16: Growing Your Social Media Audience with Paid Ads

Indie Made Business: A Podcast for Creative Entrepreneurs and Handmade Business Owners

Once you get to a certain point in your business, you’re going to have to start thinking about using paid ads to reach a wider audience. Investing money into advertising is a big step, and you want to be able to get the most bang for your buck, but where do you even start to have a strategy that is going to win for you? If these questions and worries are rolling around in your head, we have just the episode for you this week! We’re talking about what you’ll want to consider before spending your hard-earned money, the types of ads you can use, and how to be intentional.

The whole purpose of running ads is to get people to view your products and really, because we’re trying to sell those products. But a great ad is not something that’s just trying to be a one and done, sell this one product and move on with your life. You’re trying to create community, and so your ads are just to get them in the door. Once you have them at your website, or your social media, having a strategy beyond that is crucial to retaining the customers that showed up. There’s so much to talk about on this subject, regarding the type of ads, the technology that’s available to you, and more. So make sure you’re taking notes because we’re getting into it!

Quotes:

“When we first start out with ads, we jump in thinking that we just want to make a sale. So we set up an ad for a product and we just hope that it's going to entice someone who's never heard of our business before to click through to our website and make a purchase. We're disappointed when we don't see those results, or maybe we only see one sale. What we don't realize is that asking a cold audience who's never heard from you to see your ad and jump over to your website and give you their money, well, that's a really big ask. It takes several touchpoints like upwards of six or seven before someone becomes an actual paying customer.” - Cheryl

“Make sure your ads aren’t overselling what you’re offering or you’re making them jump through hoops. When people come to your store and have a positive experience, they're probably going to tell a friend or two, but if you let somebody have a negative experience, they will tell everybody. You don't want anybody to leave your platform or leave your page feeling salty, because they might spread this opinion of you that may or may not even be anywhere near accurate.” – Nicky

“Increasing your ad spend slowly gives the algorithm enough time to adjust to new budget and optimize the delivery of your ad. Increasing it too quickly or by too much can do more harm than good. So a good rule of thumb is to scale your ad spend. It's kind of like scaling a business where you get the formula down first, you make sure everything’s working the way it should, and then you scale and grow at a rate that fits your business model. It’s the same with ads.” -Cheryl

Key Points and takeaways:

- Make sure you have a strategy before investing money into an ad campaign

- Utilize all the analytics and technology that’s available to you through platforms like Google or Facebook

- Know your audience, and know what step of the journey toward being a customer that they’re on so you can properly target ads to them

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