Dive into the world of ads mastery with our latest episode, “Clickbait Queens: Mastering Facebook and Google Ads.” Host Juliet Clark welcomes Rebecca Bertoldi, an expert in creating impactful ad campaigns. Learn how to optimize your Facebook and Google ads, understand customer journeys, and leverage lead magnets to drive conversions. Rebecca shares her insights on avoiding common pitfalls and making your ads stand out in a crowded marketplace. Tune in to elevate your ad strategies and achieve real results.
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Clickbait Queens: Mastering Facebook And Google Ads
We have a special guest who’s been working on one of my client’s accounts and I wanted you to read what she had to say because she does a good job with email and ads as well. Before we get started with that, I want to remind you that we are offering our AI platform-building course again in September of 2024. The cost is $1,497 and it is a one-on-one and group course. You get a month’s worth of group sessions to learn how to use the different platforms and what to use them for. Also, for one-on-ones so that we can address what you need help with directly.
The last time we did this class, people were blown away at how much time we took off of their content creation and book marketing. If you want to talk about this and find out if it’s right for you, jump on my calendar, ChatWithJuliet.com. I know some of you are using a little bit of AI and not the whole gamut, but you’d actually be surprised how much time this knocks off when you use all of the programs that I’m going to show you and how essential it is for getting keywords and book marketing tools and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, jump on my calendar, ChatWithJuliet.com.
My guest is Rebecca Bertoldi and she has built her businesses on creating memorable experiences for brands who want to connect with their consumers on a level competitors can’t match. She’s blessed with both creative and tech brain, which doesn’t happen very often, making it easy to bring your ideas to life. Stay tuned for Rebecca.
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Rebecca, welcome. I’m excited to talk about ads because I think there’s a lot of people waste a lot of money because they don’t actually know what they’re doing. This is going to be enlightening.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me and I’m excited to reach your audience and to help them crush their ads.
Overview Of Facebook Ads
Let’s start with Facebook ads because I think that’s where people find to do it on their own. They’ve probably read books, which by the time you get the book on how to do it, usually the whole process is obsolete because it’s constantly changing. What are those big things, like the big misconceptions and how do people overcome those about Facebook ads?
I know a lot of business owners will go in and they will try to run some ads and they say, “This doesn’t work.” They forget it. I have to say, though, that Facebook, while it can be challenging and frustrating to deal with, still do have one of the biggest marketplaces and we do want to run our ads in there and with a few tips, you can actually start seeing some success.
One of the things that I see a lot is people are boosting their posts. Facebook makes it so easy to boost your posts, but the reality is in the end, boosting makes Facebook money. That’s why it’s so easy. When we’re looking at the Facebook ad system, there are actually a few different categories of the types of ads that you can run and they have this bigger ad system that make it very difficult to get to.
It’s so easy to get to that boost, though. When you’re looking in that back end, you can see that there are ads that are geared towards getting engagement with your post, which is where the boost falls in. If you’re boosting your post, Facebook is going to go and they’re going to find people that will engage with your post.
On the flip side, they also have lead ads, they have sales ads or conversion ads and traffic ads as well. You can go into those and you can say, “Okay, go find me people that Facebook knows will become a lead.” They will fill out a form and become a lead or if you’re looking for sales, it will find people that they know will buy online.
There are different types of ads. Facebook, once they discovered that they knew all of this information about us, took advantage of it and said, “Okay, now if you want to get ads that convert and make you money, you’re going to pay more for those ads.” The boosts are definitely the most inexpensive ad, but it’s not going to get you the sales you think it may.
Let me ask you about that because I feel like when people go out and they run these ads, they think they’re going from zero to sale. Would you say that boost is more of an awareness? I feel like people forget the whole awareness campaign and jump in to buy something from me and there’s no trust.
Yeah, absolutely. The awareness part of that is great and you can put together an ad in that bigger ad system in the backend that I like to call a fancy boost. Let’s say you have new people coming to your page and liking your page, it will target anyone who comes to your page or is new to it and you can identify maybe five posts that are doing well. They have a lot of comments on them so that when somebody comes onto Facebook, they’re going to start seeing that there’s all this engagement on your page.
It’s about delighting that person and keeping that awareness going. You can do those for like $5 a day. Those are easy and can build that positivity that you’re looking for and build that trust. I also wouldn’t recommend that you run any type of ad, like any type of lead or sales ad to a cold audience. It doesn’t always work, especially in the sales area.
Put yourself in their shoes for a minute. The consumer shoes. They’re on Facebook and every fourth post is an ad. They were getting hit with ads everywhere. We see like 10,000 ads a day now. I remember a while ago, when I was in college, it was like 4,000 ads a day and now it’s all the way up to 10,000. What’s going to make you stand out from all those other people?
Clickbait Queens: Mastering Facebook And Google Ads Share on X
The Importance Of Lead Magnets
One of the things that I always love to do, and I see this work time and time again for different businesses, is create lead magnets. They’re known by many different names like lead generators or things like that. It’s essentially a piece of content that’s going to help your audience move a stage in the buyer’s journey. If we’re thinking about this buyer’s journey, our customers don’t come in ready to buy. There’s a whole bunch of stuff before that.
They are typically problem aware. They know that something is bugging them in their life, they’re frustrated by it, they know what the problem is, but they may not be aware of the solution. That’s where your lead magnet gets to come in and show them that you understand the problem and then help them to understand what the solutions could be and how you are the solution for their problem. We have a great opportunity to have a lead magnet out there and then you attach emails to that lead magnet. Your first email may deliver the lead magnet, but then you have other opportunities to educate and to get them to see you as a trusted business owner and that you can solve their problem.
It solves another problem too because that lead magnet takes people off of social media and into your list and at the end of the day, you don’t own Facebook. I’ve actually seen it. I’m not on Facebook anymore, I haven’t been since 2020, but before that, I remember when Facebook switched from having a page to communities and then all of a sudden, you lost visibility. I know someone who lost a huge audience on her Facebook page because she didn’t have visibility anymore because now, communities. You always have to keep that in mind. I love that you brought up the lead magnet because your job is to not only connect but to get those people in your list because you own the list.
People say that email is dead. It’s not dead. When was the last time you checked your email? Mine was right before I hopped on this interview with you. We are doing that often enough and at the end of the day, Facebook, any platform out there, they’re going to make changes to their algorithm to support their goals and their goals may not support your goals. You may lose a lot of traction there, but your email list is yours. You get to own that and you get to build a different relationship with that person than you would on social.
When they say email’s dead, if someone’s interested, they’ll check the emails. If they’re not, then in the book world, it may be time to get rid of them because if you want to make a big bestseller list, you have to have a clean list of people that buy. You have to come up with a strategy that supports that. Facebook ads. What about Google ads? It sounds like Google’s making changes all the time.
Google Ads Vs. Facebook Ads
They’re all making changes all the time. The one thing about Google versus Facebook, let’s say you go onto Google and you’re specifically searching something out. Let’s say it’s a solution to your problem. I get headaches. You’re going to search for a solution to that. You’re searching that out and the wording that you use, so you can tell where that person is in the buyer’s journey.
Google Ads let you meet potential customers right where they are in their journey. Optimize your wording for better results! Share on X
With Google ads you have an opportunity to meet them right where they are in the journey, knowing exactly where they are in the journey and then help them to go the rest of the way. Google search ads can be more expensive than Facebook ads, but you are getting people that are way closer to being ready to buy.
Additionally, I love Google for retargeting. If I have somebody come to my website or there’s a lot of different places we can track in there, or even if they go to the Facebook page, I can then have a Google ad that’s also pretty inexpensive. You can do another $5 a day there that will go back, retarget those people and we’ll start seeing it all over the internet. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a website and then you start seeing them everywhere. That’s that retarget. Some people think that it could be annoying, but the reality is we need at least seven touchpoints before somebody will start to build that trust with us.
That’s so funny and I do find it annoying. I actually use DuckDuckGo from my personal to get away from all the ads.
It’s funny that you say that because I do a fair amount of research for my clients all the time. I’m getting served with all different things and I try so hard to remember to go into incognito mode so that it’s not as bad. I don’t remember to do that
Yeah, it still does. I was actually doing some work for an LGBTQ client and all of a sudden, I actually laughed because he’s like, “Watch. Now you’re going to start getting a bunch of LGBTQ stuff.’ a day later, I was like, “Guess what I’m getting.”
Actually, my fiancé and I were in the car and I have been trying to maybe look at other cars that I may possibly be interested in. It was more like a vision project that I was working on. We mentioned Infinity and when I got home, I started getting ads for it even though I was like, ‘No, I don’t like it.” It didn’t hear that part of it. Our devices heard us. They’re listening.
When you do advertise on these platforms, those platforms have a lot of information about us. Whether we like it or not, they do know what we’ve been doing or where we go. They know if we checked into a gym. They know these things. There are a lot of ways that they can connect with us. You can also use that, too. I will talk to my fiancé’s phone around the holidays and talk about what I would like for Christmas.
She’s a manipulator, isn’t she? That’s too funny.
They’re listening, anyway.
If you want to solve that, go buy a Faraday bag and have everybody drop their devices into the Faraday bags so that whoever is listening can’t listen anymore. I always wonder about that because I live in Salt Lake City and there is the NSA data center is out right out and I wonder how much data they have on me out there because I do collect it from all over the place.
With the Google ads, when you talk about retargeting and the customer journey, can you explain that a little bit? I think a lot of people come in, they want to be a book seller, but they don’t provide a customer journey in any way. You’ve probably seen them on Facebook which used to drive me crazy, like the buy my book. You can tell that person never set up a platform, they don’t have a customer journey. They’re oh I’m going to blast it out and everybody will buy it and nobody buys it.
The Customer Journey Explained
The customer journey is so important because we need to understand our buyers. There are multiple ways they can learn about the book. We want to know essentially like each step of the way what’s going to move them to the next step. Have this planned out ahead of time and you’re going to have different avatars or target audiences. They’re always going to be a little bit different and I have a few. If you name them and give them a face, it helps you when you’re creating that message to speak to them.
Susan is one of my avatars and this is her age group. If we’re talking about in a marketing sense, these are the challenges she has in her business. I can then speak to that. When we’re looking at that buyer’s journey, we have different ways to connect with them each step of the way by understanding the language they would use when they’re doing it, when they’re searching for something or anything like that. Let’s go back to the headache example. Somebody might say, “What does a headache in the back of your head mean?” I Googled that because I slept funny one day and that’s what it was.
Clickbait Queens: Mastering Facebook And Google Ads Share on X
What’s that genie thing? A crook in the neck for 1,000 years or something, living inside a bottle.
Based on how I’m searching, if I then came back and said something like, “Headache for a week now,” there’s something that I could put in there as an advertiser to align with that that would say, “Maybe a doctor’s call,” but whatever the product is, you can then give them a call to action based on what they typed in. When we can understand where they’re going to come from before they purchase and then you want something for after they purchase it. Marketing isn’t done when the sale happens. We want to make sure that we have likely spent money to get them on our list. They are now buying from us. We want to keep them there. It’s a lot less money to keep a happy person on your list than it is to acquire a new person.
People do not realize that. Let me ask you something else about that because it sounds like you’re saying that you might have several avatars. For my audience, this is why the Build Your Author Avatar course is so important because you have to know the demographics and the psychographics. I’m going to say something and you can tell me whether Facebook still has it or not. When I tell you to go out and figure out which influencers are doing what you do, doesn’t Facebook have something in the ads where I can say follow people who follow Simon Sinek? Does it still have that feature? It used to.
There are still things that you can target as far as interests, but after Facebook got sued for collecting all that information about it. They started taking away those options because it was definitely a big lawsuit and they had to take them away. Over the last couple of years, there was one big reduction in interest. Now it’s so a lot of those things have gone away but you can also target on emotion. If people are trying to be happy, you can target happiness, those kinds of things.
However, in Facebook and Google, wherever you can use a custom audience, on Facebook, it’s a lookalike. Google, it’s similar. They’re called different things, but they’re the same thing where you have a customer list. Let’s say you have an email list. You upload that email list and not only can you market to your existing list, but you can also create another audience in there that looks like that list.
When I say looks like, it has all those data points still, it’s not letting us use them. If you have 100 strong people on your list who are always buying and you put them in there, it’s going to find the similarities of those people. Maybe they’re all dog lovers, maybe they love to golf. It’s things that we’re not going to see and it will go and find people that look like your list. If we can market based on people’s actions, that’s always the best way versus trying to be more disruptive. Starting with a list of people that we know will buy and that they are engaged and big fans of yours, then finding people that would be like that is what you want.
Let’s use a real-life example. We have a client, Dorothy, who’s doing ranch retreats. If she has that list for ranch retreats, but then she goes to do some other event that’s related, that list and those people who are opening, not those people who are not, would be perfect to segment and get back in and say, “Find the audience that looks like this. We’re doing this upgraded event.”
Importance Of A Clean Email List
That’s where we want to keep that list clean. I know I use Builderall. They’re actually deleting people who don’t open within 90 days, which I don’t know how I feel about that actually because it makes my list smaller. I tend to have a smaller list of engaged people. You’ll probably remember you’ve been around a long time like I have where when you did a summit, the first thing somebody ask is how big is your list. For me, I don’t care about that. I care about who opens, and who buys. If you have a smaller list with a good buy rate, you are much better off than a big ugly list that I think all of us got from the JV days.
It carries over to that misconception on your following on social. You can have a million followers but if they’re not buying that 100-person list is far more valuable.
Remember the JV summit days. I know they still do it, where we have this free year-end giveaway. What you’re doing when you get those people in your list and then you run it through Facebook is you’re getting a bunch of people who want free stuff. You have to be cognizant of that if you’re trying to sell them, most of those people jump in because they want to learn something. They think they’re going to learn it but they want to learn it for free. If you charge, you better be cognizant that that list is probably not going to serve you in the way you think.
A lot of times, on Facebook, because you can still target by income, which I love, it’ll be very sad the day that that leaves. For now, I work with a lot of life coaches and I can go in and say, “I want somebody who is working on making their life better,” and I can layer it with also who is in the top like 10% of income in the country. I know down the line that the price will not be an objection. As long as I deliver that value, I know the price won’t be an objection.
Setting Realistic Expectations For Ads
Let me ask you something because I feel like when people hire someone for ads they have unrealistic expectations and we’ll leave everybody with this thought. This doesn’t happen overnight because you have to run the awareness, you have to run it in stages because nobody’s going to buy from you if they don’t know you. If somebody hired you now, when could we probably start to see results? Knowing that everything else in the customer journey is, how long does it usually take before you start seeing results?
This is a little bit of a tricky question because sometimes we have to look at how long the sales cycle is. If somebody is coming in from an ad with a lead magnet and then they have maybe five emails after that, how long do those go? Is it going to be a week and then they get the first opportunity to buy? Let’s say that that’s a week. We want to test those things out. We want to see when people come in, are they opening those emails? Are they taking action if you have any calls to action in those emails to see where the people are buying in the end? One of the things that I love to do is create a quick and dirty testing campaign before I start the real campaign. This helps me with messaging because we do a 48-hour test.
We see tests of ten different messages and see what pain points they’re going to react to. I can take the winnings from those campaigns and put them into a real campaign where we’re going to start spending real money on it. In a case like that, typically, after two months, we will be able to get close to the sweet spot of the cost per acquisition that we’re going for or how much it costs to bring in a new lead to the system. We get to see how those leads are going through what we’ve created and we can optimize as we go.
Clickbait Queens: Mastering Facebook And Google Ads Share on X
The wonderful thing about digital is that you can optimize as you go. For example, I created a quiz for a coach and it was all about finding your purpose. From there, there were four different outcomes and each outcome had an email sequence attached to it. We had to wait like fourteen days to actually see people go through them. Since there were four outcomes, it took about a month to actually get some real data in to see where they were dropping off there. Once you get that solved, then you increase your budget and let it flow.
If someone wants to work with you, where can we find you?
For me, you can find me at RebeccaBertoldi.com. I always offer a free strategy session. Let’s get down and brainstorm together. I always come up with a custom package because not everyone’s the same. Every budget is different but we have options for all budgets.
That’s great. Alright, thank you so much for being on.
I am so excited. Thank you so much for having me and I hope I can share more tips in the future.
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About Rebecca Bertoldi
Rebecca Bertoldi has built her businesses on creating memorable experiences for brands that want to connect with their consumers on a level competitors can’t match. She is blessed with both a creative and tech brain, making it easy to bring your ideas to life.
