How to Make Sure You’re Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Buck With Facebook Ads with Jackie Ellis

How to Make Sure You’re Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Buck With Facebook Ads with Jackie Ellis

Welcome to episode 44 of The Determined Mom Show. I have Jackie Ellis from Jackie Ellis Marketing LLC, and she will talk to us about how to ensure you are getting the biggest bang for your buck with Facebook ads. 

You are the first podcast guest we’ve had that lives in Washington State. It’s like the uniform for working at home in Washington state. But welcome and tell us about your business, how you started working from home, and everything you and Jackie Ellis are marketing. 

My story is interesting because I run a marketing agency and had zero marketing experience just a few years ago. So my story starts when I was running a. Brick and mortar business here in my town. It was a local tennis and health club. I had been in the fitness industry for 18 years, so I was always on the fitness side.

And I think there comes the point where you can only do so much fitness anymore, you know, and so I moved into management, and what I learned about running a business was a, it was stressful, like running a brick and mortar, trying to always.

The turn rate is high in fitness. People are quickly in and out of the door, and we always have to generate leads to get people in. Well, it’s pretty hard for a local business to like get foot traffic in the door constantly for memberships and that sort of thing. And for a variety of reasons, it was very stressful for me.

And you know, I have a family. I have two kids at home, and I was finding that all my energy was going into my day job, and all my brain power was going to my day job. And when I came home at the end of the day, I was exhausted like I was too tired even to have time. Or energy for my family. And the unfortunate thing is that when you have two teenagers, your day just begins when you get home.

Because now we’ve got four or more hours of practice to run around too. So what ended up happening was I was a stressed-out mess and exhausted all the time. At 34 years old, I had a heart attack. Oh, my goodness. I don’t recommend getting stressed out to that point. I would this so recommend that as well.

 Sometimes we don’t realize its mental and physical effects on us until we get to that point. When something like that happens, you should reevaluate your life. What am I doing that brought me here and what can I do to change this because this is not how I want to live?

But I just realized that then. I thought that everybody was just distressed out of the hot mess. I started to think about if I could live mine. Ideal like day, week, or life, what would that look like? And I figured out very quickly that it had to revolve around my family.

As I said, the family was a priority, but work was coming first. So a lot of reflection, journaling, and looking inward kind of led me on this path to start my own business. I moved from running a local business to an online marketing agency because I realized that marketing was what I was passionate about in running a local business.

I had to learn about marketing. I was stressed out about getting leads in the door, but once I started to figure out how to do that in a more automated way, in an easier way. I took what I knew and started my own thing, Facebook ads, and the online market. It was a massive piece of that.

We do online marketing and email marketing, that sort of thing. But the more significant thing for me is knowing what it’s like to be in that position where there’s so much stress trying to figure out where your next customer will come from. Where’s your next client going to come? And that’s something I want to take off the plate of people trying to figure that marketing out for themselves.

And when you’re in that position where you’re running the brick and mortar, you have to worry about do you have enough toilet paper. Do we have, do we have enough people and staff? Like do we have enough money to cover payroll? There are just so many things that are other things that you need to worry about.

And you are adding that marketing piece and trying to learn that, as a business owner is impossible to do on top of all of those other things. So hiring out is the way to go. So how did you, like, did your kids kind of like, like that transition from you going to completely stress out to do your own thing or like your family? I’m going to go, and I’m going to spend two weeks there, and I’m just going to.

And that was new to me. I mean, I’ve always stayed on vacation and relaxed. It’s always about how much you can see, experience, and do. And as I said, it’s not in my nature to just like putting my feet up.

And it was the first anniversary of—my heart attack. So we celebrated that, and my kids were like, what is happening? Like, it’s the first time they saw Mom do nothing. And then I was like, okay, this is def as I enjoyed it. I remember that.

I’ll remember that vacation forever. And that’s actually, so a year later, I decided to leave me. I stayed around a couple more months after that summer, and then in December, I just said when my kids are out for school, out of school for Christmas break. I want to be home with them.

I made little promises here and there to my kids; I would try to be more fun than dad. Like, that was a massive thing to me. I know that sounds silly, but I’m always the one that’s,  I think as moms we’re always the one that’s like, we have to be on schedule, we have to have meals, we have to do this, do that.

And you know, dad’s all. At least in our house, dad’s, you know, the one that’s like, let’s go ziplining. Let’s do this. I was like, oh, I’m going to be more fun than Dad. And my kids were like, whoa. Being around more, not being tired, and having more energy to have fun and do stuff with my kids was huge.

I love that story. Well, I love that you’ve changed your life through that story and eliminated some of your stress. Probably not all of it, because being a mother, you’re still in a business however possible. You still have to have a healthy amount of stress in there.

But hopefully, it’s not enough to make that heart attack recurrence or anything like that, so that’s awesome. That’s. Could you tell us how we can, when we’re running Facebook ads, and how to ensure we’re getting the most out of our dollars?

I have many people asking about what I can do to run a Facebook ad and get better results. Or what can I do to get my cost per lead down? And then, the most important thing that’s often overlooked with Facebook ads is that there’s not necessarily a magic switch. Facebook that you’re missing. And it’s not necessarily the cost per lead, either. We all know that advertising costs are going up and that sort of thing.

While a lower cost per lead might be great, you might need something else to get better results. I encourage people to step back and think about their ads in terms of; I’m spending money on this to generate a lead, and then how will I recoup that ad paid? Or what am I going to offer them down the road?

For example, let’s say you have a freebie, a lead magnet that may be a pdf. Checklist or something that people want for whatever, for whatever reason, it’s just a pdf. There’s nothing for them to buy. That’s usually where people stop. They’re like, oh, I have to grow my list.

So they pay to get people on their list, and then they sit there on the list collecting dust. Right, and that’s just leaving money on the table. When someone opts in for your freebie, they’ve raised their hand and said, I’m interested in what you’re talking about here. I would like to know more. And then you don’t give them anymore.

Our biggest mistake is not following up with them with email marketing. And so that’s one thing that we have started to do a lot more with our clients: generate a sequence that moves people toward the next action you want them to take.

And this is the response that I get. Clients or people asking about this all the time is, well, I’m not good at it, or I need to learn how to do it, or It seems so complicated, and it’s really no more complicated than setting up an ad. And if that seems complicated, then it’s really no more complicated than just having a conversation.

I created a long email sequence. It’s like 14 emails, and it’s more educated than anything. So it’s like showing them the inside of someone’s insights, going over the details, crunching numbers, and things like that will be more interesting for someone learning about Google My Business.

 I felt that pain recently, and I tore off the Band-Aid, and I made myself, I actually did it, like while I was watching TV with my kids, I just sat there and like I used a pen and paper, and I wrote down all the emails, I completely agree with you. Like if you’re going to be spending that money, you’ve got to be able to follow up with them.

And it seems like such a big task, but as you said, you were just like scribbling as, you know, you were sitting there with your kids. It doesn’t have to be; you can do it one at a time. You can write the first email and then come back and write the second, but it’s an insurance policy.

You don’t want to think about and worry about it, but once it’s in place, it feels so good. You can; can sit back and know that every lead coming in will now walk through a little conversation with you automatically. And it doesn’t even matter if you, I mean, eventually you want to lead them to another action to take or you lead them to an offer.

In marketing, we miss that a little bit sometimes because we’re focused on the message and what they’re going to do; what will make them think? Will it make them think they need to order or buy this, but create that feeling? You hit a big, golden nugget there with that.

Well, I’ll tell you, as far as trends in marketing and social media and that sort of thing, I think that people are going to see the need to go start going in that direction of how you’re making people feel and how you’re connecting with people because it’s, it could be the only thing that makes you stand.

Among your competition, right? If everyone else is saying, get the top 10, da da, da, or you know, this flashy or flashy thing and yours is more of a heartfelt connection or conversation. That’s what separates you from the rest of the pack, you know?

So you don’t know anymore when you’re getting started. You don’t have to get fancy software or anything for your landing page. And two, they just came out with a free version. So you can get started with Convert kit and not, not have to make a big investment. Their lowest plan. It is about $29 for a thousand people on your list, but it has advanced ad capabilities.

You can set up an entire sequence without having to pay for anything. And convert it. That’s what I recommend. The software starts with, in terms of actually setting up a sequence, what we do for our clients is a five-email sequence, and we keep the focus or the theme for those five emails very similar no matter who we are.

Marketing for, right? So your first email is always your confirmation email. So it’s con confirming that they have just now signed up for something that will help them with whatever problem you were trying to solve for them. And maybe it’s a sliver of that because you won’t sell them something else eventually down the line.

So the sequence will lead them to a sale. So that’s your confirmation email, and that goes out. Then the next email, we’ll call it email number two, is about giving them added value. Sometimes we’ll do this and link back to social media posts for example. That way we can put a screenshot like there’s an awesome Instagram post that you did that had a lot of engagement, and it’s along the lines.

You’re a freebie. So we’ll put a screenshot in there. We’ll link to the Instagram profile so they can follow if they want, and we’ll talk about how that relates to what we shared with you. So it’s more valuable and a little bit more to get to know us. So that’s an email to you.

Email three is more education. So now we’re starting to pivot towards what we want them to consider buying. So it’s taking whatever your freebie was on a little bit deeper of a level and kind of educating them, letting them know what they might need to learn, but that’s also bringing awareness to what they don’t.

On a deeper level. And then, so that’s email three. And then four and five are just a combination of introducing the offer, what it is, and how it’s going to help them. And then number five is that; here’s your chance to get it at us. At a special rate, that sequence ends, and we roll people into a newsletter sequence, like a weekly newsletter.

I love that formula, and it’s a great way, just a good starter. If someone’s intimidated by, you know, setting up emails and writing them, just that little formula right there is amazing, and it’ll help many people get started.

A quick question for you regarding the confirmation email. Do you prefer to do the double opt-in? This is always like the debate. That it was coming by the way; when I said in the confirmation email, what is your preference? Do you like the double opt-in? Do you hate it? You can either like it or hate it, so I don’t know if there’s another option.

 So this is funny because I was just in about this yesterday and a Facebook group. And it was all copywriters that were talking about this. What do they do with their opt-in? I don’t do a double opt-in, but it was split about 50-50, which is probably not helpful in answering this question. It’s not don’t like it either, I don’t, so that is the reason that most people do. They like it because they feel they get better-qualified people on their list.

So you’re going to, so if anyone needs to learn what this means, it’s like someone opts in for your freebie and then they have to check their email and hit confirm on an email before you actually do. Get added to the list. The thing is, I’m a busy woman. I’m, I’m a mom. I got, you know, a dog running around.

We just got the stuff. I sometimes get around to confirming that email. That doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the thing. So that’s my take on it. And, Eventually, people fall off my list if they’re different from what I scrub my list, and people will fall off if they’re not interested in what I’m talking about.

But the reality is, even as an agency, it’s something that we do, and then we keep an eye on it and watch and change the things that aren’t working right. So really, what I’m saying is you have to start somewhere. It can be very simple. You can begin very easily, and if people aren’t opening your emails, then maybe change the subject line and see if you get better open rates, or if people aren’t opting into your ad, then maybe change how you’re approaching talking about your freebie.

It’s just testing, and start easy and watch and see what happens because that’s giving you valuable information about how people respond to your content. It may not be what they wanted if they’re not opening your email. So what can you do about that? And so, instead of just shutting things down or stopping doing it, look into that information and see how you can update or optimize things.