Evolving Facebook Ad Strategies

Can copywriters who run a service business attract good clients using Facebook ads? The short answer is "yes". Facebook Ads Strategist, Tara Zirker, is my guest for this episode The Copywriter Club Podcast, and she explained that not only can they use FB ads to attract clients, they may be able to do it for as little as $10/a day... and that could attract dozens of leads—more than you would need to hit six figures. Want to know how to do it? Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Your Ad Kit (Tara's Newsletter) The Successful Ads Club The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Do you think of Facebook ads as a tool for growing your copywriting business? If not, it might be time to update your thinking. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. This is not the first time we’ve talked about Facebook ads on this podcast. I think I keep coming back to this topic because I see so much potential here—both for our own businesses and for our clients’ products and services. This is the kind of strategic skill that helps set some copywriters apart from most others. When you understand the ins and outs of driving paid traffic to your offers, you become imenselly valuable as a writer. And if you use these skills for your own products and services, you could create an almost endless pipeline of customers ready to pay for your help. But, for some reason, Facebook ads feels difficult. You’ve probably heard the same stories that I have of a creator who turns on ads and steps away for the weekend, only to wake up Monday morning to bill for thousands of dollars and no leads to show for the ad spend. This is something you probably can’t set it and forget it, at least as you’re gettinng started. I wanted to understand more about using ads and the analytics we need to pay attention to when we start using them to maximize our experience. So I invited Facebook ad strategist and founder of the Successful Ads Club, Tara Zirker, to walk me through all of this. We talked about how to scale a business with ads on a tiny budget… like $10 a day… what metrics you need to watch, what to test and what you can not bother with and a lot more. I’ve been on Tara’s list for quite a while and really appreciate her approach for running ads to your business… and yes, this works for service businesses like copywriters and content writers. Tara is about to tell us all how to do that in this interview. Before we get to my interview with Tara, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. But I doubt that will be your experience because The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.  And now, my interview with Tara Zirker… Tara, welcome to the podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here, as I was telling you, right before we hit record. But before we get into all of this stuff around Facebook, Facebook ads and your expertise, just tell me how you got to where you are. How did you become the expert in Facebook ads?  Tara Zirker: Thanks so much, Rob. I'm so happy to be here and talk to your community. And basically, a very long story short is I actually got my start in journalism. So come from the copy world. I actually ended started in editorial, and pretty quickly they must have recognized something, because they asked if I want to take on a couple of advertorial assignments, and that just became my place. I was like, loving it. It was so fun. And I just love seeing the results that you had from writing copy and having your clients get conversions. And so that started to expand pretty quickly, until, you know, I eventually went freelance. Had a full book of business in varying freelance services, everything from blogging, social media to SEO and, you know, just the whole kit and caboodle.  Developed a small agency, and then I had one client who kind of did a bait and switch. They hired us for social media, and when, you know, day one, they're like, actually, we need you to run ads. I was like, whoa, whoa. And this was way, way, way back when. I mean, I think Meta had had ads running for just a couple of years, and they had just launched ads for app downloads, and that was what my client was in hospitality, and they had an app. And so we started working on ads for downloads, and pretty soon I got a call from Meta, and we had a lot of budget there, so we're very well resourced, and got a lot of face time with Meta. This was back when you had Meta’s phone number, you could literally call.  Rob Marsh: That doesn't happen any more. Tara Zirker: So anyways, we got a call from Meta, and they said, you are outperforming everyone in your industry. How are you doing this? And you know, and they wanted to know what tricks, how we were thinking about their features, and how we were using them to outperform our competitors. Well, this was hospitality, and that was kind of a big deal. So I was like, whoa, maybe there's something here. And I took those same strategies to every single one of our clients. I'm like, Hey, can I run ads for you? I just want to test and see [what we could do], we're seeing great success signals with one client. I want to test it across several and see how it works and start getting great success for our clients, everything from brick and mortar to service based providers and more. Eventually, online course, creators, coaches, consultants, things like that.  From there, once I saw the power of ads. I could not look away, I could not turn back. I was like, we're going all in. So that's what we did. And now we have had several agencies in the ad space, as well as our training company, which is publicly what we're most well known for, and absolutely love it. So I know you teach people how to do this.  Rob Marsh: Obviously you learned it through a lot of trial and error and experience. You have programs that help this. But let's say somebody wanted to get up to speed really quickly on Facebook, ads running for clients, or maybe for themselves. Is there a shortcut for learning this stuff? Or do you have to have the program? Tara Zirker: There's lots of ways to learn. I mean, even Meta. So when we say Meta, of course, we're talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole family suite of apps. Meta has some great training called Blueprint. You can learn for free. We have a really quick, condensed, accelerated training for people who want to learn how to do their own ads. You know, the thing that I've had to learn to get really, really good at Rob and you probably share the same thing being kind of in that educator role is how to take complex things and shorten them, make them very quick, very easy to digest. You know, we teach small business owners how to run ads. Our lessons are 20 minutes a piece. They have to be able to get them up and running. We always say, ads up and running within a couple of hours, results the same day. And that's because you have to teach very, very quickly. So I could even teach some frameworks that anybody could learn today and be able to start to understand how ads work.  But it's honestly so simple, and I think that copywriters, if you're wanting to run ads for yourself, or maybe you're thinking you would like to learn a little bit more about ads so you could offer copywriting services, for ads right? For social ads as a niche service, or maybe you want to add ads as an entire skill set. It's honestly really easy to learn, and it's getting easier by the day, because the algorithm is so smart at this point that it's getting harder to mess it up. There's definitely a few things you can do to mess it up, pretty bad, but it's getting harder to do that, which is pretty cool. So copywriters have a really cool opportunity, I think, to understand advertising, because you, for the most part, understand the strategy and conversion and ads obviously have to turn into sales, or it's not worth it.  And copywriters, I think, are uniquely positioned to really quickly just add a few buttons to their skill set already and start to see success.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I'm glad to hear you say that it's getting easier, because my sense of particularly Facebook ads—using the ad manager and setting up the accounts, and I've seen people, you know, set it up and suddenly, over the weekend, you know, they didn't set the right limits, and suddenly they owe $2,000 its just crazy. So hearing you say, it's actually getting easier and better is good. Tara Zirker: It sounds good, right? Because there's so many of those nightmares that we hear that probably keep a lot of us who ought to be experimenting with ads out of doing this 100% and I will say too. Ads really picked up a terrible reputation with the iOS 14 updates, where the privacy policies of Apple essentially cascaded to all the platforms. But Meta was the hardest hit, and essentially said you can't do your tracking. That was several years ago, and that reputation continues after iOS 14. The tracking now, I would say, is almost as good as it ever has been,