Salome Schillack:

This is episode number 79 of The Shine Show, and today I'm going to share with you how you can get started with Facebook Ads without wasting your money. Yes, there is a way to start running ads without feeling like you would rather go and put your money on the roulette table. Today I'm going to show you exactly how you can do this, so stay tuned.

Salome Schillack:

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack. I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in. Because you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show.

Salome Schillack:

I started the podcast on the 10th of December 2019, so it is just under a year. To this day, one of the most popular episodes is episode number two, entitled How To Get Started With Facebook Ads Without Wasting Your Money. That podcast episode still gets downloads to this day, brand new downloads, and it is one of the most popular episodes, and for good reason.

Salome Schillack:

Since I recorded that podcast episode, this idea of creating engagement using ads has semi gone a little bit viral, and I have my beautiful, amazing mentor and friend Amy Porterfield to thank for that because I was on her podcast sharing that. Then, I have also shared the strategy in Stu McLaren's TRIBE membership, where people have raved about it. So I thought it would be a good idea because I'm getting so many questions on social media about this engagement ad strategy, it would be a great idea to come on and do a bit of a refresh of episode two.

Salome Schillack:

Today I am going to share with you again this 2.0 version of How To Get Started With Facebook Ads Without Wasting Your Money. This matters so much to anyone who is building an audience on social media. It matters so much to anyone who is just starting out with Facebook Ads and does not want to waste any money. It matters to you if you feel like the work you're doing on social media is going nowhere slowly. It matters for you if you have tried list-building but your costs were ridiculously high that you gave up on it because it's not sustainable for someone who's just starting out with a low budget.

Salome Schillack:

So if you are slaving away on social media and you feel like the algorithm gods have got something against you because they do not favor you and they just don't show your stuff to your people, stay tuned. If you feel like Facebook ads have just been a waste of money in the past, stay tuned, because this is for you.

Salome Schillack:

Now, let me tell you how I stumbled upon this strategy. It was back in 2018. I have a client, one of my favorite clients, and she's been with me now like, I want to say three-and-a-half years I've been running this person's ads and just a wonderful person to run ads for. When we started working together, she told me that in order for her funnels to be profitable, we need lead costs under $2.50. This is going back three years ago so $2.50 wasn't totally outrageous back then. It was within the realm of doable, but we didn't have a lot of pixel data on there. Her account was fairly new. So when we did her first launch, her leads came in just under $2.50, which was brilliant.

Salome Schillack:

Then in January 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that the algorithm has changed. I'll tell you a little bit more about what Marky Mark said, but the bottom line of what happened was, this client, who had worked very hard and very consistently to get to about 50,000 followers on Instagram, instantaneously lost most of the engagement on her Instagram account. Of course, if you have spent years building that account and you've poured so much energy and love into it, it matters. Nobody wants to just lose their entire Instagram following overnight, so we decided to play around with engagement ads.

Salome Schillack:

We decided to run engagement ads on our Instagram feed to run them to her warm audiences so that they remember her so that they come back and they engage with her new content. And we just started fiddling around with it. The funny thing that happened was, as soon as we started doing this, her social media engagement went up, her follower number went up. She told us that she's getting more traffic to her website. She said that she is getting more sales from her Shopify account. She even said she was getting more downloads on our podcast.

Salome Schillack:

When we sat down and thought about it, we realized, but hang on a second, whenever you stimulate engagement on Facebook or Instagram, you're basically coming to the attention of a lot more people and you're getting those people to things. What are some of the things that they do? Some of those things are, they click through to your website. Once they're at your website, because your website is awesome, they might sign up for your lead magnet. They might go to your Shopify account. They might go and find your podcast and subscribe to your podcast.

Salome Schillack:

So the spinoff benefits of having engagement is tremendous. And what we then realized is, when we kind of almost artificially, and it's not artificial engagement, but we just stimulated artificially because Facebook has artificially suppressed it by messing with the algorithm. When we stimulate that engagement, it's like every one of your digital assets wakes up from the slumber that it's been in and all of a sudden your website gets more traffic, your podcast gets more downloads. Everything wakes up. Because when people engage, they do stuff. And the stuff that they do leads to them doing more stuff.

Salome Schillack:

And so, we realized that when we create engagement on this client's Instagram feed, we accidentally also created the spinoff effect of that engagement. And that spinoff effect is beautiful and it is amazing. It's literally like getting a vitamin injection, infusion for your digital marketing. And so, we watched as this client's lead cost came down. I just looked in her ad account and the last time we launched her course, her lead costs were in some campaigns down to as little as 67 cents. It is just unheard of for someone to go from paying $2.50 for a lead in 2017 to paying 67 cents for a lead in 2020. It literally is unheard of.

Salome Schillack:

Everyone else's lead cost is up but this person's is down. We attribute that directly to us running engagement ads. So it was kind of this theory that we had, that we had based on what happened with this client. Then we started running engagement ads for all of our clients. Like stock standard, you sign up to work with us, we run engagement ads because we see the overall benefit of running engagement ads.

Salome Schillack:

Then what happened was in September 2019, I decided to get back in the game and to start building my audience and to start building my email list and to start posting on social media again. Now, my audience and my email list, everything had been stale for so long because I was working my heinie off first as a Facebook Ads freelancer, and then as building the agency. While I was building the agency and putting systems and processes in place and serving our clients, social media wasn't exactly top of my list of priorities, and neither was emailing my email lists.

Salome Schillack:

So September 2019, we decided to participate in Amy Porterfield's DCI, Digital Course Academy, launch as affiliates and I started running ads again for myself. I remember we didn't want to run conversion ads because I felt like at that stage it was too late to build my email list. So what we decided to do is to just run ads to fill a Facebook group. So we ran traffic ads, landing page view ads, and I ended up paying about $1.40 per landing page view. That's a lot, the average landing page view's somewhere between 30 and 50 cents.

Salome Schillack:

So between September 2016 and September 2019, my ad account stood completely still, nothing happened on there. Then all of a sudden I'm coming in there running traffic ads with Facebook page that has no followers on it, that has no engagement on it, with an Instagram account that has no followers on it, that has no engagement on, that I haven't posted in in years. And I was pulling my hair out with this $1.40 landing page views, it was ridiculous. I think I ended up, from the people that clicked to that landing page, I ended up paying something like $17 per person to get them into a Facebook group, which is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.

Salome Schillack:

So I was pulling my hair out, didn't know why this is happening to me. Remember, we know how to run ads, and we know how to write copy, and we know how to create conversions and how to get people to take action. I couldn't even blame my ads managers because my ads managers is us, but it dawned on me that what I had missed in my neglect of my social media and in my neglect of my ad account was that I had not built up engagement. And so, we stopped all of the ads and right after that launch I started running massive amounts of engagement ads on my own accounts.

Salome Schillack:

I remember one day, I have a screenshot of this somewhere. My engagement on Instagram literally went from 200 engagements in one day to 2,000 the next day. That's the difference that taking some money and putting it behind engagement makes for Instagram and Facebook. I know you could say, "Well, Zucks is just out to make money." Yes, he is. And we should all be happy that he is because when Zucks makes money, we make money. And when he can build Facebook and build the infrastructure and has the money to build something that is of lasting value, then we get to benefit from that because we're building our businesses on his platform.

Salome Schillack:

So yeah, let's support Zucks in making money. Let's also invest in engagement and try to get our content in front of our friends and our family and our followers. Let me tell you just a little bit about this announcement that Mark Zuckerberg made in January 2018, when he changed the algorithm that kind of sparked all of this and that brought all of this on. Now, I've told you about how we stumbled upon this with our client. I've told you about how it manifested in my account, so now I want to tell you about what Mark said and when I realized how important it is to pay attention to what Mark said when he changed the algorithm and how it's directly related to this.

Salome Schillack:

It was January 2018 when Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that the algorithm is changing, the social media algorithm is changing. They are moving to an artificial intelligence. So before 2018, it was more like a computer system, if I have to explain it in very simple terms, and now it's going to be more of an artificial intelligence that learns based on the actions people take. And he said that, from now on the algorithm will favor the content of family and friends over overly promotional content or over that of brands. To put it in different words, what he said is engagement is the new currency on social media. If you think about it, the computer system, the algorithm doesn't know if someone is our friend or our family. The only thing the computer has to go on is their engagement, are people liking, commenting, and sharing this person's stuff?

Salome Schillack:

If they are liking, commenting, and sharing, that is a good indication to Facebook that it is good quality content, that it is content that strikes a nerve with people, that strikes an emotion, makes people feel something and makes them take action. Of course, that is what Facebook wants. Because, if we bore our viewers to tears, or if we post things that they don't care about, then they go to Snapchat and we don't want that. We want to keep them on Facebook. We want to keep them on Instagram, so we want to make sure that we're posting content that gets likes, comments, and shares.

Salome Schillack:

The other side of this coin that Zucks did not announce but that I know for a fact, having spoken to a lot of Facebook Ads reps, is that Facebook penalizes you in your ad account if you do not have engagement on your page, on your Instagram profile, and on your pixel. If your pixel is not tracking activity, if you're not getting clicks to your websites, if your ads are not getting clicked on, if you are not getting likes, comments, and shares on your ads, then Facebook sees you as an overly promotional, boring, not-going-to-look-after-their-viewers type of marketer. And what they do is they just don't show your ad to people.

Salome Schillack:

They've told me that they penalize you by putting up your CPM. That means you pay a lot more to get in front of people, to get into, to get an impression in the newsfeed than someone who has high engagement. So they give our accounts rankings, and because our accounts are connected to our pixels, and our pixels are constantly feeding back info to our accounts, and our Facebook page and our Instagram profile is feeding back information to our pixels and to our accounts, it all creates this beautiful machine that builds our account mojo, is what I call it. I'm struggling to find a better expression than just its mojo. We want good mojo on our accounts.

Salome Schillack:

When you have good engagement on your content, you tend to get a lot of clicks to your website. You get likes, you get comments, and you get shares. That is why this strategy of mine works the very best for people who have small audiences, or people who are looking to kickstart their social media engagement. So if your engagement has grown stale the way mine did, or for people who have never run ads before and does not want to be penalized from day one, because you start out running list-building ads and Facebook's like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You haven't even created any engagement and you're already asking for something. So this strategy works really well for anyone who's struggling to get out of that social media. Like, when it feels like you're walking through mud, it works well if you're on a low budget as well.

Salome Schillack:

The other amazing thing about this strategy is, it lets you get started with Facebook Ads from as little as $5 a day. Because, it's kind of a difficult pill to swallow when you go from never having spent any money on Facebook Ads to all of a sudden having to spend at least $25 a day on list-building ads. That can be a significant budget transformation, and it can be something that we put off running ads just because we don't want to go there and we don't want it take the pain of actually having to give Facebook our money without knowing how it's going to come back to us. So with this strategy, at least you have a clear plan in place for how you're going to build your audiences and how you're going to create engagement on your social media. Then from there on, you start building your email list and you start making people offers for your low dollar offers, or your low ticket offers and you can start making money.

Salome Schillack:

Let's break this strategy down. I'm going to make it as easy as I can for you. The first thing that you're going to do is, inside your ads manager, you're going to create your custom audiences. Basically, custom audiences are just buckets of people, or it's how we define the different buckets where we are able to capture people in. For example, you will create a custom audience of people who have visited your website in the last 180 days. That means you tell Facebook, "Hey Facebook, I want to create a bucket of people who've been to my website in the last 180 days. And when they come there, I want you to please capture these people inside this bucket and keep them there so that I can do something with them later." That's what your custom audiences are.

Salome Schillack:

You're also going to create a custom audience of people who have engaged with you on Facebook in the last 180 days. Same thing for Instagram, and you're going to upload your existing email list to Facebook so that you have those people there. These are what we call your warm audiences, and the reason we call them your warm audiences is because they've already warmed up to you. If someone's been to your website, if they've engaged with you on Facebook or Instagram, or if they're already on your email list, they know you, they like you, and they trust you. And so, we call them warm audiences.

Salome Schillack:

So step number one, you're going to set up your custom audiences. Step number two is, you're going to choose a post that already has good engagement on it. Now, when I say a post that has good engagement on it, that doesn't necessarily mean your post with the most engagement is going to be the best engagement ad. Because think about it, if I post a picture of me with my dog and I say like, "Lazy Sunday, cuddles with Odi," that might get a lot of engagement, but that is of absolute zero use to me. It's a great gimmick to stimulate engagement on my page but it's not necessarily going to make a good ad because, what value am I adding to people by paying to put this in front of them, especially if it goes to strangers? Strangers are not necessarily going to comment on my cuddles with my dog.

Salome Schillack:

So when you choose a post, I want you to think about the following things. Does it speak directly to your ideal customers? Does it in some way, shape, or form show you in an environment where your ideal customer can recognize themselves in? Does it show your customer in an environment where they recognize themselves, or does your copy or your video, does it help your ideal customers see themselves and stop scrolling? That's why I say, like the photo of me and Odi, not necessarily going to make my ideal customer stop scrolling. Does it showcase what you stand for, and almost more importantly, what you don't stand for? Does it communicate your values?

Salome Schillack:

I saw the other day, I think it was Russell Brunson ran an engagement ad where he was standing in front of a picture of Jesus. I don't remember the message. I think it's possible that there was scripture in his copy, and I just thought, "Wow, that would be so polarizing for his audience." But that is who Russell is. Russell is a Christian, he's a religious man, and he is just saying, "If you want to hang out in my community, you got to be willing to talk about this, and you've got to be willing to know that this is what I stand for." And so, I'm sure a lot of people who saw that, immediately goes, "Ooh, I'm not going to hang out with this guy," and that's great. That's what Russell wanted. He wanted the wrong people to opt out of hanging out with him. So that would be another great example.

Salome Schillack:

The next question I want you to think about is, does it leave your ideal customer feeling something? Does it make them go, "Yes, I want to comment on this. Yes, I want to share this. Yes, I want to like this. I'm laughing at this. I'm crying about this. I'm giving it a thumbs up. I'm giving it a red heart"? Like, bring up some kind of, "Oh, this person really gets me. I need to engage with this," type of feeling? Because that is the best type of feeling.

Salome Schillack:

Now, it also needs to share some form of value with the clients. So it might be a video of you speaking on stage. It might be a snippet of a video that you did on social media or on Facebook Live, or it could just be a quote that your ideal customer is going to immediately recognize as something that is a value to them. Then you can mention like, "I was talking to a client recently." Or, "I was helping someone recently." Or, "When I share with my students, blah, blah, blah." Immediately, that gives you authority. So without going out and saying, "Hey, I am expert such and such and I'm going to tell you such and such," you are indirectly inferring your authority, inferring that you have expertise.

Salome Schillack:

I have two examples of engagement ads that I am making available to you that, or two engagement ads that I have run in the past. They're good examples. I'll talk you through them and then, if you want to go to the show notes, you can go and check them out. The first one is a photo of me holding one of those, you know those letter boards, where you can build out messages with little letter tiles? I'm just holding it, I'm standing in front of a very bright purple screen and it said, "You had me at funnel." That's what it says, "You had me at funnel."

Salome Schillack:

Now, the first thing I want to share about this image is, anybody who's into funnels, anyone who's into Facebook Ads, anyone who's into online marketing, is going to see me holding that going, "You had me at funnel," and of course, if they're my funnel gals, my funnel guys, they're going to be like, "Yes, you had me at funnel to." And the opening line of that, the first line of copy is, "Want to know how to successfully use Facebook and Instagram ads to launch your online course." Then I share some value and I say to them, I say, "Something I get asked all the time is, 'How do I even know if my results are good?'" Then I share some information about how they can know that their results are good.

Salome Schillack:

So for someone who is interested in launching an online course, someone who's interested in Facebook and Instagram ads, someone who's interested in funnels, they're immediately going to stop and read this copy, and they are going to associate with what I'm saying, and they're going to get value out of it. They're going to like it. They're going to comment or they're going to share it.

Salome Schillack:

The other ad that I have that is an example of a good engagement ad is a video I did. I literally just recorded, it's just my head, my like a talking head video. Then there's literally one line of copy, and that one line of copy just says this, "Manifesting is successful online course launch without knowing your data is just daydreaming." Now, what we did really well with this ad is we hit the manifestors, we hit the online course launchers, and we hit anyone who is into data and analytics. I don't mention the word Facebook ads in the copy, but I talk about Facebook Ads in the video. And I have captions on the video so that anyone who watches the video can watch it with the sound off and still read about how to understand your data from your lead magnet, to your launch all the way through to sales, and then understanding and interpreting that data so that you can know what worked, know what didn't work, and then scale beyond that.

Salome Schillack:

And by scaling from your data, you are then able to manifest your successful online courses. So it kind of also polarizes the audience a little bit because, I'm speaking to the manifestors but I'm telling them they need data. And so, I think if there was were two buckets of peoples, one was the manifesting bucket and one was the data people, then I would probably fall more into the data group. Even though I totally on board with manifesting and believe in all the woo-woo stuff, love the woo-woo stuff, when I open my mouth to talk, it's data that comes out. So I tend to attract more of the people who are interested in learning about the data than, and not many people come to me to learn manifestation. Let's just put it that way. So those two examples are hooked up for you on the show notes page if you want to go and have a look at them.

Salome Schillack:

The next step you're going to take as you work on your setting up your engagement ad is, you're going to set up an ad with the objective post-engagement in the campaign level. So when you set up your ad at campaign level, you have to tell Facebook what your objective is and you're going to choose post-engagement as your objective. Then when you move to the ad set level, you're going to choose your warm audiences. Your warm audiences, remember who they are? They are those audiences you set up in step one. They're your website visitors. People who've engaged with you on Facebook and Instagram. People who are on your email list. These are your warm audience. So you're going to run it to your warm audiences first. And if you have a super, super, super small warm audience, it's likely that you're going to run through this warm audience pretty quickly.

Salome Schillack:

The way that you know that you've run through your warm audience is when you hit frequency four. When your frequency gets to four, you know you've kind of put it in front of most of the people in your warm audience, it's time to move on. But hopefully by that time, your ad will have some comments, some likes, and some shares on it because you've run into people who already know, like, and trust you. Once that's done, you're going to switch off the warm ad and then you're going to duplicate that ad. And when you duplicate that ad, there's going to be a little box that comes up that says, "Do you want to bring the social proof on this ad with you?" You're going to check that box and make sure that in your duplicated campaign, you have brought the social proof with you.

Salome Schillack:

And this time at ad set level, you're going to run this ad to a cold audience. This is an audience you choose from either their interests or it's a lookalike audience. You may have created a lookalike audience of your email lists or a lookalike audience of people engaged with you on Facebook and that would be another cold audience you can target. The purpose of running these engagement ads to a cold audience is A, for it to fill your warm audiences with people, B for it to generate engagement on your accounts, and C, to just bring new people into your world on autopilot every single day. Imagine if you can stop hustling your heart out on social media, and instead just know that you have a handful of engagement ads that for $5 a day is totally doing the work for you. That makes life a lot easier.

Salome Schillack:

You know that these ads are working when you're getting about a one to three cents per engagement. When you're paying one to three cents per engagement, that's a fairly good indication that you have message market match, which means the message in your ad is a good match to the audience that you have chosen. You also know it's working if your social media all of a sudden comes to life. If you all of a sudden see, "Wow, my social media is just on fire," it's probably because of the engagement ad you're running.

Salome Schillack:

You also know it's working if you are running list building ads or conversion ads and the costs starts to come down. Now, that does not happen overnight. I will tell you. That takes a few months to happen, but as you learn to target the based audiences, as your pixel becomes seasoned, as your account mojo gets better and better and better, those lead costs come down. I will tell you, my lead costs have come down from about $12 to where it is now at about $3, $3.50.

Salome Schillack:

Now, with this strategy, my goal is to help you never waste money on another Facebook ad, another boosted post, or another ad that you're running for list building that's just ridiculously expensive again. My goal for this is to help you see that there's a way out of that social media no man's land, where you are showing up every day and no one's engaging. There is a way to build an audience and to build your email list faster, and then to sell to that audience. Because ultimately, the reason why we're doing all of this is so that we can sell to those audiences so that we can make a bigger impact in people's lives, and so that we can create more freedom for ourselves in our businesses.

Salome Schillack:

I hope that you've enjoyed today's episode. I hope you've gotten a lot out of it. We are opening the doors to A-Lister again on the 13th of January. Mark your calendars. A-Lister is the fastest way to build a lucrative audience online and to make your first sale using Facebook and Instagram ads without wasting your money, selling your soul on social media, or getting a tech degree. You can sign up to be on the wait list for A-Lister right now by going to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist. That is it for me today. I will see you again next week. Can't wait to talk to you then. I hope you have a lovely week. Bye.

Salome Schillack:

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.