S2E6 | Special Guest: Facebook Ad expert Sheena Murphy

“Facebook ads aren’t complicated, they’re very straightforward, we tend to make them more complicated than they are.” -Sheena Murphy

In this episode I had a great conversation with Sheena Murphy, a Facebook Ads expert who has been running Facebook ads for clients for five years. She’s worked with budgets of all sizes, and she was kind enough to give us some advice on using Facebook ads to grow our groups. 

First Sheena stressed that many people out there make the mistake of thinking that since there’s so much competition on Facebook that you have to have a huge budget for ads, but this isn’t necessarily the case. There’s no reason you can’t start by using $5-$10 a day! Even if you’re a brick and mortar store, if you spent just $5 a day trying to reach new customers, there’s no way you wouldn’t increase your buyers!

I used Facebook Ads when I was running a challenge in the Summer of 2020. It was a free challenge with no upsell, but as soon as they signed up for the challenge they were guided to my Facebook group. That challenge led people to sign up for my membership, which meant the ads paid for themselves. 

Now Facebook doesn’t like for you to advertise directly about your group, and it’s good to have an ad for an offering that will get them there, or that will provide you with their email address. You can give them a free downloadable checklist, a calendar, a video series, or anything else that provides value. Even though you could advertise directly about joining your group, why not give people something of value?

There are a couple of ways to create Facebook ads, but first I want to define two different terms. 

A cold audience is made up of people who have never interacted with you. They may not even know who you are. When advertising to a cold audience, feed Facebook demographics, which can include gender, location, interests, and more. Facebook will then find people who match that description. 

A warm audience are those who have already been in touch with you. You can upload your email list to Facebook, or can include people who have visited your website, or can use the people who like your page, and Facebook will show your ad to them. You can also take a list of people who have bought from you, and tell Facebook to create a lookalike audience to market to, so your ad will be shown to others who are similar to those on your buyer’s list. You don’t have to have as big of a budget when advertising to a warm audience.

The bottom line for advertising to both of these audiences is that the more help you can give Facebook, the better. You’ll need to use different ad copy for both groups, and have a different budget. 

In addition to advertising a challenge to grow your group, Sheena has seen clients give out free or low cost resources like lists, calendars, or documents that will help them keep track of their results. You can then link your resources to a ‘thank you’ page on your website, which includes a link to join your group. Sheena recommends that your landing page be simple, and will provide them with an offer that collects their email. 

A lot of Facebook advertising is testing to see what works, so Sheena recommends testing out the waters before going crazy with your ad budget. You have to know your audience, know what they want to hear, and use an image that makes them stop scrolling. Otherwise, you could have the most amazing offer but it wouldn’t get noticed. 

Sheena’s favorite way to use ads to grow your group is to grow your email list. It’s one of the most valuable assets to your business because once someone has joined your email list, you can email them whenever you want. You don’t have to create another ad and pay for it, now communicating with them is completely free!

And just an FYI, you may want to start running Facebook ads sooner rather than later. Apple’s iOS 14 update allows people not to be followed around Facebook and the internet. So the people that don’t want to be tracked on Facebook won’t be tracked. This makes it harder on the advertising side, because if you have something running, Facebook’s tracking is off from how it used to be, and it’s hard to know your exact numbers. And iOS 15, which will be coming out, will allow people to use a fake email address to download offers and other products, so you won’t be able to add them to your email list, either. But, doom and gloom aside, there still isn’t another ad platform that’s as good as Facebook. 

So if you have something, don’t wait! Get it out there!