→ Get out of the weeds and redesign your business for an aligned scale. 3 days of CEO work with me in Austin – Embodied Marketing Live early bird is now open: https://get.embodiedmarketing.com/live

If you’ve ever run paid ads for a few days and thought, “This is not working,” this episode is for you.

I talk about what needs to be true before running ads, why converting cold traffic is such a huge unlock, and how to stop looking at paid ads like a slot machine and start looking at them like a business investment.

Key Takeaways

• My 3-5 sales rule to start running ads
• What your first $500 is buying you
• The 3 things that need to happen for paid ads to work

 ____________________________________

More ways Embodied Marketing can support you:

Turn your expertise into consistent revenue. Funnels, strategy, launches—everything done for YOU. Apply here: https://get.embodiedmarketing.com/app

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE PODCAST!

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Embodied Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to Apple Podcast, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review.

Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.

♥ LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

You cannot compare organic social media with paid ads in terms of, quote, “quality” or the actions people take. unlocking paid ads success is such a huge unlock in the success of your business. We need consistency. We need predictability to be a healthy business. So it’s really important that you don’t let fear stop you from investing in paid ads when you’re ready. If you’re not, you’re just leaving money on the table because, again, you want to get that reach. You want to amplify. Because again, ads are an amplifier.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello, you guys. Welcome back to the podcast. We are in October. I can’t believe it. The best month of the year. It’s my birthday month. I love October, obviously, ’cause it’s my birthday, but also fall and changing of the seasons. Fall is my favorite season, and we’re getting a little bit of relief from the heat here in Austin, so I’m super excited about that.

Had a really good week. I told you guys a couple of episodes ago, one of my goals is to get ahead on this podcast, and I am recording the podcast w- more ahead than usual. So that’s good, and my intention is to create a little bit more space so there’s no rushing and last-minute things. I have been very averse to rushing after doing my kinda somatic experience about a week ago, and have just not been able to be, like, in that mode of rushing, and I don’t really wanna go back to it, so it takes intention to stay here.

But anyways, today I wanted to do a podcast episode and talk about paid ads. And I just felt called to talk about this ’cause I had this conversation with a couple of entrepreneurs that I coach, and just kinda like the perspective of paid ads and how to go about them, when to use them, and the mindset and the expectation behind them.

And I haven’t really talked about this in a while on here. Obviously, I’m a big fan of paid ads, but there’s a reason behind it. It’s not just because it’s the main way that we support business owners in getting traffic to their business. It is. That is the main way that I… We support businesses at all different levels in growing their businesses using paid ads.

The reason why, like, if I thought that there was a better way to do it, I would offer the better way, right? The reason I love paid ads is because you have so much control over the speed, and I think it’s really a frustrating and stagnant place to be in business when you are throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something works, when you are relying on things way outside of your control to grow your business.

So this is why I love paid ads, because I think that they are the number one way to get in the driver’s seat, increase your traffic at a fast pace. Now, let’s talk about, you know, when is it time to run paid ads? And then really importantly is the mindset behind it. And this is where I think people get, rightfully so, and I understand it, but they get, they get themselves panicked, and then they end up trying paid ads and quitting really quickly.

And I do think that for most businesses, unlocking paid ads success is such a huge unlock in the success of your business. So first, when is it time to run paid ads? This will obviously vary a little bit per business, but number one, I recommend that you have sold your offer before.

Usually, like typically, I say three to five times. If you’ve sold your offer three to five times, even if you’re gonna evolve your offer and change your offer a little bit, at least you know that the problem you’re solving, the desire you’re fulfilling, and, you know, the, the reason your business is here has a connection to your ideal customer.

They want it, and you’ve validated that. So essentially what I teach and what I recommend is if you have never sold your offer before, don’t build out a lead gen funnel, don’t build out email sequences, don’t build out all those bells and whistles. Just create the offer, and just create the sales page, and then sell that offer, and you’re gonna do that through conversations with your ideal customer.

It’s gonna require the resource of time, but that’s just where you’re at in your business. Optionally, you can say, “I have no time, but I do have money,” and you can use paid ads to speed it up. Let’s say, though, you’ve sold your offer. That’s when I think you are ready for paid ads, and typically I think people are ready for paid ads sooner than they think.

And let’s look at paid ads as a leverage. Let’s look at it as a, a leverage you can use in your business, and it is the resource of money to speed up time, to speed up results. That is what paid ads does because you put money behind ads, and it amplifies it. It shows it to more people. It shows it to your ideal customer faster.

So therefore, not only should you get more leads and more sales faster if it converts and it works, but also you get data faster. Whereas if you take the exact same funnels, you have a webinar funnel and you, you take the exact same funnels and you go post one on social media and you put, let’s say, $500 ad spend to get registrants behind it on ads, you are going to get way more leads with paid ads most of the time.

Unless you are some exception to the rule where you have a huge organic audience and a huge email list, most of the time, though, you’re gonna get way more with direct paid ads. So it’s the resource of money in exchange for speeding everything up. Okay? So you are ready for paid ads when you know that you have an offer that converts, you’ve sold it at least a couple of times, and now it’s time to build your system.

It’s time to say, “We as a company need to have consistent audience growth, consistent lead growth, and then therefore those two turn into sales.” And if we try to do that by just posting on social media and organically, it could happen. It also could be very slow, and it could be a, a very, frustrating process because you have no control Over the input.

Paid ads are also an amplifier. So a lot of times people like to blame ads and say, “Well, I tried ads and they didn’t work.” What you were running the ads to is probably what didn’t work. Your messaging is probably what didn’t work. Your strategy is probably what didn’t work. Ads just amplify. They’re just gonna get more traffic to what you’re driving the traffic to, and they’re gonna do it faster, and they have an incredible ability to target your ideal customer, which that’s one of my frustrations with organic.

Not even frustration, it’s just the reality of it, is I don’t have control over who sees my post. So if we have, you know, a trend that we try to create and it goes, quote, v- semi-viral, most of the time, a huge amount of people that like and see that post are not my ideal customer because I had no control over who saw it.

Whereas with ads, I can put the exact person, their interest, their age, all those demographics, and also, you know, psychographics even, dependent on who they follow and the data that Meta has. Now, there’s a big difference between organic and paid. You have to understand where you are hitting somebody, right?

With paid ads, most of the time, obviously, as people come into your world and you re-target, this isn’t the case, but most of the time you are hitting somebody who doesn’t know you yet. They’re cold I will go out and say a business who has not figured out how to convert cold traffic is capped, is massively capped.

You have to unlock and figure out the formula, this, the strategy, the messaging, the messaging is very important, to convert cold traffic to grow your business. And until you’ve done that, you’re gonna be very capped, and people experience this. They are get, they get referrals and they get some organic traction, but it’s inconsistent and you can’t count on it because it could be none one month and two the next month.

And that’s a dangerous place to be in a business because then what happens? You don’t have predictable revenue, which if you don’t have predictable revenue, how are you gonna invest back in your business? How are you gonna invest back in your growth of your business and actually invest in team, in systems, in paid ads if you don’t know when and where the sales are coming from?

We need consistency. We need predictability to be a healthy business. So if you have not unlocked how to convert cold traffic yet, then you are gonna have a ceiling that you probably already are at, and you’re in this like hamster wheel where you’re like, “I’m trying to grow my business, but I don’t have enough revenue to grow it and I don’t know if I’m gonna, you know, get the sales next month,” whatever.

But cold traffic is very different to convert. You can’t compare somebody who found you on social media, had a conversation with you, or was referred to you by a friend or their coach or somebody they follow with somebody who’s scrolling, comes across your ad for the first time, clicks it, you know, and goes into your funnel.

The messaging, meaning the language that you use to attract cold traffic even has to be, I don’t even want to say different because it would work to attract warm traffic. It has to be better. It has to be sharper. It has to be more direct. It has to stand out. It just has to be better. It has to be good.

And it sometimes is going to take time for this to happen. So recently I’ve seen, I’ve seen people and talked to business owners where they like literally launch paid ads and then it’s been like three days or four days and they’re like, “It’s just not working. It’s just not working very well for me, paid ads.

And you know, it’s, it’s this, it’s that, it’s expensive click whatever.” And I’m like, ” it’s been four days.” You, you have to see this as an investment and you’re paying for data to improve what you’re doing, but you don’t know what’s gonna work fully until you go and put it out there. So that brings me to the mindset with paid ads.

before I talk about the mindset, let’s just recap that I feel in my best practice and most of the time my recommendation, there’s obviously a few exceptions to this, but most of the time my recommendation is that somebody invests in paid ads after they have sold their offer a few times.

And they use paid ads, they create a funnel, like this is what we do in our scale program. We say, “Okay, you know, what do you have right now? You’ve sold your offer. Do you have a lead magnet? Do you have a live launch? What have you done? How do we take that?” And we basically create two core funnels. One is your ongoing lead generation funnel.

It runs every single day. People can just go into that funnel, go into the email sequence. They’re joining your list. You’re growing your ecosystem of warm, ideal customers. Usually on that thank you page, we put a small priced offer, not to make a bunch of money, but to offset the ad cost of the lead gen.

Then we throw in a live launch and we say, “On average, about once a quarter, you’re gonna do a live experience, you’re gonna do a workshop, you’re gonna do a webinar.” Now, this frequency varies. I have some clients who do this every single m-month. I have some who do the weekly live webinar. However, the weekly live webinar is actually more of a cold traffic lead gen strategy than a let’s reengage the warm audience and bring them in to this experience quarterly.

So, so average quarterly. You do a live launch, you invite everybody in your list, your social following, you run ads to it, you, you bring new people in, you bring retargeting ads to it, and that’s what sells your core offer as big cash infusions for the business. So those are two strategies. We build two funnels, right?

To increase the amount of traffic to them, you use paid ads. Because if you were to build a lead gen funnel or you were to host a live launch, a live webinar, and go out and promote it on organic social media to your email list and to your audience, you’re very limited. You can probably get some signups, but the volume’s gonna be really low.

Whereas if you say, “Let me put $500, let me put $1,000 behind this and just focus on getting as many registrants as possible,” you’re gonna have a way higher volume, okay? So that’s when you wanna use paid ads. However, the mindset going into paid ads is you have to see it as an investment until you have proven that for every dollar I put in, here’s how much I can make back.

Like I can tell you consistently with my ads, if I put a dollar in, I get three back at minimum. Sometimes more, like our challenge, we get seven back for every dollar we put in, but that’s because also we are capitalizing on leads we’ve already paid for. And I talk about this so much in my marketing and the training that I host.

It’s a system. It’s an ecosystem. You’re bringing people into the ecosystem, and they sometimes take time to convert. But until you have a funnel, a strategy where you know if I put a dollar of paid ads in, I will get $3 back. You have to look at it as an investment. And it’s an investment in, number one, data.

Proving to yourself that how, you know, how does it all convert? Do people click on the ad? Do they sign up for the thing? Do they go through the email sequence? Do they buy? Like, each step of a customer journey, each step of a funnel, has got conversions. A conversion starts with clicking on the ad, then doing the thing on the page where they clicked on the ad, then opening the emails and doing what you want them in the emails, showing up to the webinar, buying, booking a call.

All of those are conversions. And this is why I love ads and I love business, because it really isn’t luck. It’s not. When you understand it, you understand it’s not luck. It’s a matter of inputs, data, okay, what do we do? Actions. So what’s the data? What is it telling us? What’s the story it’s telling us? And then what are the actions we take based on that?

And we just repeat that until we have a converting funnel. And when you unlock a funnel where you’re putting in a dollar and you’re getting back two, you’re getting back three, you’re getting back four or more, imagine the potential of scaling your business now. Now, you can have predictability. You know if I spend $5,000, I’m gonna get back 15.

Obviously, as you scale, you have to watch those numbers because that can shift and that can change as you bring in– you go wider with more cold traffic. That’s another issue that I have seven-figure clients run into, is they have a cap of where they can scale, and then they run into issues. But until you can get your numbers to where you have that predictability, you have to look at ads as an investment.

And it’s like at some point in your business, you have to do this. So it’s either now or in the future. Yes, you gotta weigh, like, what’s priority for your business. But again, I think people wait too long. And I’m not just saying that because I love ads. I love ads because they grow businesses fast, and I like speed.

I don’t like being out of control with my business growth, and it’s– this is how I’ve grown my business because I don’t want to be tied to the algorithm being the thing that I’m counting on to grow my business, which I have no control over. Whereas ads, I know that if I put money in, it amplifies it, I get money out, and it becomes that predictable.

So anyways, I had– I have people where they run ads for like three days. And I get it. You’re spending money. It’s scary. You don’t always know what you’re doing or know what’s happening. You don’t understand it. And if it doesn’t work in a couple of days or even a week, people panic. But in my opinion, it’s because their mindset going into it was off.

Their expectation was off. If you go into ads saying, “I know that I’m not gonna make my money back right away.” Now, that’s not a guaranteed. I have clients… I have my client, Mallory, who spent her first thousand dollars with us. This was three years ago. We’ve scaled her business since then. But first thousand dollars with us and made forty-two thousand dollars.

So I’m not saying it’s guaranteed. Like, you could go out the gate with ads and absolutely crush it. But if you go into it with the expectation that it’s an investment and that no matter what, it’s gonna at the least provide you with data that you then can use to take different actions, then it’s valuable.

And so therefore, you have to choose the ad spend in the beginning that you’re okay if you don’t make it back right away. And if you don’t make it back right away, again, it’s still valuable. Think about the journey of if I spend $500, and let’s just say worst case scenario happens, I don’t make sales with it.

I don’t make the money back. Well, I spent the $500. I got data about how people responded to my ads. I got data about what ad did the best. I got data about how many people clicked. I got data about how many people opted into something, what my cost per lead was. I got data about what they did after they opted in.

Did they open my emails? Did they click? Did they go to the webinar? Whatever. All of that data now can drive actions. If you don’t run ads and you have very little traffic go through a funnel, now you’re just guessing. You’re going like, ‘I think it’s good, but I don’t actually know.’ And I love actions driven only by data because it takes the emotion out of it.

We use emotion in marketing to connect with our ideal customer. We use data to tell us if that’s working. We use data to tell us what emotions, what angles, what messaging, what offers, what lead gens people like. So even if I was to look at my organic social media The, one of the reasons that I invest in posting three times a day right now is not just for growth.

Yes, it’s growth, but it’s also because I’m trying to get data faster. I’m trying to go, if I post 15 times a week, I’m gonna get a response back faster about what worked and what didn’t work, and I’m gonna be able to pivot easier. Whereas if I post twice a week and my volume’s way less, I’m not gonna get that response back.

Same thing with ads. If I spend $500 and I promote my lead magnet or I promote my webinar, I’m gonna get a faster data back, which means I can take faster actions, which means I can get to the next step faster. And like I said, I love speed. And I have, you know, been in so many rooms with seven, eight-figure business owners, and I am telling you, they are so not afraid to, to spend money on paid ads.

To the extent, because they’ve removed the emotion of it. My, like, my most successful big clients, it is, we put money in, we get money out, and it’s just a math problem. And they, they have removed all of that emotion and that fear of like, what if it doesn’t work, from it. Because they’ve put in the time, they’ve put in the reps, they’ve put in the investment to get their business to that predictable spot.

But then they see the more money I put in, the more money I make, obviously to an extent. So it’s really important that number one, you don’t let fear stop you from investing in paid ads when you’re ready. You’re ready to invest in paid ads once you’ve sold your offer a few times. And now before you run paid ads, you need to have a super solid strategy that you’re gonna run the paid ads to, because that’s the biggest thing that’s gonna impact the success.

When I see someone have, let’s say, a webinar or a, or something that’s converting like way high, it’s like the cost per lead’s crazy, usually it’s the offer. It’s the topic of the webinar. It’s the actual lead magnet. It’s the thing you’re running the ads to. It’s really hard to go, oh, I’m, you know, I’m paying a $30 cost per lead and it should be six, and get that down with just, like, ad tricks.

If it’s super high, it’s the offer, but you get that feedback faster. So once you have the offer sold, you build the strategy, now you use ads as an amplifier. Do it sooner than you think you’re ready, and then go into it with the mindset of it’s an investment If you go into paid ads and you say, “I have to make my money back in 30 days,” or, “I’m gonna be pissed and I’m gonna, you know, go out of business,” then while you’re running paid ads, you gotta figure out how to make money, right?

You gotta still do the conversations and still bring money in for the business. I actually just met with a client, she’s been working with us for a year, and she’s run all these webinars and we got, we got to do a one-on-one. She got a bonus with me, and she pulled up her stats, and I was so proud of her because she had all these stats from, like, probably 12 different webinars.

And she ran ads to them, and she had her ad spend. She’s in one of our programs, so she’s getting support, but she’s also having to do some of it herself. She had her ad spend, she had her show up, she had her calls booked, she had her conversion. And we were able to take that and go, “Okay, how do we improve this?”

And I could tell that she very much had the mindset of even in the instances of she had a webinar that didn’t perform where she wanted, she did the next one. She came back, she spent the money, she got the leads, she made the tweaks, she did the next one, she did the next one, and she was able to build on top of that over the last, like, I think it was a year of data And her grounded view on I also see that I’ve, you know, added thousands of leads to my list that just haven’t bought yet, and I’m in it for the long haul.

I’m in it to be consistent. That’s very different than the person who’s like, “Well, I tried for 30 days. It didn’t work, and so didn’t work, and I’m pissed.” It’s just that’s not the mindset of a seven-figure business owner. can’t, you can’t have that mindset. You gotta go, “What is the data telling me?

How do I take the actions?” Consistency is so important. Yes, we’re gonna be responsible with the ad spend, and we’re gonna spend it and s- put, you know, a strategy behind it that we believe is gonna do well, all of those things. But you still don’t know until you go get the data. And the faster you do that, the faster you are able to improve and increase your results.

So I think a lot of business is about that consistency, and it’s like how fast do you wanna make it happen? And kinda just to close the loop and go back to something I said on cold traffic, you do have to understand you cannot compare organic social media with paid ads in terms of, quote, “quality” or the actions people take.

You will always convert higher in terms of sales conversion warm traffic to cold traffic. Like, that makes sense, right? You go in a room with 100 people who know you, there’s a way higher chance they’re gonna buy from you than 100 people who have never met you before. But the game is you gotta get the 100 people who have never met you before to now be in the group of people who know you.

And now that group keeps growing every single day, and so now we have more people who wanna buy from us because they’re building that know, like, and trust. But you can’t compare it. You can’t go, “Oh, paid ads don’t work for me because my organic converts higher.” Like, yes, of course it converts higher. They know you.

They’ve watched your stories. They’ve seen your posts. But you’re capped. Your volume is capped. The pace at which you can grow is capped. So you have to master the game of converting cold traffic. And until you’ve mastered the game of converting cold traffic, you won’t have consistent revenue, and your growth will be capped.

So the sooner you go master that game, the faster you can grow your business. This is why, I mean, almost every single successful digital brand that’s large, seven, eight figures, they’re running ads. Like, name one that doesn’t run any ads, and I would argue why you’re missing out on money if they’re doing that.

Like, I’m thinking of so many, and they all run ads. if you’re not, you’re just leaving money on the table because, again, you want to get that reach. You want to amplify. Because again, ads are an amplifier. Ads will speed things up. Ads will become predictable in terms of how many people you can reach, which that attention is the first step to the rest of the funnel. So with all that said, hopefully that got you thinking a little bit differently about paid ads. But also, of course, if you want help with that, that is our specialty in terms of the paid ads, all the setup that goes into the ads, the ad copy, the ad creative.

But more importantly is what the ads are going to. The strategy, the funnel, the messaging, the offer positioning, and all of that. So helpmystrategy.com. We have three ways that we work with business owners, and that will explain it and tell you, you know, based on where you’re at, if you’ve sold your offer or not, if you’re scaling or you gotta, you know, get predictable with paid ads, there’s a spot that we put you.

Thank you so much for tuning in today, guys. I will talk to you on the next episode.