Are you questioning whether you should run your own ads? Let’s explore this together with my marketing expert insights!

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Transcript:

Hey there, wonderful people! Today, I want to address the question: Is it worth it to run your own ads? And the answer to that is yes, if tech is easy for you.

Okay, that’s it, podcast over.

Just kidding!

The short answer

But yeah, I did have this question posed to me, and it got me thinking. Well, yeah, the short answer is yes, if tech is easy for you. Yes, if you’re comfortable with looking at the backend environment of the ads platform, and if you’re comfortable with all the moving parts back there, or if you’ve got someone on your team who’s comfortable with doing that.

Personal experience

This got me thinking to my earlier days in my digital career, where I was a web design freelancer. It used to really bug me a lot when people built their own websites, and my thoughts were like, no, you don’t do it! You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to get it wrong, it’s going to look awful, your customers are not going to buy from you, they’re just going to click the X and go away. But that was a very long time ago, and I’ve grown a lot as a freelancer. And then, as I became a consultant, I started to develop a lot more consideration for what someone might be going through.

So, I would say now, when it comes to websites, yes, totally go ahead and do one of your own. This will help you learn a lot, it’ll help you understand what kind of components go into a website, and it might lead you to decide that website building is not for you. You may have gotten a feel for what you could do, but you decided that you can’t really figure out all the design and usability things for best practices. If that’s just not your thing, and that’s totally fine.

Running ads on your own

And the same goes with ads. It’s totally possible to do it on your own without hiring help, so long as you’re comfortable, like I said, as long as you’re comfortable with the interface and understanding what needs to go into it, and then understanding how it hooks up to your overall brand and marketing strategy, how it hooks into your website, and being comfortable interpreting the data.

Training and resources

Having said all that, currently, at the time that I’m making this episode, I don’t actually offer any sort of training to teach you how to do Facebook ads yourself. It is something that would be nice if I had that, but there are a couple of reasons why I don’t. The first is that I just don’t really have the capacity. So as much as I’d like to help you, that’s kind of a thing that’s preventing me from doing it at the moment.

But the other thing is, there are plenty of good Facebook ads and digital marketing training people that I know, that people in my network have trained with, and people that I’ve actually trained with. So, I’ve done comprehensive training courses with one agency here in Melbourne, Australia, called The Digital Picnic. It was 10 weeks long, and it was very comprehensive.

The kind of courses that TDP put together are everything that you need to know, and they provide a lot of support as well, and a lot of opportunities for asking the team questions. They’d be my top recommendation. There is also somebody that a lot of my network have trained with called Zach Spuckler. So, I haven’t trained with him, I haven’t actually met him and done any of his courses, but he comes very highly recommended by people in my network. So, I will provide links to these sources in the page for this episode.

Understanding the tech

Now, I just wanted to come back to what I said about understanding the tech. I actually did explain some of the tech things in a previous episode, some of the tech things that you’ll need to get your head around. So, like I said, understanding the interface, being comfortable with the Facebook Business Manager, being comfortable with knowing where the pixel goes on your website, and how all that stuff works, being comfortable with interpreting the data so that you know what’s working and what isn’t, and how to pivot if necessary if one bit of your ad strategy isn’t working.

And then, being comfortable with coming up with the creative, because another important thing that you have to keep in mind when you’re setting up and running ads is that creative is probably one of the most important parts. And by creative, I mean the images, the copywriting, so that’s the words that you use, and videos too. Videos are pretty important.

You kind of want to get some evidence that your material, your images, and your video, and your writing will work. So, you get that evidence by just putting those out in organic, so not paid ads, and then you can get that right first, and then you can sort of start putting those things into paid ads. And then, of course, there is boosting.

Boosting posts

I do want to mention boosting. I do have episodes of this podcast that are dedicated to boosting posts, where I go a bit more in-depth on that.

➡️ Related podcast episode: 007 To boost or not to boost? That is the question.

Some people say that they tried ads and it didn’t work, and I imagine what’s going on is that they’re just boosting a post. And boosting a post can work, you just have to not hit the Boost button and walk away. It works a lot better when you use the strategy that I explained in my Boost Post episode, where you need to have organic content that works, you need to have a call to action that your targeted audience will feel okay clicking on and interacting with. Especially if it’s a $500 or $1,000 course, you don’t want to boost a post announcing that to a cold audience who’ve never seen you before, because they’re going to think that you’re crazy and think that you’re spamming them.

➡️ Related podcast episode: 013 Your first FB ad (even if you don’t quite feel ready).

What you want to do with boosted posts and early awareness strategies is just put content out there that helps your audience get to know you. And then if they resonate with who you are as a brand or as a person, as a teacher, whatever, you move them down the funnel.

Educating yourself before you run your own ads

So, there’s a lot of things going on, there’s a lot of moving pieces to this, and a lot of things that I would recommend educating yourself on. And yeah, you definitely can run, you can play around with the ads interface without any kind of study or training. I wouldn’t recommend that though.

But yeah, I think it’s totally possible, and that’s how I’d recommend you do it though, I’d recommend educating yourself as much as possible, understand what is and isn’t possible, and then yeah, if you or a person on your team is okay with that, run with it.

Conclusion

It also puts you in a better place should you ever decide to outsource help for this kind of thing. So, anyway, those are my thoughts on whether or not you should try to run ads yourself. If you got any questions to do with this sort of thing, I’m happy to answer them. And yeah, as I said, I’ll include some links to some resources where you can go and learn how to do Facebook ads yourself.