Marketing Runs Deep: Episode 17

ads Jul 07, 2020

Hey, everyone, this is Bryan Hatch, founder of AutomateBIG, and I want to jump to another episode of Marketing Runs Deep, and talk to you about some of the frequently asked questions that I get as I'm out and about. When I'm telling people what we do here at AutomateBIG, one of those is how can I run ads by myself, for myself, for my thing, and that's a great question. There's a lot of people that want to go into the nuts and bolts and all the details and figure out all the cool things like an agency would, or someone that's going to run your ads should, but when you want to just get some things moving, and you want to understand how that works, it shouldn't be that complicated, and so I want to teach you today, how to run ads on Facebook/Instagram and on Google AdWords.

Now, the keyword being very simple. I'm showing you simple ways of how to get things done because you shouldn't be scared of getting something out there. Even on your organic side, if you're gonna post a cool video like this, that's just value to help other people get ahead and whatever you're gonna do for them, well, even that, if I just post it by itself on my pages, it will only get so many people to see it. No matter how many followers you have, if you don't put a little money behind it, it doesn't get out to your whole audience. Even though you might think that if you have a thousand followers or 10,000 followers, or all 10,000 were to see what you posted, that's incorrect. Even then, you probably need to be able to put a little money behind what you create, it goes a lot further, and you can get things done, get videos seen, for less than a penny per view. Some cool stuff out there.

Today I'm gonna jump right on and go through a very simple "how-to" set up a quick ad on Facebook/Instagram, and on YouTube, that's it. I'm not gonna go into all the semantics and all the really high-level tips, just basic. So, go ahead and check this out. Jumping right into Facebook ad creation. I want to remind you that we're gonna go straightforward, simple. I'm not gonna get super complicated. There are advanced strategies to be able to use here, but I want to be able to get you off the starting blocks. When you come in to create an ad, you'll be able to click on Create New Ad inside of your business manager, which is nice. And you'll come to a screen that looks like this. From here, you'll be able to choose what your marketing objectives are, what are you after?

Today, I'm gonna show you Engagement, and this is more along the lines of if you want people to comment, to engage, to watch a video, to check out what you're doing, which is the purpose of this specific video. There are different strategies. Brand awareness on this side of the fence is your lowest level. It's gonna be your cheapest style ad because it's very, very cheap, but you're not gonna track a whole lot of results, considering what you could do with the other options here. Then you've got Consideration where you're gonna get website clicks. You're gonna get people to watch your videos or engage with your posts, which is really cool, and this is a good place I like to start.

I typically don't start in the Brand awareness. It's a little bit too low on the totem pole for me. I want to be able to do a little bit more, and then Conversions will get you, if you're tracking conversions, when they're gonna go to a sales page and go from there, which, you want to use ads in phases. If you're starting a brand new ad, this is the reason why I'm starting in Engagement. If I'm starting a brand new ad, I want to get people to engage with my topic, with my conversation, and so how I do that is I use that as my objective, instead of going all the way to Conversions first, where that's trying to get someone to buy something. I might need to be able to drum up a warm audience that recognizes my face, my name, my brand, and that's why this category, Traffic and Engagement, are my two favorite to be working on. Brand awareness will get you page likes, which is a conversation for another day, but Traffic Engagement, a really good place to start.

You can look for Engagement, Page likes, Event responses. Today, I'm working on getting more people to watch my blog episode. Again, I will launch this ad while we're talking, which will be fun. From there you have two options, to either do a Lifetime Budget or a Daily Budget. I'm doing Lifetime over a specific set period of days, and that's how much I want to spend. You can set your own budgets. Knowing that I'm looking for engagements, which should be pretty cheap. I'm just trying to get thousands of people to watch and engage with my posts.

From there I'd hit Continue, and that will take me to the Audience section. You'll note that on each of the pages, I'm using a specific set of criteria to name, even when I come to the Objective side of the fence, I have this specific naming convention. There are different ways and versions of how to do that. You just want to make sure that it's clear to you what you're doing. For me, this is the objective and this is what I'm gonna be working on. So then when I go to the next page, I want my ad set. This is kind of not the ad level. There are three levels to creating an ad here. The ad set name for me is gonna tell me a little more about who I'm targeting, okay? That's how I use the ad set naming convention. The default that you get from Facebook is very simplistic. As you go through, you're gonna create your own audiences.

I recommend looking, and that's another conversation for another day as well, to go through and really understand your audience. For me, I'm specifically targeting specific cities in big cities in specific countries that speak English, that are interested in my product or service or the topic of my conversation, and then I want to make sure that I'm excluding certain people, that I don't really want my ads to go in front of, and then I also want to kind of layer who's who, so this is a very brief, very basic level, but you can get a targeting strategy that gets you an idea of who you're after.

You don't have to be super specific as you're starting. The better you're working on when you have sales, the better it's gonna be for you. It's funny how even though my audience is rather large, millions of people, I like the arrow to point in the center, usually, two to four million's what I'm shooting for, with an objective of engagement. I'm cool with being a little bit wider spread, and not too broad, though, where I'm targeting tens of millions of people does not work for me. Next, I am looking at specific placements. You can go to Automatic Placements, and then Facebook and Instagram will look and see what your video, your ad is actually going to use. It will automatically place your ad wherever it possibly can.

For me, I like to exclude Audience Network when I'm getting these things moving, because it's just a little different engagement, and so, primarily, feeds are very good, stories are a possibility. The videos do have to be certain sizes and lengths to meet those objectives, but I like the feed, so if you're gonna pick anything, the feed's probably your best bet to get started or to use the automatic and see what you come up with. From there, I'm setting the time of when I'm actually gonna be doing these when this boost is gonna work. And then I hit Continue. I have an Ad Name, which usually, for me, is going to be along the lines of my headline or something that identifies what we're doing and what I'm trying to get people to accomplish.

Now, even though my objective is engagement, I do it. I would love for them to click and check them out, the rest of my blog, which is great. You want to make sure you connect your Facebook and your Instagram pages so that it works on both platforms. And then, I'm using a single video, and the thumbnail is gorgeous, which I'm excited about, but either way, you upload a video, which I've done. I've trimmed it so that it cuts out some of my intro that I usually have on this video. And then the captions are particularly important underneath the videos because a lot of people watch social media on mute, so that they're not causing a lot of noise for the neighbors. And so once you have your captions in your video, you'll want to hit Save. That way, the captions come up on your video, which is wonderful.

Facebook does have the option to be able to auto-generate those for you, and you can go through that. I like to upload my own, so they go in line with what I want it to. And then from there, you want to create your primary text, it gives me one option, depending on the type of ad that I'm running. And then I have a URL that I'm trying to get people to point to. That's not the primary reason for the post, but I would love to see if anyone wants to learn more, to see other episodes of my blog, and I have a button for that. From there, I want to make sure that my Pixel is engaged. That is what will track people that go and check out your post. It warms up audiences for other ads that you can run later to get them to go buy something from you, which is great. And then from there, you hit Confirm, and that is the ad. I purposely didn't want to over-complicate things. There are many things you can do when you're going through your ads.

Now, going on to YouTube, when you go to create a YouTube ad, Brand Awareness and Reach is what you want. I could look for website traffic if I wanted to go that route as well and get clicks to my website. I'm particularly interested in getting more people to watch this episode, and so, that is the video campaign objective that I've created here. And then from there, the campaign names are pretty straightforward. They auto-populate those. I usually add some suffix to differentiate what I'm doing. Next, the bidding strategy you can change if you want to. Depending on what kind of ad you're running, that will give you a different objective. And then from there, a similar situation. I'm creating a budget for a specific time period. It gives me the idea of what we're spending. And then from there, I can also enter the countries and locations where I want my ads to run, which I've done. Then, if you have different languages, you can do that.

From here, there's a little bit of a difference when you're creating an ad in YouTube. This is the Google ad platform. I'm particularly interested in making sure that I focus on the specific set of audiences, which are people that are interested, they're in the advertising marketing services. They need help with their advertising and marketing. That is something that I've chosen because of past performance of other ads that I've run, that shows that this is one of the audiences that is most likely to engage with my posts or with my ads. And so that's important, but different than Facebook, I'm not gonna layer those quite so stringently. I'm not going to say they have to be in these countries and in this audience and they can't be this kind of person. You don't want to layer your audiences inside. I have found that if I select more than one or get really fancy in here, it generally makes the ads perform far worse than if I focus on one style.

Google Ads is a little more simple of a platform, and they still do a great job with what is available. You can add keywords and topics. This is another part of the process is if you're gonna go with audiences, go with audiences. If you're gonna go with keywords, go with keywords. If you go with topics, go with topics. If you're gonna go with a certain placement, go with certain placement, but if you keep adding and layering on top of it, what you're gonna do, the effectiveness of your campaign is going to plummet.

While I'm not gonna spend the time going through every little piece of why that's important, in all of my learnings, with all the people that I've worked with, and those that spend a whole lot more money on YouTube advertising than I do, that is the recommendation that I would recommend that you use as well. Get clear on what you're after, but I wouldn't recommend layering with keywords and topics and the specific placements. Allow it to happen the way that YouTube will let it run. You say, what, per the thousand views, am I willing to pay? I'd put in a dollar amount, and then it will give you the estimated performance because of what I spent, how many impressions I should be looking to see given the audience that I've talked about.

From here, it will ask you to go and put in a YouTube URL. So the next section is a YouTube video. So videos that are running on YouTube have to be a YouTube video. Unlisted, you don't have to have it be a public video. And then final URL, if they click on it, I'd love them to go to the blog which I've put in, and I have a call to action. Some only have 10 and 15 characters, so note that your call to action and your headline are very short and cannot go outside of that. Do not caps lock your situations. Make it straightforward, simple. Google does not like to look like you're shouting. They already do that for you. So make it simple and straightforward. From there, you can auto-generate the banner, or you can upload a specific image. As it's recommended, I like this because they're picking the banner that showcases what I'm talking about, which I like. And then I hit Create Campaign. And that is what we have to create ads on YouTube.

Now, this is meant to be a simple, straightforward approach to Facebook advertising and YouTube advertising. For those of us that want to get a message out there, get things moving, and not have to pay a big corporation or entity or agency to accomplish this for us, this will get the ball rolling. This should get you out of being scared of clicking the Submit button and running ads. You're not gonna ruin your life. You're not gonna ruin your customers' lives. Get your ads running, and you'll have a whole lot better chance getting in front of the right people and you'll learn this process.

All right, so with that simple formula, if you look at how to be able to put an ad together on Facebook and Instagram and on YouTube, if you'll put those things into practice today, you can have somebody else that's not usually seeing your videos today. So put it in practice, that's just one way to AutomateBIG.

 

Close

50% Complete

Get Weekly Training From The Marketing Guy Who Has Been Behind The Scenes For Multi-Million Dollar Businesses

Enter your name and email to learn the tactics used by the most successful businesses in today's market.