
is better than another or if short copy for your ad
is better than long copy,
testing which blog posts, product pages
or other content you send people to,
which produce the best results?
You need to be testing thoroughly and methodically
and you have to have a system for testing,
because this is how you find what works.
Testing allows you to effectively scale your ads,
by putting money behind what's really working
and not wasting your money on what's not working at all.
The final mistake I want to talk about
is not optimising your website, your product page,
your e-commerce store or wherever you are sending people to
from your ads.
In a nutshell,
ads will amplify the quality of whatever you send people to.
If the place you send them is optimised
and gets good results,
ads will increase those good results,
but if you send them to a page
that has a very poor conversion rate for example,
it'll be very, very expensive advertising,
because you'll need a lot of traffic
to make sales on a page that has a poor conversion rate
to begin with.
This means that it is very important to make sure
that you first have an optimised website, webshop,
product page, blog post,
basically wherever you're sending people to from your ad.
If you make sure that these are all optimised,
then when people click on your ad and go to your page,
they are much more likely to take action
and either purchase your products,
sign up for your newsletter
or do whatever the goal of your ad is.
This is why I often recommend
that you don't start straight away with ads,
but instead wait until you have a little bit of data,
about how your website or your shop is performing,
because that data will tell you the best pages
to send people to,
the pages that have the highest performance,
the best conversion rate.
If you don't have that data before studying your ads,
then you won't know if your ads aren't working,
because ad quality
is not bringing the right people to your shop
or your shop itself is not turning those potential buyers,
into buyers because it's not optimised.
So, if a page isn't converting well,
it may be because your layout isn't great.
Your images aren't as good as they need to be,
your product copy isn't great, et cetera.
So, you want to optimise each of these things,
before spending money on ads that send people to that page.
If you're trying to optimise your website
or product page at the same time
that you're running your ads,
it's also really difficult to know what's working
and what's not,
because you have too many variables that are changing.
So optimise first,
then take time to see which pages have the best results,
then advertise.
Now, if you have haven't watched last week's video,
about deciding if paid ads,
could help you grow your handmade business,
you will definitely want to click
the link showing on your screen and watch that next.
And if you're ready to start scaling your business,
using paid ads where you need a little help,
I have great news.
We've just added two courses inside Tizzit HQ
to help you run successful Facebook and Instagram ads.
The first one is taught by Jessie Hailey,
former head of performance marketing for Etsy International.
She runs an ad agency
that turns purpose-driven product brands,
into very successful e-commerce businesses using ads.
And she's going to take you,
through what is working right now on Facebook and Instagram,
what budgets you need, what sort of return you can expect
and what sort of products it currently works best for.
The second course is taught by Rachel Fallon,
who's also an ad expert focusing on e-commerce brands,
like yourself.
She spends her days managing successful ads for her clients.
And she's going to show you how to do the same thing,
by walking you through how
to set up a successful ad campaign from A to Z,
even if you've never done it before.
So, if you're already a member of the HQ,
go to your course library,
if not come and join us,
the training is waiting for you in there.
Thanks for watching.
Make sure to check all the links
that I'm gonna put below this video for you.
And until next time, aurevoir.