Hey there.
Welcome back to my channel where I am filming totally solo today from my home
office because we're all self isolating.
So on that note I ask that you don't look at my nails too closely because I did
them myself and they're still drying.
One of my students posted this recently in our paid group.
I'm looking to run ads through Instagram,
but feel like I have been throwing money to the wind for the few ads I've done.
Can anyone relate to that?
If you've ever struggled with wanting to run Instagram ads for your business,
you're in the right place because today I'm going to walk you through how to
know if your business is even ready for ads plus how to run ads profitably in
2020.
And stay tuned until the end where I'm going to share the two key things that
most business owners who are running ads forget to do.
And if you don't do these things, you're going to lose a lot of time and money.
So stay to the end and I'll share what those two things are.
I'm Elise Darma and I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs like yourself use
Instagram so that it actually becomes a revenue stream in their business.
And today I'm excited to dive into Instagram ads in 2020.
If you're new here,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell so that you don't miss any
future trainings like this one. So just as a heads up,
here's what I'm going to take you through in today's video. One:
a checklist to see whether your business is ready for ads. Two:
I'm going to cover the top ads that I see working in my business and in other
businesses in 2020. And three:
I'm going to cover it the two things that you need to do if you are going to
spend money on Instagram ads this year. Are you ready? Let's get started.
First things first, the checklist.
How do you know if your business is actually ready to spend money on Instagram
ads? So the very first thing I recommend to my students is to ask themselves,
have I validated this offer?
How have I put it out to my Instagram followers or my email list and already
gotten sales or leads for it? If so,
then I'm ready to start putting money into ads.
I truly believe that you should be able to build a warm audience organically
first before you start to look at putting money into ads.
It's slightly more risky to take a brand new offer and just start running ads to
it, especially if you haven't built up a warm audience first.
So I highly recommend to build your followers, build your email list,
and then offer your new offer to your warm audience before running ads,
especially to cold traffic. Now, there is an exception to this rule.
If your business has extra revenue, extra savings in it,
and you're willing to spend money on ads for the sake of testing,
then you could look at running ads for your brand new offer to a cold audience.
But that's only if you're willing to spend at least a thousand dollars on
running ads, not expecting to see that come back to your business.
It's purely for testing and data, so that's an exception.
If you're not in that position,
then I highly recommend to first present your offer to your warm audience.
Then once it's validated, you can start looking at ads.
This brings me to my second point on the checklist.
You need to be able to figure out what budget you're willing to spend on ads.
If you're new to ads,
you have to be willing to accept that you might be putting money into ads and
not seeing a return. This is what's called the return on ad spend.
Also known as ROAS. Ideally when you're running ads,
you're putting in a certain amount of dollars to Facebook or Instagram and
you're getting a certain amount back in return.
Ideally more than what you're putting in. That is your return on ad spend.
However,
if you're brand new to running ads or this is the first time you're running ads
to this offer,
you have to be willing to accept that you're simply running ads for data,
not for a return on your ad spend. So if you make sales from your ads,
that is an amazing perk. But when you're just getting started,
it's not the expectation. On that note,
you next need to figure out how much you're willing to spend on ads to acquire a
sale. This is also called the cost of acquisition. So for example,
I have a product called Story Vault, and currently as a filming today,
it is $27 so when I'm running ads to the sales page,
hypothetically,
I can spend $20 maybe even up to $27 to acquire a purchase.
Now, of course, that's a business decision I make.
Am I willing to run ads to make money off this product or am I running ads just
to acquire a new customer? If that's why I'm running ads,
then I could spend up to $27 to acquire that customer because my expectation
isn't to make money from that customer.
It's just to bring in a new customer to my business. However,
if I'm running ads to actually make money,
then I probably won't want to spend $27 per acquisition.
I'll probably want to spend maybe $20 maximum so that there is some leeway for
profit. So depending on what your offer is, maybe it's a $27 product,
maybe it's a $600 course.
You're going to have to figure out how much money are you willing to spend in
order to acquire that customer from ads. Now,
I'm not going to go too deep into numbers because it all depends on your offer
and your business model and this is where working with an ads professional is
really beneficial, but I will share some general rule of thumbs.
First rule of thumb, when you're looking at conversions,
especially to a sales page,
average industry conversions are generally between one and 3%.
That means if a hundred people land on your sales page,
between one and three people will become buyers.
Now of course this varies by industry and by market.
Some people can get a 5% or even 8% conversion to a sales page.
But let's go with industry average that's currently between one and 3% and let's
say 2% just for example sake.
So if you have a 2% sales conversion,
that means you need a hundred leads so that two of them become buyers.
Now if we take a further step backwards, how do we get leads? Well generally,
depending on your offer,
you get leads by driving them to a freebie or an opt in page.
Now let's say your opt in page has a 50% opt in conversion.
So 50% of people who land on this page are going to become leads.
If you need a hundred leads in your business,
then that means you need to send 200 people to your opt in page because 50% of
them are going to become leads, right?
So now we have a hundred leads and 2% of those people are going to become
buyers. So two buyers.
So that means we need 200 unique visitors to our opt in page to get a hundred
leads in order to get to customers. Personally,
I love this kind of math because then it's black and white. It's crystal clear.
I know how much traffic I need to send to my opt in page or my sales page in
order to get the sales that I'm looking for through ads. Fun, right? Now,
going back to my first point, generally as a rule of thumb,
when you're getting started with ads,
you need to have a budget that you're willing to spend on testing so that you
can get this kind of data.
So I recommend spending up to a thousand dollars in your ads just for testing
and data.
Now that we've covered the checklist on whether your business is ready for ads,
let's talk about the types of Instagram ads I see working for businesses in
2020.
The first type of ad that's working is a carousel post. Now, personally,
I find this surprising because in my past testings,
I've never seen this type of ad convert,
but in 2020 it's converting pretty well for me and other business owners.
Let's look at this example ad from Dahlia Wealth.
You can see in this example that they've put together three quotes,
kind of motivation and inspiration in their carousel posts.
So that's something you could totally use for your business.
I also find writing kind of a story and breaking up the text in between the
carousel posts work really well,
as well as using the carousel posts for testimonials.
So there's a couple ideas there on what kind of content you can put into a
carousel ad.
The next type of ad I see doing well on Instagram is what I'm calling an
animated graphic. So in this example by General Assembly,
this is designed to be an Instagram story ad and you can see that it will
automatically play where there are graphics and text moving to really capture
the attention of someone who's scrolling through their stories really quickly.
So personally I'm also seeing this kind of ad work well in my business,
especially for Instagram stories. So definitely a type of ad you can try out.
If you're interested in learning about how to create videos for your Instagram
profile, I'm going to be covering that in an upcoming video very soon,
which you'll be able to check out here.
The third type of ad that I see working well is basically an ad that looks like
an Instagram story. That makes sense, right?
Because sometimes ads can look like an ad,
so if you can design yours to actually just look like a story,
it's going to fit into someone's story scrolling experience a whole lot more
seamlessly. Let's look at this example ad by my friend Esther in this ad.
It's super short. It's 12 seconds.
She's got one of the Instagram filters creating that halo effect.
She's got some text over top plus her CTA and it just looks like something you'd
naturally see in your Instagram stories feed.
So I find this type of ad working really well today in 2020. All right.
Now that you know if you're ready to run ads and the type of ad to run,
let's talk about the two things that business owners typically don't do that
costs them a lot of time and money. The first thing is testing.
I talked a little bit about testing when I mentioned the checklist, but here,
I mean you need to get granular with testing what's working in your ad.
So there's generally three aspects of an ad that I like to A/B test.
The first is my targeting.
I love to A/B test different types of audiences and then see which audience
performs the best. So I can run the same ad to two different audiences.
Maybe one has a specific interest and one is a different demographic or
location. And then as those ad sets are running,
I can see which one is performing best with the same ad.
The second thing I like to test is the creative. And by that I mean the image,
the photo, the carousel post.
Sometimes I think I know what my audience is going to resonate with and
sometimes I am completely wrong and completely surprised.
So that's why I like to create about five different types of ads to run to the
same audience.
And then I let Facebook test and optimize to see which ad really resonates the
best with my audience. The last thing I like to test is my copy of the ad.
And by that I mean the headline, the body of the ad,
maybe even using emojis or not. So when testing copy,
what I like to do is keep everything else the same.
So my targeting and my creative,
but then I will run two variations of the ad with one change in the copy.
So maybe they both have the same body text,
but I've changed the headline on each ad.
This is how I A/B test and this is how I can see which is the winning headline
between those two ads.
So testing is really key because whenever I start a new campaign or a new ad,
I like to create different versions or different layers of tests.
Then when everything's running,
I can look at the data as a whole and turn off what's not working or what's
costing me too much money. So this is a key money saver.
The second thing that most business owners don't do in advertising is
retargeting.
Retargeting is generally the easiest way to recoup your costs of advertising or
actually make money from your ads. So what is retargeting? Well,
before you start running ads,
you are going to place your Facebook pixel ID on all pages of your ads.
So let's say you have an opt in page and a thank you page,
we'll just keep it really simple. When you set up a retargeting ad campaign,
what you're doing is targeting everyone who landed on your opt in page but
didn't make it to your thank you page.
So those are the people who bounced off and they never actually opted in.
Generally when you set up a retargeting campaign,
it's very cost effective to run a specific ad with specific copy and messaging
to recapture those people who left your landing page and never opted in.
Retargeting campaigns are key in my business.
Whenever I run a campaign for either sales or lead generation,
I always have a second campaign that will have a specific ad to recapture that
lost traffic of mine. Hey,
you've probably seen one of my retargeting ads before. In fact,
some people meet me and they say, Oh yeah, I recognize you.
I've seen your ads and that actually makes me happy.
It tells me that my ads are doing their job and I'm showing up in multiple ways
so that people know about my business and my brand. Now,
if you're interested in running specifically an Instagram story ad,
I invite you to check out this video right here where I cover the back end of
setting up an Instagram story ad in ads manager.
And if you've made it to the end of this training and you're thinking, yes,
I'm ready to run Instagram ads, but I don't know what to post,
I don't know what content to share, then I invite you to check out Story Vault.
Story Vault is my answer to your question of,
'What do I share today in my stories?' It comes with 800 prompts and ideas for
your stories, whether you are B2B or B2C,
and I guarantee once you've unlocked Story Vault and you see those 800 ideas,
you're going to get ideas for your ads as well.
So I'll leave the link below this video for Story Vault,
make sure you check it out and hopefully I'll see you inside.
To ease and revenue. I'll see you in the next video.
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