Episode 009
Step by Step Guide to Running a Successful Facebook Ad in 2022
September 15th, 2022
28 mins 51 secs
Tags
About this Episode
In this episode Nick interviews Matt and asks him all there is to know about running and setting up a successful facebook ad in 2022. They also jump into discussing running a Google and TikTok ad. How to retarget and reach more people for the cause and ministry of Jesus in your churches!
SHOW NOTES
//VIDEO TUTORIALS ON RUNNING ADS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dymukpfbg4A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGl8B_PO_Ow&t=106s
//ADDING YOUR FACEBOOK PIXEL TO YOUR WEBSITE
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755?id=1205376682832142
TIMECODES
00:00-01:04 Introduction
01:04-03:09 The purpose of online advertising
03:09-06:39 TikTok and Google Ads
06:39-07:10 Step 1 - Set up a Business Account on Facebook
07:10-10:19 Step 2 - Gather Content and Determine Time Margin
10:19-10:51 Step 3 - Clarify your win
10:51-11:31 Step 4- Run the Ad
11:31-12:07 Step 5 - 3 Questions: Target, Budget, & Goal
12:07-15:46 Step 6 - Create your Audience (MOST IMPORTANT!!)
15:46-18:15 Step 7 - Time to get creative!
18:15-21:34 When to hit the eject button on a bad ad
21:34-22:43 What is next?
22:43-26:55 How to retarget warmer leads?
26:55-28:42 Go do it!
TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:01):
What's up everybody. Welcome to another episode of the hybrid ministry podcast. Your host this morning, Nick Clason, alongside the baby holding Matt Johnson. Good morning, Matt. Are you awake?
Matt Johnson (00:14):
Good morning. I am. Uh, I'm awake. I got the baby in my hands right now. She, uh, she's mom that I have a little bit break. Cause I heard her crying and I went, ran and grab her. So if you hear her, I'm sorry, but she has a pleasure. I hope, she won't cry. She's just gonna grunt a lot.
Nick Clason (00:31):
Just making grunty noises. And even if she does cry, I will do my best to fill the gap, but it's gonna be hard cuz I don't actually know what we're talking about today. This is all you so on, on today's episode, what I actually wanted to do is I wanted to talk to Matt about advertising, digital advertising. How do we do it? How do you set it up and maybe have him walk us through a little bit of what that process looks like. It can get a little bit tricky, a little bit confusing. So before anything like Matt, what are, what is the purpose of online advertising? Can you walk us through some of the examples or some of the reasons why you would even want to run an ad in the first place?
Matt Johnson (01:14):
Yeah, absolutely. So there, when it comes to like Facebook ads or ads in general, um, a lot of people say, oh, the purpose is to like, uh, tell you what my product is. Right? Um, so it's to bring awareness, but there is actually three main purposes for tra uh, your ads, which is awareness, consideration, and conversion. And we can really get into the differences of all those. But honestly, awareness is like, let's bring awareness for, um, you know, whatever we're trying to promote. So in this context would be your church consideration would be, you know, I'm trying to get people to like engage with us, maybe watch video, send traffic to our website, download an app, give us their email, that kinda thing. And then the conversion ad is like, Hey, I want you to buy this shirt or I want you to buy our, you know, maybe your vacation Bible school ticket or whatever that looks like. So those are gonna be a three main ads. And we're talking about ads, we'll talk about how each of those should play into each other and how this creates like this robust system for you.
Nick Clason (02:30):
Okay. So you would recommend doing an ad, like a, like a three tiered three prong, add one for awareness, one for consideration, one for conversion and have them all kind of like work together
Matt Johnson (02:43):
In a perfect marketing plan. Yes. But that's not necessarily what I'm gonna recommend for most people. Like we don't even do that at currently where we're at. So yeah. Um, uh, we mostly run awareness ads what we're trying to do, but then like, okay, we have our vacation Bible school coming up, so let's, you know, get our conversion up for that kinda stuff. But I can, we can go into like how we want those to play off of each other here in a second.
Nick Clason (03:09):
So, so today we're gonna focus particularly and specifically on Facebook. Um, I'm assuming, right?
Matt Johnson (03:17):
Yeah. We can talk a little bit about TikTok and Google, um, which are, those are probably gonna be your three main, you could also do LinkedIn, but most ad functionality is very slim to whatever we talk about. So Facebook is the easiest starting point for everyone here, Google you're, um, ads, which super easy, but that's how you see those Google ads. Like if you search something and it's the top thing, uh, like, oh, uh, for this SEO yeah. Functionality or on a YouTube ad, that's how you're gonna run those and then TikTok or, you know, just a normal ad, but they run almost exactly like a Facebook ad and LinkedIn ads are the same way. And I can know in the difference of like, why you'd wanna use one of those over the other two.
Nick Clason (04:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, well, I here's the thing, I know that there's been a couple different times where I've tried to run an ad. Um, mm-hmm
Matt Johnson (04:45):
Yeah, it's usually step one is reaching out. Um, TikTok could have, my guess is TikTok is cuz it was a religious ad.
Nick Clason (04:55):
Mm yeah. And well, the point, my point in saying all that is like, I just, I felt so like over my head, like right. I was just waiting into like something I never really waited into. And so it just felt, uh, if it can feel really intimidating. And so yeah, I was hoping that kind of through this, um, we could look at just a step by step ad building framework. Um, but I wanted to start there because right. The idea, I think a lot of churches, if they're like, oh, we should run an ad. Why to get more people here. Right. Um, while that might be an option or a solution to what is about to happen. Um, I think that there needs to be a little bit more of a dynamic and a little bit more of a robust why, um, understanding that there are different avenues to it.
Nick Clason (05:46):
There are the three different, there's the awareness, there's a consideration and there's the conversion. And so the purpose of your ad is important. It's good to define that and know the reason why you're doing it and know mm-hmm,
Matt Johnson (06:31):
Yeah. Yep. No, you're good. Keep going.
Nick Clason (06:33):
So let's talk about it then. That's all I got. So let's talk about it then let's, uh, dive in. If you are brand new, like you have a Facebook page, um, for your church, um, let's assume that that's the starting spot then. Where do you go?
Matt Johnson (06:50):
Yeah. So the thing is you gotta set up a business account on Facebook. So you go, if you type in business.facebook.com, you can set up your ads account and that's how you're gonna set up your ads account. But before anyone listening to this runs an ad, I want you to ask yourself two questions. How much content do I have and what is my margin of time? And the reason I say that is cuz when we start talking about ads and how to really do ads, well, you're gonna a lot of time and a lot. It's really just ad, which is what
Nick Clason (07:27):
Like a one single ad one campaign. Yeah,
Matt Johnson (07:30):
Yeah. Which our church used to do all the time. But our conversion numbers on that where we're like 14 for, or, you know, uh, $6 for a lead. If I'm on that's bad. If I'm, yeah. If I'm over $4 a lead, I feel like a failure. Um,
Nick Clason (08:34):
Let, stop you for a second. Let's say like, let's talk about types of content. Like what do you mean by that? What are we looking for? Types of content wise to crazy question you say, make sure you have some, what is it like, maybe someone's sitting here thinking like, I, I might have some, but it depends. I'm not, I'm not exactly sure.
Matt Johnson (08:52):
Okay. So that's, we, we can really dive into that, but I would say if you don't have three pieces of unique content, don't run an ad. So, okay. We are currently running awareness ads for our church and we have nine pieces of video going out right now,
Nick Clason (09:08):
All at the same time. So
Matt Johnson (09:09):
All at the same time and they're all targeting different things and they're all being way differently, which, uh, we can kind of get into the nitty gritty of some. I can get into the nitty gritty of that. It's like actually showing how to set up an ad. I'll recommend some like videos you can watch to actually walk through that. Um, but I really cause it's hard on a podcast for me to explain, okay, you go here, press the plus button. You're like, what the heck are we talking about right now? So, um, but yeah, so have some unique content. So like a big example of this is like when we were trying to sell lead the cause at dare to share, we'd run nine videos, nine graphics and uh, um, like actual like, you know, a color background with words on it and then just nine photos. So just normal photos. Wow. I mean, that's, I mean, that's a different way to like, that's a lot of content to get, you know, a lot of people to sign up and sell out those events, which would work. So play that. So like I would recommend get one video, one photo and one graphic and that's gonna really help you start to experiment with this.
Nick Clason (10:14):
Okay. All right. Great. So that's, that's some of the content examples then what mm-hmm
Matt Johnson (10:19):
Matt Johnson (10:40):
You need to know that cuz that's gonna depict. If you do an awareness campaign, a consideration campaign or a conversion campaign, and that's something you gotta define before you even start building, you know, your ads. So what's just start with the brand awareness, like an awareness campaign. So I want people just to know about my church and let's just for this example, say our church is life, church, not the actual life church, but we're just some subsid area of a life church in the middle of no. Okay. So we want people to be aware of life church. All right. So I'm gonna set up an awareness campaign with brand awareness life, church, and then the goal of that ad. So you're gonna have to choose like, okay, what is, what, um, what is like my target? What is my budget? And then you're gonna go, what is the goal? So pick your budget. I always do a daily budget when I do an ad and I always recommend start out about $10 a day. Okay. And you turn it off when you're ready to turn it off. So you don't need to spin
Nick Clason (11:45):
So you can run it. You can run it in perpetuity. You're saying mm-hmm
Matt Johnson (11:53):
I
Nick Clason (11:53):
$10 a day to throw at it.
Matt Johnson (11:55):
Yeah. And then we turn off our ads. Once the conversion goes below what I want it to. So okay. When the ROI starts out, weighing it. So you'll go through and your name, your ad you'll schedule it out. But the big, next step is creating your audience.
Matt Johnson (12:11):
This is the most important part of your ad. So before you run your ad, you need to decide who am I targeting here? So, all right. We are, let's say we are life. Church is located in Phoenix, Arizona. I'm gonna target Phoenix, Arizona then. So you start with, okay, we're gonna target get Phoenix, Arizona. You're gonna pick the age. You're gonna pick like, uh, so let's say, okay, we wanna this let's say we're promoting something that's for young adults. So we would probably choose 18 to, you know, 40 year olds to come to this event. So I would target them specifically and Phoenix, Arizona. And then you can start like looking up interest and behaviors for them. So this is something that's recently just changed in Facebook in the last couple of months is you used to be able to like, uh, type in, oh, okay.
Matt Johnson (13:04):
Bible study in there. You can find people that have, you know, liked Bible study or Christian or whatever. So you could type in religious stuff. Facebook doesn't allow that anymore. So you're gonna have to get creative. So this is how, what we started doing, um, at dare to share. And then currently here we started thinking, all right, who, what do our people like around here? So one thing we started tar targeting was like coffee lovers. Okay. Um, is we know youth pastors love coffee. Uh, we started targeting here. This is a really funny one. Nick. I don't know if you can do it now. I'd have to double check with the new update, but we targeted skinny jeans
Matt Johnson (14:11):
So let's do Lee stro, but you know what I just thought of what might be. Oh,
Nick Clason (14:23):
I'm sorry. Hello, Eleanor. Welcome to the podcast. We should add her as a, a host.
Matt Johnson (14:30):
A host. Yeah. Yeah. She, I think she she's pooping right now. Oh, oh. What? The life? Um,
Nick Clason (14:36):
That happens to me sometimes.
Matt Johnson (14:37):
Anyway.
Nick Clason (15:13):
Yeah. Yep. Sound good. So you're segmenting down your audience. Okay. You're choosing them. You're getting nitty gritty specific about what they are.
Matt Johnson (15:22):
Yep. Yep, exactly.
Nick Clason (15:24):
And then, um, do you need to go change a diaper so that we so that she does, so that you're good with that? Or do or can you keep plowing through
Matt Johnson (15:33):
Yes, I will. I will go change the diaper real quick. Okay. And Nick, you do some filler
Nick Clason (15:40):
Great off, off, I'll be right back off. He goes off our, our podcast marketing expert goes all right, great. So after some technical difficulties, Matt, what comes next?
Matt Johnson (15:51):
Yeah. So, uh, the next thing after you get your audience, you decide everything you're gonna do your ads. So you start naming your ads and this is where you make all your content. You set up your ads as image videos, carousel, collections, cetera. Um, and this is really where I want you the listener to get creative here. Okay. So this is where a copy. So all the words you write are gonna be super important. Um, cause you can do five variations of everything you write. And I say, do five variations, cuz Facebook will choose like their algorithm, which one's converting the best. That will become your number one. But so you don't wanna just do one variation there cause you're not getting Facebook any time to like learn. And this is also where you'll add in your other ad sets. So you can start doing, uh, the other videos.
Matt Johnson (16:49):
You maybe have other photos, graphic, whatever that looks like. So, and then we create five pieces of copy, five titles for each and get fun here. Like this is really where you should be testing out. Uh, okay, what are people gonna search or think, or what's gonna hook with them. So, um, and it's funny when I do this because I'll get so many messages from people around the church, like, Hey, uh, why am I seeing this version? And I was like, well, it's clearly, that's what your likes have. Uh, you know what Facebook has thought that you liked the most. And clearly it worked cuz you're texting me about it. Yeah. And you know, the other hunt, 99 things that go out a week, you didn't notice at all. So like that's so, um, yeah. Have fun with emojis in there. Fun titles, be funny, serious vision casting, whatever that looks like for your church. This is the time that you can start to really do it.
Nick Clason (17:47):
Okay. So build out. But, but when you do that, when you launch it, try to do that with a variety of different types of content, do some video, some static, post some graphic posts and is what you're doing is you're just kind of sending all of them out to Facebook to see which one performs the highest or are you letting all of them run? And then let's just say, this is your first time. Like what is a terrible like conversion? Like when is it like, okay or what's I guess maybe not even a conversion, but what is the sound? The alarms like hit the Jack button, don't run this ad anymore. It's a waste of your time, a waste of your money. Um, and what, when should they, like, this is the thing. And now with that, you should start over because it's not going well.
Matt Johnson (18:31):
Yeah. So, uh, Facebook will do something called free Facebook learning. So I wanna be clear like once you like post an ad, it's gonna take a couple, it usually takes about a day or two before the will start running. So just be that don't freak out. Yeah. Don't freak out and also triple check all your copy and all that stuff. Cause if you change anything, it goes back into Facebook learning. So you're like, oh crap, I did this or whatever. It's gonna have to go back and learn again. Uh, when it comes to hitting a jet, uh, that's really on you of what your budget is and your like what your goals are. But like I said, if we're over $4 on a person for a conversion, I hit check on it.
Matt Johnson (19:12):
OK. Um, honestly it's usually if it's above $2 for us at our current church, just cause you know, money is, uh, something that you have to be cognitive of. So yeah. Um, if we're under $2 on our ad conversion, then great. Like we will, uh, keep writing that ad and I'll pour gas on it is what I tell the that's taking off. Let's put another, you know, 500 towards it until it starts to not as well. And then when it stops converting, well you can, let's the, title's try the copy let's even, or the colors, the background. And then you get to the point where it's like, okay, this ads run its course and you take that audience so you can take that cold list and the audience you learn from and advertise with, to them for something whatever's next for you.
Nick Clason (20:01):
Mm. Okay. So let's pretend like for you and, and us, we've been, we're running ads now for a while. Mm-hmm
Matt Johnson (20:20):
Uh, I would say shoot for under $4 right now. Like everyone try to shoot
Nick Clason (20:28):
Four and then maybe as you, as you do more of this and as you become more familiar with it, you might, you might be able to whittle that down. You're saying
Matt Johnson (20:38):
Y yep. Yeah, definitely.
Nick Clason (20:40):
Okay. So, so the, the, the experience and the more familiarity and the more volume that you do with it, like will hopefully help, help drive that down. So I just wanna be clear that people are like that $2. That's your benchmark, but you've been doing this and yeah, you're pretty advanced on it. So it's, it's, you know, that's not a starting spot necessarily.
Matt Johnson (21:03):
No. I mean, there's sometimes that like this for this audience, you know, I keep it her $4 or $2, but like, let's say you have a 300, 500 product. If you're converting at $10 a person at that point, like the ROI outweighs it, you know? So it really depends on the product. Sure. But, um, if you're running free ads for awareness and just trying to get people to go to your website, if you're over $4, like don't get eject there, you know?
Nick Clason (21:34):
Okay. So you're just kinda watching the dashboard. Now you're watching the conversion rate. You're seeing which one is converting. What, if anything is next?
Matt Johnson (21:47):
Yeah. So that, uh, really will, um, come down to what your strategy is honestly. So, uh, right now we run a monthly awareness campaign at our church. Um, and what I do is like, we wanna just build up our audience on our Facebook ads. And as we're about to launch our summer ebook, we'll retarget, all those people that might have watched our awareness ad with the conversion ad or an engagement ad now. Um, OK. So it's a good way to like get in your pipeline. So I would recommend like, Hey, run ads for, you know, a couple months before Christmas, even, and then like target everyone for Christmas time or trunk or treat or whatever that looks like for you. Like you have some options there. Um, and also like, okay, go ahead. Do you,
Nick Clason (22:38):
Do you, uh, go back into like, say ad number one and everyone who's become an audience member of ad, number one, do you say target this ad to them? Or like, how does that work? And I get it, I'm sounding like, I don't know what I'm doing, cuz I don't. So
Matt Johnson (22:55):
When you're staying
Nick Clason (22:56):
Retarget, what do you do? How do you actually like go to those people?
Matt Johnson (23:00):
So it's really built off your Facebook pixel, um, which that's becoming a, you know, a little bit of a issue with new privacy laws, but you know, right, right now you can still kind of use it and it's retargeting people as you're creating your audience, you can like say target my Facebook pixel through this time or whatever, which should, if it's an awareness campaign and they're going to whatever you're trying to do. It's like if they're, if you are doing awareness campaign and the whole point was for them to go to your website, mm-hmm
Matt Johnson (23:45):
Um, you can retarget those people, uh, cuz they would be a warmer lead for you. So you're targeting people that have essentially seen your ad at that point. Um, another thing um, you can do is like target people that have watched a video for a certain length. So, uh, that's why videos are really good. And we did a lot of that at dare to share like, okay, this person watched the video, we wanna only target people. I've watched this video for 30 seconds. OK. So we've run ads that were like, um, you know, 15 minutes long cuz we wanted people to watch as much as they could. So we target 'em different and Netflix does this sometimes and it's kinda rare. I haven't seen it in a little bit, but they used to run ads of full episodes of a show. Wow. On YouTube. So before YouTube, a video would start on YouTube, you could watch a full episode of like an example right now it's really big as the scene man. So like maybe sand man's episode, one would pay, play as a full episode and then Netflix can just retarget you over and over. Cause you watch an hour of their content. So they know this person's hooked.
Nick Clason (24:53):
Yeah.
Matt Johnson (24:54):
Gotta get subscribe. So you can do that too. So you can get really creative with this stuff.
Nick Clason (24:58):
Mm interesting. Okay. But so then that audience just kind of like builds in that Facebook, the business Facebook like add place and you're just saying, okay, uh, send this ad to someone who watched a video for longer than 30 seconds or send this ad to person who engaged with our ad at such and such level. And you're doing that for, you know, so if you run a bunch of awareness adds, what you're saying is you can do a bunch of awareness ads and then once you get to Christmas, once you get to VBS, once you get to like your big event that you're actually trying to then go from like a awareness to like a conversion, you can start to specifically target those people be because in marketing words, they're warmer, they've engaged with you longer or at least at some level through previous ads. Okay.
Matt Johnson (25:48):
Yep. So a good example of this is like right now we're running an awareness ad. My goal is not like conversion rate on anything yet. Like how much it cost. It's just how many results people are we getting like to play our ad a week. And our goal is about 10,000 a week and we're hitting about 10,000 people. Every seven days are looking at our ads. And now that we're about to launch our fall ebook, we're gonna just retarget all those people that might have, you know, done a through play on our stuff to download the fall ebook.
Nick Clason (26:18):
OK. OK.
Matt Johnson (26:19):
So they're
Nick Clason (26:20):
Interesting.
Matt Johnson (26:21):
We're building trust. So the, I whole idea of your ad is to build trust with them and not to go back to the days of like commercials where it's okay. I'm just trying to get you to buy this product or whatever. Right. Like build trust with your audience. So give them a reason to wanna keep seeing your stuff.
Nick Clason (26:38):
Yeah. Yeah. Well it's like what we were talking about right. At the beginning, right? Like this isn't going from a a hundred people to a thousand people. You're trying to like yeah. Be a good mentor show, show them that your church is trustworthy and all that type of stuff. So. Yep. All right. Great. Um, anything else? Like that's a, that's uh, how to get it going, how to get it set up all those types of things. My audio cut out in the middle for half of it. So you were just flying solo and you didn't even know no.
Matt Johnson (27:06):
What are we missing?
Nick Clason (27:09):
Changing diaper. We had a very productive morning. Yeah. What's the last little bit of thing that, that the people need to know anything.
Matt Johnson (27:17):
Um, like go set up some ads for $10 a day, try a week out or whatever. Um, just go test it, watch some videos we'll put so a bunch of stuff in the show notes for you. And I also wanna be clear, like ads are changing constantly. Just like everything else that we've talked about. Like, you know, this is this week, next week. This could all just drastically change. Cause you know, Facebook just decides, Hey, this is what we wanna do now. You know? Or Google decides, oh, we're not doing it that way anymore. We're not gonna weigh our, uh, our Google ads as high. We're gonna go back to YouTube ads being weighed higher. There's always, you never know. So just keep that in mind too. So I'll even put into some resources that you can check in. Like what's most updated stuff for ads. So, uh, love it. We'll have a lot of, lot of stuff. This is definitely more techy and more of the technical side of everything we talk about on here. It's not philosophical at all. Yeah. So anyone can do it. You just gotta have patience and go test it out.
Nick Clason (28:18):
Yep. Love it. All right guys. That's it for today then? Uh, like and subscribe, give us a, uh, rating. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend hybrid ministry.xyz online at hybrid ministry on Twitter and we will catch you next time.
Matt Johnson (28:38):
Bye guys.