EP84 How to Use Facebook Ads to Boost Sales and Grow Your Business with Stacy Reed

In this episode we get into how Facebook ads can be a game changer for your business. Stacy Reed, a Facebook ads expert, shares how it can skyrocket your business visibility and drive real sales growth. She reveals the must-know strategies for leveraging paid advertising while maintaining authenticity in your brand presence. Whether you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur this episode will give you actionable insights to elevate your online reach and maximize your ROI.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• How to blend organic social media with Facebook ads for long-term growth
• The role of a fractional CMO and how they can scale your marketing efforts
• Audience targeting strategies to ensure your ads reach the right people
• The difference between Boosted posts vs. Facebook ads 
• How to build genuine relationships with potential customers through ads
• The power of authentic, relatable content in high-converting campaigns
• Debunking myths about social media advertising that hold businesses back

So if you are looking to add Facebook ads or looking to refine your online marketing strategy, this episode is your roadmap to smarter marketing, stronger engagement, and bigger business wins.

Tune in now and start scaling your business with confidence.

Where to find Stacy Reed:

www.stacyzeal.co

LinkedIN

Free Workshop

Chapters

• 0:00 Leveraging Facebook Ads for Business Growth
• 4:03 Transitioning From Organic Marketing to Ads
• 8:40 Unlocking Advertising Success on Meta
• 19:49 Maximizing Facebook Ads for Small Businesses
• 31:42 Creating Compelling Ads for Conversions
• 38:34 Strategies for Ad Success and Growth

Transcript

Stacy Reed: 0:00

If you see an ad come across your timeline from a brand or a person you don't know, you're going to probably click on that page, go to their page, check out their stuff, make sure they're a real person, and so that's what we want to make sure that our members understand it's not just running ads and saying I run ads and that's it. It's also about making sure you're creating the right organic content and have the right email sequence in place and have the right lead magnets to bring people in.

Violeta: 0:22

Hola, mi gente, welcome to the money chisme podcast, where we spill the real chisme on building wealth without the bullshit.

Violeta: 0:33

Whether you're trying to invest, grow that side, hustle finally get your money right or, my favorite, buy rental properties, you're in the right place. I'm your host, violeta, a first-gen Mexican immigrant real estate investor, entrepreneur and your financial hype woman. Get ready for tips, tricks and expert advice straight from nuestra comunidad, porque el dinero es power and we're here to claim it. Don't forget you can always find helpful resources down in the show notes and in descriptions, so make sure you check that out.

Violeta: 1:10

When you're an entrepreneur or you own a business, one of the biggest obstacles is growth and getting your business out there and having your target customer or target client trying to find your business. I know that's one of the things that I struggled with, and we're going to be talking about how to grow your business using Facebook ads. Hola, I am Violeta, your host of the Money Chisme podcast, where we talk about personal finance, real estate, investing and entrepreneurship. So today we're going to be talking about not only how to use social media, which is kind of organic, but how you can use Facebook ads to add on top of that to grow your business and so joining me. Today I have Stacey Reed, a fractional CMO and Facebook ads expert. Ceo of Stacey Seal Co. Hi, stacey, thank you so much for being here today.

Stacy Reed: 2:12

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Violeta: 2:16

Yeah, I'm excited because I will say that I did try to do Facebook ads a few times. I don't know if I had. I think I had like maybe five at the most that went to like my website or clicked on my profile. So definitely interested in this. I am definitely a newbie, so I'll be learning along with the listeners. So I've got a few questions. But, yeah, before we get into that, I want to give you the opportunity to introduce yourself.

Stacy Reed: 2:48

Tell us a little bit about you and your company and what you do. Yeah, definitely, my name is Stacey and I am the CEO of Stacey's Eel Co, which we help clients who are looking to accelerate their growth, and the way that we choose to do that is with Facebook and Instagram ads. So we work with clients in the agency sense, where we'll run it for them, but we also work with clients who are looking to do it themselves, and that's a bigger I would say a bigger pool of people. There's a lot of people out there trying to figure out how to run their own Facebook and Instagram ads, even if it's just to try to figure out if it works for your business. Try to generate some leads and stuff like that, to test it out, see if it works, before you want to hand it over to somebody else.

Stacy Reed: 3:22

It's definitely beneficial for business owners to understand at least how Facebook ads work, but there's a lot of our clients are looking to run it themselves, and so we do that with our membership, our courses, different kinds of our podcast roadmap to 1 million, all of that kind of stuff. We have a lot of great information out there about how to leverage Facebook and Instagram ads, but also how to pair that with organic marketing to be able to take things to the next level. Yeah, that's what we do, and we typically work with online service providers, local businesses, typically those clients who are looking to get more leads. Or I need more leads, I need more visibility, I need more people knowing about who I am and what I do, so that's what we help them with.

Violeta: 3:59

Yeah, yeah, and I want to get into a little bit of that because I mentioned it. Social media is a great way to start marketing and stuff, but I want to talk about maybe because they work together, or maybe there's a difference of relying so much on just social media and then moving to also include Facebook ads.

Stacy Reed: 4:23

Like you said, organic, social and organic marketing in general is just such a great way to start your business right. Like you can get things started, you start to grow a following and start to get people interacting with you, and it is required to have that kind of like two-way conversation, especially as you're starting out, so you can start to understand what do my people need? Because sometimes we think we know what they need or we think that the message that we're putting out is clear and it's not right. We think that the message that we're putting out is clear and it's not right. So we need that feedback from people to understand how do I make this better? Right, how do I better position myself? How do I better market myself?

Stacy Reed: 4:49

But then there comes a point where you start to think about growth, which is something that when we're first starting out, we're trying to make our first few sales, trying to get things moving, trying to get some momentum. But then, once you start to have some momentum, you're like how do I keep this momentum up, especially in a time where, like social media, algorithms and the reach is just dropping right, it's just really, really hard to keep up with social media as a platform, because they're designed specifically organic. They're designed to keep you coming back and posting on the platforms and people coming back and engaging. So it requires you to continue to show up. It requires you to continue to post content, and that's all well and good when all you have is time, right, and you have more time than you have money in your business. But there becomes a point where you're starting to maybe hit that middle point where you're like I'm making some money and my time is starting to really kind of pull back. I don't have as much time as I used to be able to get on Facebook, get on Instagram posting and stuff like that.

Stacy Reed: 5:48

And so then that's when you want to start start to think about advertising, because an advertising comes to play where it says okay, let me take what you're already doing really, really well, and I'm going to put that in front of thousands of people, even hundreds of thousands of people, even millions of people, because there are two point like, billions of people use Facebook, billions of people use Instagram, right, and so what you're essentially doing when you're bringing ads to the mix and saying hey, I have something that works, I have some content that works, I have a presence that is growing. I have an offer that works and now I need to figure out how do I get my offers and my presence and my content in front of a cold audience. But then not just how do I get it in front of them, how do I then capture their attention and bring them into my world? And that's where advertising really shines, because it allows you to step outside of the people who just know you through a friend of a friend. Because if you think about the algorithm and the social media platforms, typically you start out by your content is seen by your followers, then their followers and that kind of audience spreads from there.

Stacy Reed: 6:33

But what about those people who are across the country or across the world who don't know you exist, who don't know anybody that you know, but they're looking for your solution, they're looking for you as the person to weigh, to teach that. They just don't know you exist. And so, with ads, it allows us to step outside of our current bubble and say let me find those people out there who are looking for my solution, who just don't know that I exist. Let me pull them into my world so they can start to see my organic content, they can get to know me, we can start to build a relationship, and then, when they're ready to invest in that solution, I am the natural person that they think of, or I'm the first person that they think of. So that's what you want to start to think about when it comes to ads, right? It's not that you stop organic marketing when you're running ads, it's more so. How do I then take the money that I've generated in my business and reinvest it into getting more people to come into my world?

Violeta: 7:19

Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true, because with organic marketing, just using your social media I'm glad you talked about it's your followers and then their friends and their friends.

Violeta: 7:32

And I did find myself with, like my Instagram and everything like that, definitely love like the people that I built there more if it became more of a network of support versus, like my target audience that's going to actually lead to a sale and organic marketing is perfect to grow and all that.

Violeta: 7:52

But then you're really mostly attracting just like followers versus people that are actually looking for your solution or your product or whatever, because maybe they just like oh cool, another latina I want to support, which a lot of them of my followers are that way. They're just like supporting, which is awesome, and then a few target audience, and so that's why that's how I kind of see Facebook ads. But it took a minute to get there because I was like I don't want to pay for Facebook ads. I don't see like the value in it. But there is value in it because now you're focusing on your target audience and just taking a little bit step back because I realized that we did not talk about what a fractional CMO it's. Seeing your title and it's like so okay, so what is that?

Stacy Reed: 8:36

Yeah, so a fractional CMO stands for fractional chief marketing officer. And if you think about a growing business, right, like a lot of times, we start our businesses, and particularly my clients. They start their business because they're really, really great at something, whether they're a lawyer, they are a CPA, they are great at finance, they're great at talking about money, they're a business coach, right, something like that. Right, they are starting a business based on their expertise. But then they start to realize that running a business is not only about your expertise, right, it is also about marketing, it is also about sales, it is also making sure that you bring those people in. And typically, my clients come to me and when they're looking for a fractional CMO, because they have built a business, they've gotten some momentum, they're growing and they're starting to get to a place where they're like okay, I know that if I want to take my business to the next level, I need to bring in an expert that knows marketing. Right, somebody that studied marketing, somebody went to school for marketing, that's done marketing as their job and loves it. Right, like me, right, I love marketing, I love talking about it, I love talking about Facebook ads, and so they start to realize that my zone of genius is serving my clients.

Stacy Reed: 9:37

It's even, maybe even being the face of the brand, but it's not doing the day-to-day stuff. It's not actually doing the strategic planning. It's not making sure that the campaigns that we're running are we're looking at the data and analyzing and optimizing? Are we using the right marketing tools? Do we have the right marketing systems in place? Right? That's kind of stuff is just they're like. That's not my zone of genius, that's not what I really want to focus on, and so that's where really what the where a fractional CMO shines is that I can be that executive leadership team personal in your leadership team that you need. That can really connect the vision of the CEO's vision with the marketing team and the people who are doing the execution of the marketing. I come in and can sit between them and I can really make sure that what the team is doing is contributing to the bottom line and then also making sure that what we are doing and we're communicating with the CEO to see how their vision shifts and change and grows over time and make sure that we on the marketing side can support that. So that's really where that fractional CMO comes in, because it's like I'm not a full-time employee, like you're not hiring me as your full-time in-house marketing executive, which comes with a salary of at least like an average, like $200,000 a year.

Stacy Reed: 10:41

You're coming in and you're hiring someone part-time, but you're hiring them for that high level expertise. You're not necessarily hiring them, or at least for us. Like our clients hire us for our strategic planning and our guidance and our leadership for their marketing team as well as their Facebook ads, but we're not the ones creating their reels. We're not the one that's posting the reels. Right, they have a junior marketer that is doing that. Right, that's their zone of genius is figuring out reels and TikTok and all the kinds of different things. But then we bring our expertise of like.

Stacy Reed: 11:09

Okay, how do we make sure that Instagram as a channel is contributing to the bottom line? Not just are we creating great reels, are we growing our following, but how do we evaluate this channel versus putting resources into this channel like ads or something like that? Like, how do we make those strategic pivots in the business? And so that's really when you are looking at a fractional CMO. They're coming in to be that executive, high-level leadership team that you need on your marketing team, but they're coming in as a part-time basis.

Violeta: 11:38

Okay, okay, that makes sense. Ooh, 200k, that's nice, but yeah, with Facebook ads, I guess one of the things that confuses me is is that separate from Instagram? Because you know like it's basically almost like they're under the same roof. So when you are trying to do Facebook ads, does it like, go with Instagram, like, does it show it to Instagram or is it just like something completely different?

Stacy Reed: 12:06

Yeah, that's such a great question and, honestly, that's one of the great things about investing in Facebook and Instagram and meta ads, I guess now because they've changed their name to meta, so I guess we'll call it meta.

Stacy Reed: 12:17

But so the whole umbrella is under meta, right. But if you think about like Facebook and Instagram, the great thing there is that when you are running ads on Facebook, you do also have the option to say I also want these to run on Instagram, or I want these to only run on Instagram, right, or I only want these to run on Facebook, because Meta also owns WhatsApp. If WhatsApp is a part of your business strategy, you can even send the same ads to WhatsApp. And so essentially, what happens when you go into business manager, which is businessfacebookcom, what you see is you'll have there's a section there where you can actually go and actually build ads, because that's really like a big difference from what people think about advertising. They're thinking about boosted posts a lot of times when they think about advertising.

Violeta: 12:58

That's what I did, so it's actually yeah, exactly, ok, so it wasn't even an ad, it was just a boost post.

Stacy Reed: 13:05

Yeah, and the thing about boosted posts is that they make it so tempting, right? They're just like, oh, don't you want like a thousand more people to see this? And you're like, yeah, I'll pay $5 to get a thousand people to see it, cool.

Violeta: 13:13

But what you really don't understand right.

Stacy Reed: 13:17

What you don't understand is that I'm behind that. What you're doing is you're telling Facebook hey, show this ad to more people who are likely to engage with it. So an engagement is likes, comments and shares and, as we know, comments, likes and shares do not pay the bills. We want people to come into our pipeline. We need people to book calls. Then we need to buy people to buy things. That's what we want people to do, and so a boosted post is very limited in the sense that it is just like hey, how do I get more engagement on this particular post?

Stacy Reed: 13:42

But when you go into the back end of Facebook, which is businessfacebookcom, like I mentioned, and you go to actually build ads and ads manager, what you'll see is you have so much more opportunity, you have so many more options, meaning you can you have different objectives. On that first kind of level of like, it's not engagement. You can say I want to show this to sale people who are more likely to become sales. I want to show this to people who are more likely to become leads. You can really pick what objective you want Facebook to focus on for your ad campaign, unlike with a boosted post, which is the default is engagement. Then also there it opens up your different audiences that you can target. Like you can target a lot of different interest groups on Facebook, you can target your custom audiences, which is like people who visited your website.

Stacy Reed: 14:20

So if you, for example, have a business where people may have checked out your services but they didn't book that call, you can have an ad that just only shows to people who visited your website or only shows to people who have visited a certain page of your website. You can even get that granular. And then you have more creative options when you run ads and ads manager. So you get the option to be able to test videos and test still images against each other, right, instead of having only one ad, one copy, one piece of creative, you can say, hey, let me take this one image and give it five different headlines and Facebook will figure out which headline works best. Or Facebook will figure out what body copy works best.

Stacy Reed: 14:55

And so I guess I say all that to say like, when you're running ads and ads manager, you have a lot more flexibility, you have a lot more options and it's a lot you'll get. It'll be a lot more successful because you can target and say this is what I particularly want, which is leads and sales, versus let me just boost this post and just have more people comment on it or more people like it, because sometimes we want more comments, likes and shares. But I generally tell people that boosting posts is a waste of money because really rarely do we want more likes, comments and shares. We really want people to go and do the thing right. I don't care how many people like it, I want you to go and buy the thing.

Violeta: 15:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I spent. How much did I end up spending? I think it was like 35 bucks, or something.

Stacy Reed: 15:37

So, yeah, I think I got a follower. Yeah, you know, and that's, I didn't yeah.

Violeta: 15:39

I didn't realize that was the difference. I guess I thought like you created a post and then that you could make it like an ad and then you just push that into an ad. But I didn't know like you had. I did kind of like play around with that, but I think I just scheduled posts on there like the business suite or whatever it's called, and I didn't know that's what that was. So I'm glad that you mentioned it. I'm going to go look at it.

Stacy Reed: 16:04

There's a lot of tools in there. Yeah, a lot of tools Like the insights tools are really good to look at, cause A lot of tools like the insights tools are really good to look at because then you can see the analytics of, like your Facebook page and your Instagram. Other things we look at are, like the custom audiences are really good, because then you can take your email list and say, hey, let me upload my email list in here and stuff like that, so you get a lot of opportunity. But then also, when you're looking in there, you'll see a thing called ads manager, and that's when where you'll be able to see all of the different options you have when you're running ads in the backend versus running it as a boosted post.

Violeta: 16:34

Oh, that's crazy. I didn't know you could put like your email lists on there and then it was target them. If they have like a, is it just like if they have a Facebook or Instagram?

Stacy Reed: 16:43

right, like you could yeah, what it'll do is it'll. So let's say, like you have an email list, you have to have a minimum of a thousand people. So let's say you have a thousand people on your email list, you can take that list and upload that into Facebook, and what Facebook will do is they'll try to find the match by email. So, like, if someone puts their email in, it'll try to find them on that Facebook page. Sometimes people's email addresses don't match up, like for, especially if you're a business right, like I might like, my email address for my Facebook page is my personal email that I set up years and years and years and years and years ago when I started my Facebook page. But what I use for business, when I like sign up for a lead magnet or something like that, it's typically a different email address. So you have that happen sometimes, but for the most part, they are going to try to match as many people as possible. You can also put phone numbers in there, which is might get you closer right, because typically people may have one phone number right, so you can add phone numbers in there and say hey here, match people up by phone number. This is especially good if you're using like texting as part of your business strategy. So you're already getting people's text messages, getting people's phone numbers anyway. So there's a lot of flexibility that you have.

Stacy Reed: 17:51

And even with that not even just that you can target your email list because you can say, hey, only run this particular ad to the people who are on my email list.

Stacy Reed: 17:54

Which you can also do is say, hey, facebook, I would like you to create a lookalike of this email list.

Stacy Reed: 17:59

So, essentially, what Facebook is going to do and they're going to say hey, of all the thousand people you have on here, these are the similar interests and targeting and ages and demographics that they are.

Stacy Reed: 18:09

I'm going to create an audience for you, the people that look just like the people on your email list, and then you can start to target those people. And because those are it's cold right, they don't know who you are, but they just have similar behaviors and habits like the people on your email list, and so then you can target those, and so we find those are really, really effective for our clients as well, because they typically will have like similar attributes and stuff like that or similar behaviors, or at least they're maybe following similar pages, stuff like that, right, but it allows us to really make a direct, almost direct copy of the people who are on our email list, and then we can use that to run our lead magnet ads too, or and stuff like that yeah, I did not realize it could get that detailed, in that you could even use the list to create a similar group, because I did.

Violeta: 18:52

I think I glanced and I know what you're talking about, that you could do a custom or whatever, but that's pretty cool. So, yeah, so what do you tell people? For, let's say, a client comes up here and they're like okay, I want to do ads and you suggest Facebook ads. But people are like you know what? I don't know, facebook is old or whatever. That's old news, but like, because obviously it works. So what do you tell those type of people that, like, I don't know if I want to invest in Facebook ads?

Stacy Reed: 19:23

Yeah, it's interesting, I think if you think about, facebook is like the third most visited website in the world and if you look at that, even if you're like, even if some of the other platforms, like TikTok and stuff like that, they're up there, instagram's up there, but there are still a lot of people that use Facebook, like I think last report I saw was 2.9 billion monthly active users, meaning 2.9 billion people log into this app at least once every 30 days, and so that's a lot of people, right. And if you're thinking about especially us small business owners, right, like, how many clients do you realistically need to be able to hit that? Seven figures, eight figures or whatever figure that you're going for, even like six, seven figures, right, how many clients do you realistically need? You probably don't need 2.9 billion, right Clients that get to where you want to go, right. And so if you're thinking about, when I tell clients to think about what ad platforms they're going to think they're going to invest in, I want you to start to think about one when is your audience consuming and buying information about a product or service as similar to yours? I get a lot of leads from Facebook. I get follow a lot of business owners on Facebook that also get a lot of business from Facebook. I get a lot of business owners on Instagram, especially product business owners. They get a lot of business from there, and so, for me, the natural next step, or my advice, is, if Facebook is already working for you, or if Instagram is already working for you, let's start to put some money into advertising to blow that channel out, instead of saying let's go over TikTok and see if we can make TikTok happen.

Stacy Reed: 20:44

Right, because a lot of times, people are trying to just dance around these free channels because they're afraid to invest money. But if you think about this one, that's stunting your growth, right, the impact that you want to have is going to be on the other side of you being uncomfortable. So you're going to have to spend some money. You're going to have to spend some time really trying to be able to have if you want to have the impact that you want to have. And you have to start to think about Facebook's users. They're millennials and older, right. They're really. There's also a big demographic of boomers on there, and so, if you think about that, if those are your clients, right, those are people who have money. Those are the people who you're targeting, then you want to make sure that you're showing up on a platform that they're on.

Stacy Reed: 21:19

Now, if you're looking, going after Gen Z, you might want to definitely consider only Instagram, or consider maybe TikTok and then make TikTok work. And if TikTok works, then go invest in TikTok ads, because I've run ads in TikTok as well. But what I like about Facebook ads is that it allows you to show up when people are not necessarily thinking about you. And this is an argument that I make when people are trying to debate between Google and Facebook, because the thing with Google ads is that Google requires a search and so Google requires you to be the person or your consumer, your lead, to be in the mind frame of.

Stacy Reed: 21:51

I am ready to find a solution to this problem right now, and that is there's something to that. Right. There's something to being able to get with somebody who was like, hey, I want to find a CPA in my area and they go to, they Google it and they find you come up. Right. There's something to that as well. That's true, yeah, but then if if you want to think about all of those people out there who need your services but they're not Googling it. I know for me, one of the examples I use is laser hair removal, so I've had laser hair removed before, have been considering getting it again, but it's not the top 10 things I think about every single day, right Like I have so many other things I think about other than laser hair removal.

Stacy Reed: 22:24

But when I get, I get on Facebook four or five, maybe 10 times a day. And so one time I'm on Facebook and I see an ad pop up for Laser Away and they're like, oh, fill out this form and get the pricing. And I'm like, oh, yes, I did want the pricing, I did want to get the information. And so Facebook allows you to show up when people still have the need, but they may not be searching for it, they may not be Googling it, right, this second and that's why it's a great way to get people into your world. It's like, okay, you're interested in this. And when I filled out the form for LaserAway, they put me into their email sequence. They were calling me right, saying hey, here's the location that's closest to you. Would we like to get your appointment booked? All that kind of stuff, right? And so you have to think about where people are at in their journey, right? Do you want to wait to show up, is ready to make that decision? And then they're comparing you versus their competitor. Or do you want to capture somebody who was a little bit earlier in their journey? They're doing some fact finding they're trying to figure out what their options are. You can get them into your world, introduce them to your methodologies and how you do things and show them that the solution that you have is right for them. Right, or letting them make that decision of whether this solution that you offer is right for me or is it somebody else. That's right, that makes a difference, right.

Stacy Reed: 23:32

And then, with Google ads, you're also competing against giants, right. Like people, you have to spend a lot of money on Google to be able to compete, especially, like, if you're a lawyer and you're targeting anything law related, you're going up against LegalZoom. You're going up against Rocket Lawyer, right, and they have big budgets, let me tell you, right, and they have big budgets, let me tell you right. But with Facebook and Instagram, it's not necessarily entirely about the budget, because you can spend a little bit of money somewhere like $15 a day, $20 a day, and you can make an impact. Because with Facebook and Instagram, you have to have great messaging. That's what more so matters, more so than the budget. Because if you have a great message, you have a great piece of creative, you have great copy and you can really get that in front of your people, then they can start to really buy into what you're saying, buy into your methodologies and really come into your world. So that's what I like to say when that argument of is Facebook worth advertising on or what's an old platform Like it still is like the third most visited website in the world.

Stacy Reed: 24:24

Whether people admit that they're using Facebook or not, there are a lot of people that are using it. A lot of people are logging into it frequently, so you just have to. But either way, there's a lots of people using lots of platforms, right? I use TikTok, instagram, linkedin, facebook. I'm jumping around on all these different platforms, just like a lot of people are.

Stacy Reed: 24:40

But where am I making the decision about buying a product or service like yours? Is it on TikTok? Maybe not, right? Maybe, if you're not, if you don't have a product that's really very trendy and keeping up with all. Keeping up with all the changes in the algorithm and all the reels and all the TikToks and stuff like that, if you have that kind of brand and you can keep up with that speed, sure go for it, Jump into TikTok. But if you are looking for something where you're like, hey, I have a little bit of an older audience. I have an audience with disposable income, because they can invest in my product or service. I have an audience who is not necessarily keeping up with all these trends, right? Like they want to see good quality content but they're not looking for the latest and greatest reel that's going viral, right? So if you have that kind of audience, then you want to start to figure out, like, where are they hanging out? And that's where you want to show up.

Violeta: 25:25

Yeah, that's true, cause I can't tell you how many times that I will have something in mind and then I totally forget about it because of life.

Violeta: 25:34

And then I see a Facebook ad about some workshop that's nearby or whatever. And I'm like and I've gone to some workshops that way where I was just scrolling Facebook and I'll be like learn about blah blah workshop this weekend or next weekend or whatever. I was like actually I do have Saturday open. I'm gonna go to this and then I end up following them and working with them, whatever that I could see. Yeah, like it's putting you in front of people that are just scrolling and they forget about it and, um, like I didn't even think about that is a good way, because having a great content and then push it out and everything, versus just like putting some money on an ad, like I could see that working and gave me really some things to think about. I was like, hmm, okay, so with going in that direction, just because before we started the podcast, we talked about like maybe an example and everything for a business, can you talk about, like how a small business can use that and implement that?

Stacy Reed: 26:35

Yeah, definitely, we have a client who is she's a lawyer, she has a law practice and she has a membership that she started for her, for her audience, for the people who are not necessarily ready for her retainer lawyer services right, she has a really, really tight niche. She's really she does law for churches Like that's her. Her whole practice is built around serving churches and helping them to stay operational because of the legalities that are different for them versus other kinds of businesses, right, and so that's the business model. So, one keeping in mind there, she has a really she has a really solid niche. So she knows who her people are, she knows who she's talking to, and so what we've done is we've taken she has a legal audit checklist for churches that she put together. That really helps churches understand what are the documents and the different kinds of things they need to have in place. And so we've taken that lead magnet and we have run ads to it and she's generated I think what was it? November we generated 478 leads just from that lead magnet and she's not spending a ton of money at all, like we spent maybe $1,500 in November and that it was including Black Friday. We spent maybe $1,500 in November and that it was including Black Friday, and so that's the whole 1,500 didn't go to the lead generation, to this legal checklist. Just a piece of it did.

Stacy Reed: 27:50

But I say that to say because what we're doing is she's putting out this. She's taking a piece of content that she created which is her lead magnet. We're running ads to it to get it in front of more people. We're talking to our very niche audience. We are calling out church leaders in these. In the copy, the creative calls out church leaders, right. So we're making sure we're talking directly who she needs to talk to, and then we're using those ads to bring people into her world. Because what do those things do? One, they get to know that she exists. She's like. They're like. I had no idea who the church attorney was until I saw this ad, right. Two, it allows her to give people a piece of value to say, hey, welcome you into my house, I welcome you into my world. Here's an exchange, here's a piece of value for you, because people know that their email address is like currency. Now I know that if I give you my email address or my phone number, you're going to call me or you're going to email me, right?

Stacy Reed: 28:31

You're going to try to sell me something Right, and so if I'm giving it to you, it means that I'm excited to get an exchange of value right, like I'm doing, give you my email address because I know you're going to give me something that's beneficial to me, and then thinking about what kind of lead magnet is. The checklist helps people to understand where they're at. So if I'm a church and I know I need five out of the, I know I need five documents on this list and I only have two, I know I have a problem, right. I know that I need to get figure out where I can get these other three documents and I'm probably not in a place where I can hire an attorney. I probably don't want to go to rocket lawyer because I want some to make sure that this is not something I just threw together. And so we introduced them. Then from there, once people download the lead magnet, they get on the get on her email list, then they get an email nurture sequence behind that introduces them to who she is, because you have to think about a lot of people coming to you from Facebook. They're cold, they don't know who you are. They have given you their email address in exchange for this lead magnet, but they still don't know you like that, and so we want to make sure that what we do is we use that email that they, those email sequences that come behind that lead magnet, to warm them up.

Stacy Reed: 29:31

So what we do in those things is we talk about who she is, her expertise, we talk about the problems that she's on, we give them more value of. Hey, these are some things that. Here's some podcast episodes that you might like. Here are some blogs that we've done that you might like. Right, here are some paid resources, some low ticket paid resources that you might like. But the biggest thing we did with that is we introduced them to her membership and so we say, hey, we have this membership. If you are looking to make sure that your church stays compliant through the year, right, it has this trusted place to go to get what they need. You want to invest in this membership and we do all of those things to funnel people into the membership.

Stacy Reed: 30:04

But then what we also do is we also do live webinars, and those are other things we run ads to, because every month, every month, she does a webinar and that webinar we try to get people into the webinar. We get the people into the webinar and she sells them into the membership, and so that's what we and so we have ads going in the background that are just lead generation ads that are driving to the legal audit checklist, getting people onto our email list, getting people to know who she is. She's also sending out her regular emails of like here's my regular podcast that comes out, here's my emails, here's some value, all the kind of different stuff I'm doing. But then also we have ads going to these webinars to get people into the webinars People who are on our list, people who are not on our list get them into the webinar when they hear her speak. We did some, you know, when we do an analysis for our clients, when they hear her speak, they fall in love with her, right? So what we have to do with our ads is figure out how do we get people into her world to warm them up and then get them to hear her speak. That's what. That's all right, but really all of that backtracks from do you know who your audience is and what they need, right? Have you created something to an exchange of value for them to be able to say hey, I'm willing to give you something if you're willing to give me your email address and hear from me, and are you also creating regular, organic content to make it so that not only are you giving them value and warming them up and introducing them to who you are, but you're also staying top of mind, because that church leader may not want to invest in that membership today, but in January they may want to invest, or even in April of next year they may want to invest Right, and that may be a better time for them. But we have to make sure we continue to show up every day, every week, to make sure that whenever they ready, they're ready, they know we're here and we come to mind for them. And so with ads, I want you.

Stacy Reed: 31:42

A lot of people think that they're just going to run ads and then there's nothing else.

Stacy Reed: 31:45

Right, I'm just going to run ads.

Stacy Reed: 31:46

People are going to see an ad, then they're going to go buy something, but that's not how people buy, right People rarely, if you think about the things that you buy, that are not like gimm5,000 with you.

Stacy Reed: 31:59

Right, that's a big deal for people, right?

Stacy Reed: 32:02

And so they want to make sure that they're investing with people that they trust and they're investing with people that they know and that they think they can solve the problem, and so rarely are you going to run an ad to a $1,000, $5,000 product and somebody just buy it like that, when not knowing who you are, not having researched you at all.

Stacy Reed: 32:19

And so you have to really make sure that your ad strategy as a service provider particularly speaks to having to build trust, and so that's how we use ads to bring people into the world. We've all of this content has been repurposed, stuff that she's already created. So a lot of people think they have to start from scratch, when you really might not have to. You really probably just need to take some stuff and just tweak it a little bit and update it to make sure that it can handle cold traffic, and the goal of it is to warm people up and introduce them to you. But it's really, really possible to take stuff that you're already doing and then pairing those with ads and then starting to really see your marketing engine starting to work and starting to really kind of turn, and you're seeing those leads just start to pour in and pour in.

Violeta: 33:05

They're getting into your sales cycle and then you're starting to see that downflow, yeah yeah. And what do you suggest to start with? Cause I see I guess like graphics and then I've seen some video ads is like does it matter? Do you think they have similar? I don't know, I don't know the term. I guess like return on investment or something, or like just focus on just putting like one graphic or a slide, or what do you suggest for the beginner level?

Stacy Reed: 33:25

Yeah, great question. So I definitely like to see a mix of video and still images, because I see that both of them work. And the great thing about when you're running ads and ads manager I want you to stop. If you've boosted posts, you may not. You may be thinking that, not really understanding what I'm saying, but what I'm thinking what I'm saying is that when you're running ads and ads manager, you can have multiple ads running in the same campaign, unlike with a boosted post. It's like I'm spending 10 bucks on this post and that's that post alone. When you do it in the back of ads manager, you can say I want to spend $10 a day, but I have three different ads that I want to run through. This that's going to spend some part of this $10 a day, and what Facebook is going to do is going to show these different ads and say, hey, which one's converting the best? So you may see your still images getting spending $5 a day, whereas a video may be spending $2 a day, and then another video that you've done is spending $3 a day, right? So Facebook is going to shuffle the budget around based on performance, and so that's why it's important to have a mix. And so what I like to see is one or two still images and one or two videos, because, if you think about, they have the similar purpose but they also do different things, whereas a video helps people to understand. They hear your voice, they see who you are, they can feel your personality, they can read you a little bit right and help. Video helps to build trust a lot faster than still images and stuff like that. Right, so you want to have some kind of video going as well. But then you also want to think about, you know, still images, because still images are good to like, capture people's attention, give people the information and then they'll go ahead and do take the action which is downloading the thing or booking the call or whatever. Right?

Stacy Reed: 34:52

So with our clients, we typically will run, and when I teach it, also when I teach my membership, let's have a mix two still images. Also, when I teach in my membership, let's have a mix two still images, two still images, two still images in one video. And also, I want to also make sure I say that when I say video, I'm not necessarily meaning something that's highly produced, something that is you have to hire a production team for my clients. The most successful ads that my clients run are literally just them talking to their phone or talking to just talking to Zoom or something like that. You just are talking to your people, right, like you're coming up with a script. I use ChatGPT and AI tools to help our clients to come up with scripts and stuff like that, and then I always tell clients hey, go through this, but make it sound like you, right? Chatgpt can only make it sound like a computer, so make sure you go through.

Stacy Reed: 35:31

I say y'all a lot, so I make sure I say y'all and so make it sound like you and make it talking to your people. But all you're doing is really setting up your phone and just creating a video where you just talk somewhere 30 seconds to a minute, something like that. Because the goal of your ad is to capture people's attention and get them to take the next step. It's not to sell them everything and give them every single detail in the ad. And that's where I see a lot of people messing up because they'll take a webinar. Like, say, you create a flyer or something for your webinar, you'll take that and you'll just try to run an ad behind it. But they had, but these, they have a lot of text on it. It's like I don't need all the information, right? I just need you to capture my attention and spark my curiosity enough to make me want to go to the landing page where I can get all of that information from Right. So you want to make sure that your ads video ads are 60 seconds, max 30 seconds. We typically do somewhere between that. We 60 seconds max 30 seconds. We typically do somewhere between that.

Stacy Reed: 36:19

We see those convert really well, and then we also will just run a couple of still images. And when I think about still images also, I'll say what I see work really well is like the lifestyle photos of the CEO or the face of the brand, right. Those typically work like it's just a lifestyle headshot. Those kinds of things work. But we also see like you can take that and pair it with a graphic overlay. So like, for example, the client I mentioned earlier, we have an image that we have that we've been running, honestly, the similar images for the last few campaigns that we've been doing. We've just been changing the text overlay so there's just a photo of her that works really well, that converts, but then we just put like webinar for church leaders or is your church compliant, download the checklist, right.

Stacy Reed: 37:00

So you create like a little text overlay with one, maybe one line or like a headline type of thing, maybe a intriguing question, because then you also think about you have the copy that goes with it. So it's not just the image, it's not just the copy. All of that stuff is going to work together so people will see the image. That's what typically is going to make them stop the video. The images don't make them stop scrolling. They're going to look at the headline. They're going to look and then they're going to read the actual body copy and then they're going to go, maybe click on the thing and go to the page Right. So you have all of that and for all of that, real estate to make sure that you put together a compelling story as to why someone should go and take the next step. But all of the focus of the ad is to really to capture that attention and get people to take the next step. It's not single detail that they need to make a purchasing decision.

Violeta: 37:39

Yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, that's good that is not so complicated, cause I was thinking I was like man, yeah, I'm going to do a fancy video or some crazy graphic. But then, yeah, when you think about it, like the ads that pop up as you're scrolling, some of them are just like you wouldn't even realize it's an ad until a little of it or something, because it just looks like a regular video and then it captures your attention and then you realize it's an ad and they'll be interesting. It's an interesting video and everything. Great, great things for me to work on next year.

Violeta: 38:13

Add that to my to-do list. And since you mentioned, one of the things that you do is a membership, if people want to work with you. You mentioned your membership, so I want to give you the opportunity to talk about that. But what other kind of offers or services do you provide for someone?

Stacy Reed: 38:31

Yeah, thank you, I appreciate the time to be able to talk about it. So we have operated like a traditional agency for the last couple of years and then I created a course because I was just like I got a lot of people in my audience that are looking to DIY and so I created a course. And the course was definitely a great kind of jumping off point for me to see that there are a lot of people out here that want to do it themselves, but they just need guidance, right, and YouTube university can only take you back so far, right, because we try to get on YouTube and figure it out, but everybody's methodology is different. You know, somebody saying do this, somebody says do that, and so I created the course and I was just like, okay, this course is great for DIYers, but then I have people who want a little bit more higher level of support, but they're not ready for that agency yet, and so I created this membership for those people, that kind of sit between, where they're like, hey, I want to be able to run my ads, but I do need somebody who I can check in with or I can ask them questions.

Stacy Reed: 39:21

Support a community of people. I do need some video lessons and stuff like that. I need to figure out how to create a good lead magnet for my ads. I need to know how to create the email sequence, and so that's really who the membership is, what the membership is. It's for those service providers and coaches and consultants that are looking to figure out how do I bring in more leads with ads. But then also, how do I make sure that I'm also showing up organically? Because, again, like, people are going to see your ads and you don't want them to go to your Instagram or your Facebook page and see nothing, or you don't want them to go to your page and see like you haven't posted anything since mother's day, right, Like, that's what we don't want them to do Right we want to be able to have, because that's what people do Like.

Stacy Reed: 39:57

Think about ads that you look at. If you see an ad come across your timeline from a brand or a person you don't know, you're going to probably click on that page, go to their page, check out their stuff, make sure they're a real person. And so that's what we want to make sure that our members understand it's not just running ads and saying I run ads and that's it. It's also about making sure you're creating the right organic content, have the right email sequence in place and have the right lead magnets to bring people in. And so that's where the membership is for. And it's called Amplify to Accelerate. And if you want to learn more about it, you can go to stacyzielco. It's S-T-A-C-Y-Z-E-A-LC-O slash Amplify and you can learn more about it and figure out that kind of thing. No-transcript, because I think that's what a lot of stuff that trips people up, just knowing like oh, I can go into ads manager, I have so much more I can do there. Now you're just like okay, great, like now what do I do there?

Violeta: 41:02

Right, there, right, and so that's what the membership was for. Yeah, that's going to be me, I'm going to go and be completely overwhelmed with it. I was like, ah yeah, it can be overwhelming, for sure, but I think that once.

Stacy Reed: 41:11

Once you start to understand the strategy behind it and you have someone who can show you this is how you set it up and this is what this kind, this is what this means, then you can start to really understand, cause even if you are looking to invest with someone like you're planning to hire a freelancer to do your ads or you're planning to hire an agency to do it I always still think that it's really important for a business owner to understand how ads work, because then you can start to understand whether this agency is BSing you or not. Right, cause a lot of that happens, right, because I get people in my world who are always just like burned by this agency or they had this strategy. I have one client who came to us because they just had a video sales letter running as an ad and it was driving people to an application and I'm like the membership was like $5,000. I'm like nobody is going to see a video and then sign up for it and then fill a book of call about a membership that's $5,000 and they have no idea who you are right.

Stacy Reed: 42:00

So those kinds of things like you have, as long as you can understand that, you have to find a way to capture cold traffic and warm them up. Then you can start to talk to these agencies or talk to these freelancers and make sure that they're like well, what are we doing, strategy wise, to warm people up and to get them into our world right Like? It's not just about capturing attention, it's also about warming them up and making sure that people have the information that they need to make an informed buying decision. And so you have to. As a business owner, I think it's important, if you're going to invest in ads, at least have a little bit of understanding of how they work, so that way, when you're talking to people, you can figure out who has the right strategy for you.

Violeta: 42:43

Yeah, yeah, awesome. I'll have all your information down below, but I just want to say thank you for coming on here and sharing your expertise and coming out here and advocating for Facebook ads and because, yeah, it's something that small business owners, entrepreneurships and stuff like we don't think about that, we're just like we're just going to do social media and call it a day, but it's really important to also learn how to reach your target audience and all that. So, yeah, again, all your information will be down below and, yeah, thank you for being here. Thank you.

Violeta: 43:14

I appreciate it Awesome and I will see everyone in the next episode. Bye.