Today’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Michelle McCance, where we take a deep dive into why and how you should be using Facebook Ads to grow your business, after you've achieved organic social media success.
Michelle is passionate about making advertising accessible to ALL businesses, no matter their budget or tech ability and she is keen to share her knowledge with as many business owners as she can. So tune into this episode and happy advertising!
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- What you need to get right before you run Facebook Ads
- The mindset challenges you need to overcome to run successful Facebook Ads
- The minimum budget you need to run a Facebook Ad and when you should outsource
- What you need to think about and include when planning your Facebook Ad
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
Connect with Michelle on Instagram at The Small Business Ad Club or Tiny Shell By The Sea
Join Michelle's Email List
Check out Michelle's Billy Basics Meta Ads Course
Find out more about outsourcing your Ads Management to Michelle
Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter
Transcript
Teresa: Hello, and a really warm welcome to this week's episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. And as always, I'm your host, Teresa Heath Wareing. How are you doing? So as I mentioned last week, we had our first interview back and I have another interview for you this week. And actually I've forgotten how lovely it is to do interviews.
And how easy, and I mean that in a nice sense, not in a, I can't be bothered to do podcasts, but like how easy it is to do the interviews because it's just so nice to have a conversation. And today I've brought you another expert and another amazing human. So we are going to be talking to the amazing Michelle McCance, who is a Facebook and Google ads manager on a mission to make advertising accessible to all businesses, no matter what their daily budget is or their tech ability.
Now, Michelle has a business called Tiny Shell Media because she is tiny and she lives by the sea. That makes perfect sense. And Shell, Michelle, I mean, it's, she didn't just make this crap up. You know what I mean? This is like some serious thinking. She's spent 15 years working in agencies across the UK and basically knows ads in and out.
Since then, she has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on ads in 17 different countries and has worked with businesses of all shapes and sizes with her done for you service as well as offering training as well on how to do your own Facebook ads. She's super passionate about making advertising accessible to all, no matter, like I said, their budget or their takeability.
And she's keen to share her knowledge with as many business owners as possible. So I am super, super glad to have her on the podcast today. Michelle, welcome to the podcast.
Michelle: Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me.
Teresa: My absolute pleasure. So, I knew straight away that I wanted Michelle on because I have been doing some work with Michelle myself, and she is currently helping me with some ads for myself because I went to the Kajabi conference back in, I think it was June, I think, or roughly around that.
And I had this sudden realization, which quite frankly, after nine years in business, I probably should have had it a few years back, but I had this sudden realization that I had taken my business as far as I could take it organically. And the only way that I'm going to take it to that next step is through ads.
And all the people that I sat and watched and all the experts that were there, they ran ads. All of them. It wasn't one person who didn't, who had a considerably bigger business than mine. So. I A wanted to speak to Michelle straight away to be like, okay, we need to sort this out and how is it going to work for me?
But B wanted to bring you guys or put Michelle in front of you guys so that we can talk about ads. Because if you have a business and you've done really well organically, then brilliant. But actually, is it now time to step into ads? But before we get cracking on that, Michelle, I've given a brief kind of overview of your bio, which I am pretty.
Well, I was gonna say I'm pretty impressed that I didn't completely make a hash of it because I did read a bit of it, but tell us kind of like, what made you kind of get to this point here now?
Michelle: Yeah. So for me, it's been a bit of a journey really, as everyone, but I started off, as you mentioned, in digital agencies and I was actually originally a project manager.
Loved it. Absolutely loved it. But the 80 hour weeks eventually became a bit of a problem. And when I had my little girl, 80 hour weeks were just not conducive with it. And I saw so many parents putting their kids to bed over FaceTime. And I just didn't want to be that person. So, and I also found out around the time my daughter was two, that she was autistic.
She got diagnosed around that time and I realized that going back to work full time was just never really going to be something that I was able to do. So I found myself thinking, well, what should I do? And I took a bit of a whistle stop tour into upholstery and actually spent a year renovating vintage furniture, which I loved, but then got into social media and then quickly realized that as much as organic social media, and you will talk me to hear me today, talk about why it's really important.
It wasn't the thing that I loved. What I actually loved was the data, really, and being able to say, did this thing that we do cause this action? And I love the fact that with ads, you can track everything that you do. There's no just putting things out there and hoping it works, hoping the right person at the right time sees your post.
You know with certainty that it's getting out there, and I can see it got in front of X amount of thousand people, X amount of thousand people click through to a website, and personally, I just love that fact of it, and actually, I think it allows you to be really quite creative as well, and that's sort of like, it's sort of I don't know, it's sort of like, it scratches both of those itches for me.
Cause I actually started out as being a developer. So, you know, the actual, it scratches the tech itch and the creative itch for me. So for me, it's the perfect sort of thing and I love it, you know, and I've had the pleasure of working with One Man Bands, you know, people who are just, you know, like a little local business who are happy to stay a local business right the way up to global companies that want to get people, you know, they want to dominate the world and get people buying their products all over the place.
So, you know, I've had a lot of experience with a lot of different types of people and I love that variety.
Teresa: That's so cool. There's a couple of things I want to touch upon there. I worked for an agency. I've worked for a few agencies actually. And what is it with the big agencies, wasn't this when I was at a smaller agency, that they…
It's almost like a badge of honor to work that many hours.
Michelle: It's definitely the culture of it, and it's encouraged. And there is this whole culture of work hard, play hard. You know, everything became around, let's go to the pub after work, or on a Friday, we'll buy you some beers afterwards, or the drinks trolley will come out at three o'clock, or we'll buy you a pizza, but we'll expect you to give your life in return.
And I must admit, I made some of the best friends of my entire life in agencies, but it all focused around work and at the time those people were so important to me. But it's, but years down the line, I'm in touch with a few of them, but very few of them, you know, and given we were, we spent hours and hours and hours together, they weren't really true friends, but you sort of like, hoodwinked into thinking they weren't really were your friends, and you were happy to commit that time and give your life up because you got the social element too, and But yeah, it's, it's this real culture of you're expected to do it and I was one of those people who, you know, when someone had a child, when five o'clock would come, I'd be like, Oh God, they're leaving in the middle of the day, you know, and I'm embarrassed to say that now.
Looking back, I did judge those people at the time, you know, and your bosses judged them, and it was very frowned upon to just leave work on the time you're supposed to leave work, you know, so agencies, they have a habit of chewing you up when you're young and spitting you out when you're coming up to middle age and go, go figure it out yourself because you don't want to work in agencies anymore.
Teresa: But honestly, what a weird, now we have these businesses and we have our lives that we have. It feels like the most bizarre concept, and I remember like, the pride in almost people having to pull all nighters because there was a pitch that they had to get ready for, and it's like, when did someone decide that that, like, if you didn't have long enough for the pitch, or if you weren't organized enough, or there's not enough team.
Then surely you sort it out. But no, it was just madness.
Michelle: Yeah, it's the way. It was so fun. I get it time. But yeah, not sustainable for long-term life and not sustainable with having a young family as well.
Teresa: No. And then the next bit I need to pick up on is your furniture upholstery, which Brilliant. And I am in awe of people who can do stuff like that because like I'd love the idea of it.
I do not have the patience. Did you sell furniture? Is that what you did? You sold or you repaired people's stuff?
Michelle: I repaired them. So it was always a case of taking something that had been chucked in a tip or was about to be thrown in a bin. Like, you should see the state of some of the frames in my garage, which my husband goes mad.
I won't get rid of them because I'm like, one day I'll get to them. I actually have like a sofa, which was owned, which is like 102 years old, this sofa, or it was when I got it even a few years ago. It's got no base in it, nothing, it was just falling apart. It's a wooden frame, basically, and I would build them back up.
But yeah, I loved it. I loved it. But I could, I did sell, try and sell those things, but I could never get quick enough to make enough money from it because it's actually really expensive to get something upholstered because there's so many materials in it. And the people I learned from, they could. You know, took a sofa out in a couple of hours, that would take me a month to do it.
So I just couldn't earn the money from it. Loved it, but just couldn't. Couldn't sustain it, really.
Teresa: And I think that's the thing, isn't it? That is an amazing thing, but as a business model, it's a really hard one to try and manage, like, it's not the easiest way of making money. And often, and especially in the world we're in now, people don't want to pay for the time that it takes you to do something.
Like it's a, it's, it's going to take ages, but they won't want to pay that because they want the quick and dirty and cheaper solution, really, don't they?
Michelle: Yeah, but people only really want to do that if it's like something which is really sentimental or they've had it, you know, for a long time, it's a heirloom, you know, so that's why I tend to focus on my particular addiction was around mid century furniture.
Get me a mid century chair. Oh God, I'll buy it straight away. Like, but you get bargains for it. And that's why my garage is like a graveyard of mid century furniture that's not been finished.
Teresa: That is brilliant. I love it. I love it. So let's talk about ads. Like I said, at the beginning, I had this realization, which I totally should have had many years ago.
And I probably did. I probably, I think I was like a lot of business owners of trying to deny I needed to do it and thinking I could do it without it.
Michelle: And I think there's a lot of mixed messages out there, aren't there? And, you know, like I say, I am massively a fan and believer that you have to do things the organic way to begin.
You need to figure things out. You need to get your messaging right. Your organic social media page needs to act like you're shop front. You know, when we don't have a physical store. We need to think of our profile page as our store. That's what's giving that first impression. So I totally believe you should not skip the organic step.
But there are a lot of voices out there, aren't there? And there are a lot of people who hang the hat on, you don't need ads, you don't need ads. I had a 20k launch and I didn't run a single ad. But those people have spent years, maybe months if they've been lucky, you know, if they're on social media continuously.
But they spent months, if not years, building up an audience and building trust and loyalty with those people. And that's brilliant. That's absolutely amazing that you've been able to build an audience like that and monetize it and get that income. But what happens when the next launch comes, you know, how fast can you rebuild that audience?
If you're not relying on ads, you know, do you need to wait months or years again before you've got enough fresh people in your pot to ask for another sale, you know? And that's where. If you're an online business and you want repeated sales with repeated, fresh people coming into your world, it's very hard to do that organically unless you're going to spend your whole life on social media.
And let's face it, we don't have our online businesses to spend our whole life on social media. You know, if you want to… Brilliant power to you, you can definitely do it, but you are going to have to post every day, you are going to have to show up every day, you're going to have to be doing engagement, outreach, all these sorts of things, if you don't want to spend money on ads.
And even then, you are going to be a bit limited by scale, you know, so.
Teresa: There's no guarantees that.
Michelle: That's it. But, you know, there are many people out there and I see it all the time. I had this launch without using ads and I'm like, brilliant, that's amazing for you. But for most business owners, that's not the case, you know, and It's very, very hard to replicate that sort of success, and the sort of people I am seeing replicate that success have audiences of hundreds of thousands of people, you know, so if you don't have that, you've got to do something different.
Teresa: Yeah, I saw, I saw something the other day, someone sent an email which actually really resonated, so I replied to it, where they had, it was to do with, I'll just say actually, it was to do with ManyChat, they were doing a conference, and they showed two case studies by Amy Porterfield and Jenna Kutcher, And talked about how they'd organically got, like, I don't know, a ton of people into their ManyChat and into their DMs, obviously not, if you don't know what ManyChat is, it's basically an automated, like, it's AI really, it's a bot that you can have manage your DMs.
And they talked about this and it's like, and the person who wrote the email was like, I was livid at the fact that ManyChat went, look, you can do this. Because the fact is very, very few people can do that. The reason Amy and Jenna were able to do it, 'cause they have massive audiences, humongous audiences.
So again, it's that, it's that of like, and often the other thing that people don't talk about is when they talk about successful launch or when you see, and we've all done it, I used to do it all the time of like work at the math, right? So like you would watch like. You know how on lots of these launches with the big people, they'll have like post-it note for each person.
So then you hold the screen and you roughly work out. I wondered what's on there, honestly. And the other day I was looking at Facebook groups and I stumbled across a Facebook group that is for a paid product and the prep paid product is like two grand and there was 4,000 people in there. Right? So of course you'd do the math and you're like, oh my gosh.
But what you don't know, and I have been in conversations with some of these big people and they have divulged what they spend on ads. They spend an absolute fortune on ads to get that level. Because like you said, the thing that is the success of all businesses, but especially online businesses is your audience is getting more people in front of you.
And that way is the way you're going to be able to keep launching, selling your thing, showing up, doing all of that. So I think, I think let's talk a little bit about the fact of. You know, what is people's hesitancy to running ads? Why, even though deep down we know that these people run ads and we're served ads all the time, why don't we think we need to run ads?
Michelle: It's a funny one, isn't it? Because I think, my personal opinion is, I think there is a bit of a hesitancy because this was once something we had for free. And Facebook and Instagram and other platforms, they let us have all of this and they let us build a business for nothing. And then guess what? They're a business and they said, we want to monetize this and now we're going to make you pay.
And I think a lot of people really struggle to get their head around that. It's a bit of a blocker. And they almost like, well, I don't want to give them my money. Why should I pay for something that was once free? And. It's a bit harsh to say, but they don't owe you a business. They are a business themselves and maintaining these servers that, you know, allow us to use these platforms and get in front of our customers all the time are a bomb, the teams that have to go into managing them.
You know, there are huge, you know, huge, humongous teams, the research that goes into all of these things, it's an expensive business running a social media network and they have to pay for it one way or another, you know, and I do think I can understand it and I really do understand and empathize why people are frustrated with it, particularly as small business owners who don't have a lot of budget, totally get it, but it is just the reality of it and you don't have to do it.
Okay. It's just something that is going to help your boat go faster. You know, like no one is saying to you, you've got to spend all of this money on it. You can build these audiences, but it's just going to take you a lot longer. And I think the other thing that I always hear is Facebook ads don't work. I hear that regularly.
And you might say we hear it regularly because obviously they don't work. But actually when I look at people's accounts who say that almost 10 times out of 10. It's because the ads haven't been set up correctly, or the offer isn't strong enough, or the messaging isn't strong enough, or the user journey is a bit clunky and you're losing people along the way.
It's not that ads don't work. It's usually something else, you know, and I think we have to remind people ads job is to get somebody to click on an ad. It's not to sell something. The job of the ad is to sell the next step. And then it's over to the landing page, your customer service, the offer, the messaging to convert them.
So you can have the best ads in the world, but if you've got a rubbish landing page or you've got something that doesn't convert or an offer that doesn't make sense, your ads are going to flop. You know, that's not the ad's fault, that's not Facebook's fault, that's sadly your fault, you know, not that you're intentionally doing it, but it is, you know, and, and that's the thing you need to go, when things don't work, you need to go into detective mode and it's thinking about, well, if they didn't work, why are all of these businesses investing billions of pounds every month into advertising if they don't work?
They absolutely do work and I see it every day work. It's just that you need to, you do need to know the right way to use them and it's, that can take a bit of learning and it is a bit of a steep learning curve.
Teresa: I think that's really interesting as well. Like I think ads, it's a tricky one, right? Because they try and make it so it's not super difficult or super hard and that, you know, to encourage businesses to set up their own ads and run their own ads.
But the truth is, like most things, there is a really good way and an optimal way of setting up and doing something. And like you said, the other thing is, if you are just following, and I remember doing this when I did my Google Ads exams years and years ago, which FYI, I semi passed and didn't know how I passed them, so I then didn't offer it, because I thought if I don't even know how I pass these exams, Really shouldn't be offering Google, ads, but the thing is they want people to spend money.
Now, yes, they want their stuff to be successful, but they want it to spend money. The other thing they're not going to do is look at where that ad fits in the journey. They're not going to look at, like you said, you know, the, the subsequent steps from clicking from an ad, they're not going to critique a landing page or, you know, help you kind of create something perfect.
So it's almost like a, a double edged sword in the sense of, I know they're trying to make it sort of more accessible, and it should be accessible because it is an amazing tool, but in trying to do that, they're getting people to have a go and they're not working very well, and therefore they think it's rubbish.
Michelle: Yeah.
Teresa: Sorry, go on.
Michelle: I was just about to say, and that's the key, it's knowing what to do with them. And I think, you know, we all see boosted posts and things, why they've been so popular because we get those little notifications saying, Oh, this post is performing really well. Why don't you just put an extra 10 pound behind it and see where it goes.
And that can have a place. Providing it's done with the right sort of strategy in mind, but often it's just people a bit willy nilly boosting posts and what you find there is all you're really doing is giving, that's the time that you are wasting your ad spend. Cause you just sort of randomly put in 50 quid out here, 10 quid out there and this, that and the other, you're not going into it with a plan.
And they're very, very good at convincing us to part ways with our cash because like I say, they are a business, you know, and this is where I see people all the time running ads themselves and some really successful businesses as well who were spending thousands of pounds every month on ads and doing it all themselves and doing a great job of it.
They've had to take time learning how to do that. You know, it's not just to turn it on in day one and they're going to work on day one. You need to invest the time and the learning into getting them to work. And I don't say that to put people off. I say it to be realistic because I think that's the thing is we sometimes try something for a week and it maybe doesn't do what we want it to do.
And we go, Oh, they don't work. But actually. To really understand where the ads are going to work for you, you need to run them for months. And I'm not saying run a campaign that doesn't work for months, you know, a campaign itself, you can sort of figure out pretty quickly if it's doing what you want it to or not.
But I mean, where the ads can work for you full stop, you can't make that sort of decision in seven days because you need to try other things. You know, you need to try different messaging. You do need to play with your landing page. There are loads and loads of tools at your disposal that you can look at to get them to work.
So mindset is such a massively important thing when it comes to ads and it's not going into it if it's just like, Oh my God, these have to work on day one. And we all want to work on day one, let's face it. And I'm not saying they won't. But if you go in with that mindset of, Oh my God, the moment they don't work, I'm going to turn them off.
You're never going to break through that ceiling of getting them to work for you. You know, there is a bit of investment and initially you do need to think of it as like buying data, buying learning, buying optimization so that when you can scale it, you've done all of that, you know.
And I think that is the trap that a lot of people fall into is that they expect it to a convert and sell and do everything it needs to within 24 hours of launching it. And when it doesn't, they panic and I, and I get it. We've all got precious limited resources, but you do need to go in with that view of I'm learning something I'm growing. I'm doing this and have that sort of growth mindset to it.
And if you can do that, you will always take something from an ad campaign. You'll never see yourself as wasting money. You'll see yourself as buying, learning from your audience. And that is always invaluable.
Teresa: And I think it's funny because obviously I used to run ads years ago and I wasn't just, well, I wasn't, I was gonna say I wasn't an ads expert, I guess, compared to some people I was.
But we offered it as a suite of things that we offered. And I used to say to people back in the day, well, what can you afford to lose? Like, that was kind of my, like, almost caveat to start with, cause it's like, cause I can't guarantee anything. I can't tell you what's going to happen. I can't say what, you know, so if you said to me, right, I've only got 5, 000 pounds, put it all on, put it all on red.
Like I'm not going to do that. Like let's start small and then we can increase when we know it works. But. You know, in my head, it was like you almost need to go in and go, and I know none of us have got anything we can afford to lose, but there's a big difference between, you know, a couple of hundred pounds and a couple of thousand pounds.
So it's like, Going in with that learning point of view and thinking, you know, this is how it might work and, and what comes of it, and you'll always get something, it's not like it's going to be shown to a black hole and no one will see it, you will get something, but I think this comes, there's two things that come up when you say this.
Well, one is the expectation and I want to come on that in a second in terms of people expect to run an ad and they will get a sale direct off the ad and that's why they think it doesn't work. So we'll talk about the types of ads and direct sales. And then the other thing I want to bring up is we talked about budget.
So let's just talk about budgets first and what's realistic and what, you know, you should be looking at from a budget point of view. And then let's look at the actual ad itself in terms of selling it?
Michelle: Yeah, so I mean, I always laugh when it comes to budgets and things. It's always the question everyone wants to know, and I realized the other day when I was talking to somebody with everything with ads, there's never a black and white answer.
That answer is often, it depends what you're trying to do and who you're trying to come in front of everything. But as a general rule of thumb, just to give a bit of a benchmark for it, we do tend to say that you wanna have about 10 pound per day. Per audience you want to test as an absolute minimum. And you always want to run a campaign for a minimum of five days.
So you can start with as small as 50 quid, but for 50 quid, you're just going to get in front of a few extra thousand people. You might get a couple of people onto your email list, but you're not gonna massively revolutionize your business with a 50 quid ad spend, but what you are going to get is your brand in front of thousands more people that you might've struggled to get in front of.
And honestly, for some businesses, That's enough, you know, particularly in the early days, they're happy to just have that. And when you look at your Instagram insights, you can very quickly do the maths to say, well, if I put 50 quid on an ad, how many thousand people do I get in front of? Okay, well, how long and how many posts would that take me?
With just my organic posts. And I did that exercise last year with a new account and it was something insane, like I would have had to have posted 240 times to get the same amount of reach that I got with one ad for 50 quid.
Teresa: That is crazy.
Michelle: Exactly. And if you just think about like the time saving alone, that's more than 50 quids worth of time when you think about 240 posts, you know, so for me that and it's, is worth it, you know, and every business got to make their own choice with that, but that I'd say.
You know, your expectations around that, you do really need to think of, it's just helping you get a bit of extra exposure. Now, if you want to have like, you know, leads every month and, you know, you want to make sure that you get in, you know, consistent volume, that's where we say you need about £10 per day and you want to run that every single day.
But that is like your bare minimum budget. In all honesty, I would really say you really want about £20 a day in that sort of situation. But. When you start, and it's fine to start out with that £10 sort of figure, and when I talk about per audience, it's just worth explaining what that is. So obviously like an or an audience, is just basically a group of people that you wanna show your ad to.
So you can have different types of audiences. You can have one which is based on interests and they're completely cold. They dunno who you are. They may have never even heard of you before, but you can say, go and find me people who, for example, have recently had a baby, or who have recently got engaged, or who like bananas.
Say you're a banana company, and you want to show ads to people who like bananas. You can create these audiences, and Facebook, because they've got… millions of data points on us. They know more about us probably than our family do, which is a bit terrifying, but they're able to go and build audiences of people who, you know, fit into a certain profile of interests.
So there's, there's interest based audience. So you can create those completely cold. We have something which we call look alike audiences where they basically look exactly like your audience, your warmer audiences. And when we say that it just means like they match things like what are their interests, what do they click on, what sort of behaviors do they have, and they'll create an audience who look just like your biggest fans already, which is brilliant.
They can work really, really well. And then you've got warm audiences and they might be things like people on your email list, which you can upload to Facebook. They might be your existing Facebook fans, your existing Instagram fans. There might be people who've watched your videos or engaged on your page.
There's lots of things that you can do. So you might actually find yourself, you want to show your ads to different types of audiences to see if something is resonating better. So in that instance, you would almost need like an extra budget for that, if that makes sense. So you might say, well, I want to test a warm audience and I want to test a cold audience. So you need £10 per day per audience. Does that make sense?
Teresa: Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. And I think there's one thing that you said, which is the beauty of ads, but also the slight curse of it, which is it depends. And the reason like it's a beauty is because you have so many variables that actually when something doesn't work, you can tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak.
And so it's normally not a lost cause. And actually that whole thing was just pointless that it didn't work. There are so many, and this is the same for all businesses and any marketing and any kind of launch of anything that you're doing. There are so many variables that can really impact the success of it.
And I often think about it, and you and I have both come from agencies and marketing from a long time ago. Like, remember the days where… So I worked for Land Rover, imagine the print run on our brochures, right? The days where you used to have to walk into a dealership and get a beautiful glossy brochure of the new car that you were going to buy, like, imagine the cost of the print run of them.
Imagine. If something didn't quite work on that brochure or the text wasn't quite right, or the image wasn't quite right, you're absolutely done over the same with putting ads in like papers or magazines or, you know, the, the world we used to be in, and I know a lot of the businesses now are thinking, yeah, well, I was never in that world, but this is why I guess to us is from a marketing point of view, like this world ruin is such an amazing opportunity because You'd have put an ad in a paper that would have cost you, I don't know how much.
You wouldn't have no idea what success that had. You would have no idea how to track what was happening with it. And yet people, for some unknown reason, still, I think to this day, love the fact of, Oh, look, did you see such and such a magazine? Even if they posted an ad and it's like, yeah, but there's no tracking.
Whereas with ads like Facebook ads or Google ads or stuff on Instagram, like. You can see straight off the bat, and if something isn't working, you can tweak it.
Michelle: Yeah, exactly. It's a bit of guesswork, really, isn't it, with newspapers and TVs. There's certain measurements you can do, obviously, but it is a little bit of guesswork.
And that's what I love about ads, that it's really trackable. But Land Rover is a really good example of how ads can be, like, how depends is a real thing. Because, like, no one is going to see an ad for a Land Rover and click buy. You know, you're not going to spend. How, I mean, I, I'm scared to think how much a new Land Rover costs these days, but no one is going to click on an ad and spend tens of thousands of pounds on a car from an ad they see on social media.
So, in that instance, their ads, we might approach that completely differently and we might say, well, actually, you just want to focus on brand awareness or actually you want to run a campaign to get people into a showroom and book a test drive because we're not going to, we're not going to get the sale from the ad.
So, we need to think about what is the strategy then that we get in front of people and build our audience? And that might be very, very different than say somebody who's a coach who wants to get people into their business. It might be very different from a food business who want to sell products online.
So this is where like the variables start to become almost infinite, really. And that's where having a really good plan for your ads before you spend any money is always going to give you the most value back because you're going into it with a clear idea of where you're trying to get to and where your ultimate goal is.
And if you've got that, that future direction, you're not going to waste your ad spend because you know it's with purpose what you're doing, you know, and it's funny because I say, I still know people, you know, I work with somebody who is obsessed with having TV and newspaper articles and we run social media ads for them and they think it's made up, but they're from a generation that believe the ad, you know, that social media is just not really a serious thing, you know, and they come from a world where they know.
And. It's hard to embrace a different world, you know, when you've come from that sort of space, but yeah, as I say, that's just where it depends become as a real challenge and I get it's so frustrating for people to hear it, you know, and to hear you go, I can't necessarily guarantee your results because it's so many things are depending on it.
I feel like a bit of an idiot sometimes, in all honesty, when I speak to clients because they're like. Well, I need you to guarantee me…
Teresa: That you know what you're doing.
Michelle: Yeah, like, you're like, what? You want me to give you money and you won't tell me that I'm going to get some amount of a thousand pounds back?
And I'm like, listen, if I knew how to do that, I'd be rich. Like, you know, if I knew how to turn one pound into two pound every single time with no risk, I would be a very rich woman living in the Caribbean by now. But I'm not, you know, and that's because there are lots of things that can go wrong. And there's lots of things that go wrong.
Teresa: You have a a much better idea though, how to make that happen than if they were putting the money against it. So let's talk about that actually in terms of doing it yourself, because I think this is probably what people have done. They've boosted an ad, they've pressed the boost button that's like a sales thing, and then they've gone no on board.
Which you've already, you know, we've touched on the fact of actually often in these bigger audiences, their audience building. So they're not trying to convert a sale straight off the bat. If depending on your product will depend, you know, if you're Land Rover, no one is clicking and buying an ad, like buying a thing straight off the bat.
But even smaller things, you know, you've still got to build up that kind of no, like trust thing. But, what, kind of, what are your thoughts in terms of doing it yourself and, or getting someone else to do it for you?
Michelle: So… You can absolutely do ads yourself, but I will be really transparent and say it is a steep learning curve.
You know, you, it can, we can find that ads manager can overwhelm people. And that's one of the reasons that I created courses to try and get beginners into ads manager and take some of the overwhelm away really because there are so many buttons and there's things that do the same thing with different names.
Like it is overly complex and there's lots of things that you can do, but you can absolutely do it. You know, I've met lots and lots of e commerce businesses in particular who are selling stuff every single day. They don't have physical premises. They're running their own ads. They're very happy to run their own ads.
But they have been doing it for years, you know, and they have learned what their customer likes. They've learned what the messaging is. They've learned what audiences to use, all these sorts of things. They've done it themselves and they do a brilliant job at it, but it is something that you do need to keep on top of.
It's not a set and forget it sort of thing. You do need to be checking in on your campaigns. At least every other day, usually every day in all honesty, I check on my clients work and to make sure that every single penny that you're spending is being spent in the best possible way, you know, so you need to be in there really regularly.
You need to be on top of the new features and I would say there is a bit of a tipping point where once you get to about 2000 a month to spend on your ads. I think there becomes a point where it is better to outsource it because the amount of ads that you then need to start to create, because you're churning through it a bit quicker, the amount of different audiences that you need to create, some of the more fancier bells and whistles.
You do, you will get more out of an ads manager when you're at that point. So for me personally, I would say once you hit that sort of 2000 pound mark, you should definitely be outsourcing. If you're between that a thousand and 2000 mark, you can outsource, but you, you just need to be aware that you're probably going to be paying on par ads manager fee with what you spend on ads.
And that can be quite a mentally difficult thing for people. And I think if you aren't spending under a thousand pound. You do need to be trying to do them yourselves. You're going to get more value for money out of that. And I would say. You are probably on the more simpler end of running ads at that point.
And you are very, very capable of running your own ads, but you do need just a bit of support or learning to figure out what to press and what not to press.
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, thank you. That was a really honest answer. And I think, you know, lots of people who would be in your position, I think would go, yeah, get an ads manager, get an ad manager.
But you're right. There is something about going, if I've only got a thousand pound budget and I've got to spend at least half of it on an ads manager, that doesn't feel right. Cause it's like, well, surely I can have double the results if I just put it all on ads. However, you are also right in the sense of.
The investment in learning or the investment in working with someone like you to have conversations to, to be able to pick your brain to go, okay, right, Michelle, this is the ad I'm trying to put together. How does it look? What do you think? What would you tweak? Like, even if they did that every month or so, where they got you to kind of oversee stuff or work with someone on a consultancy basis rather than a done for you basis.
I think you've got to because I think that this stuff is much harder than it used to be. So bearing in mind, obviously, I knew how to do ads and Michelle and I just had to go into Meta to give her access. And I was like, Oh God, this is very different from what I know. But also I could be wasting so much money, like.
you know, that thousand pounds you could be literally wasting over half of it every single month by doing, by one thing, not quite being right or not picking the right audience or actually that button doesn't work like that, or this works better like this. Or so having someone like Michelle, who can look at your stuff and point you in the right direction when you have that lower budget.
But. It comes back to, it comes back to everything. When I think about, you know, I, I've always been very okay with investing in me and coaches and getting support I need, and that's just the same. I need to view ads exactly the same that if I want to grow, I need to make an investment in ads. Whereas, I've always been happy to make an investment in coaching, but now I need to make the investment in ads.
Michelle: And, and it can be scary for some, can't it? Because the idea of putting yourself center stage, like I talk about the fact that you can get in front of thousands of people and have that's a great thing, but actually for some people that's really scary. And they're like, I don't want to be in front of thousands of people, you know, but it is just a really, it's a very, very fast way to grow.
And it's one of those, I think once people start advertising and they start to see the numbers. And start to compare that against their organic pages. They don't, they don't feel that way anymore where they're not sure about whether ads is something for them, but it's taking that leap first and foremost.
It's a scary leap for people and I really get it. And I think the tech can really scare people and I'm really fortunate to have a few clients that I work with where I just guide them every month and we just meet every month and we just take a look at their ad account and I give them a bit few pointers.
Some they listen to, some they don't, but then, but you know, in terms of the outcome that they get. They feel so much more confident that they know that their spend is going to the right place. They know they've got confidence in themselves that they're not obviously doing something wrong. And actually the results that they get, they're blown away by, you know, like, and I'm not saying that as in like, we're, you know, we're geniuses, it's just they have done it.
They've just got a little bit of support along the way. And that in itself, just even having the confidence you spend in your own money correctly can do the world's of wonder for somebody, you know, and, and I love seeing it, you know, and this one lady in particular, she's, she won't mind me saying she's a complete tech phobe when it comes to it.
But the transformation in her business this year because of ads has been incredible. Like, I love it when I go to her because she's just, you know, she, she is completely bought into it now and she started off a bit timid and now she's like, the ads have done this. It's changed my business. I'm doing more next year, you know, and. I love seeing it. It's brilliant.
Teresa: That's awesome. And I think it's funny when you said some people don't want to be seen in front of thousands. Like, although it terrifies me in one sense, I absolutely do want to be seen by thousands. Like, and I think anybody who wants to create a business where they are the face of their business or where they want to become the go to person, or they want to be the thought leader, or they want to be picked to speak on the stages, you know, cause again, I'm like, my head I don't have the budget for all these many, many, many ads I want to do, but I'm thinking, you know, I could be doing ads about me speaking and about, you know, targeting them towards event people or whatever it might be.
And, you know, so there are so many options. And actually, if you are the face of your business, you kind of have to get over the fact of your face is going to be in front of all those people. And yes, there are going to be people who I have something to say about it. It's few and far between. I've been doing this for a long time and I have to say I've had very, I've had some real caulkers but I've had like very few big negative things and you know, it doesn't happen very often.
But the fact is like, you've got to, we've got to step out of our comfort zones and we've got to do it the same way as I've got to step out of my comfort zone and go, okay, here's some money that I'm putting behind it. Which is weird because I have spent thousands on coaching, literally thousands. And yeah, like I have never spent the thousands on ads.
It's crazy. I don't, it's such a weird mind. Like you said, it's such an odd mind that I have.
Michelle: You think that is, if I reverse it back to you, what's your hesitance? I have my own beliefs when I speak to lots of business owners, but what do you think your hesitance is?
Teresa: I don't know. Isn't it weird? Like, cause in terms of, and I remember speaking to my first coach cause that, that was like a lot of money, like, you know, tens of thousands.
And I remember saying to them, well, what if I just put all that on ads? And so I remember having that conversation, but I still chose to do that. I think, maybe I think it's not as simple as that. Maybe I am making it out to be like, there's got to be more work that needs to be done on me, or it's something I'm doing rather than what if actually I don't need to do any work on me?
And what if I just need to put some money behind ads?
Michelle: Yeah.
Teresa: And what if that would do the trick?
Michelle: I think sometimes it's about structure as well, isn't it? You know, like you sort of putting things out there and going, right, is someone going to, is someone going to do the thing that I want them to do? And I'm very confident that ads can help you.
I know they can, in fact, but a coach is going to say to you, these are very tangible things to work on and I'm going to help you do this very specific thing. And I think when it's like, you know, by the end of working with a coach, you're going to have a transformation. And I think it's that thing with the ads, you can have a transformation, but it's.
It's not necessarily as radical a transformation because you're just getting what you want to happen to happen, you know, like you've already created, almost already done the transformation. You're just now trying to make it go a bit faster and amplify it a bit more, but I think that can be, I think that might be why there is just a bit of resistance there between a coach and, you know, why don't I just put it all on ads because there's a.
A thing of, I want to be the best I can be before I scale it or I want it to be perfect. And actually that's a bit unknown over there. Whereas a coach sort of know what I'm going to get from that. So I get it, you know, and it's, it is tough to take that first leap. And that's why I always recommend just start small, start small, build your confidence and then start to scale at that point.
Preserve your money when you know, it's going to work for you. I know it can work for me for you and for anyone listening. I see it every day, you know, but. I have the benefit of hindsight and other people need to build that up. You know, they need to look at it and look at the comparisons. And I think in those early days when you're running ads, I think it's just compare the right things.
Don't necessarily compare the did I get the same sales or did I get the same results or whatever. It's look at the numbers, you know, and do the math as well, you know, if you look at your landing pages, how many people do you need to get there to get them to convert, you know, so for every hundred people you get there, how many people convert and do the math.
Well, how many of those people do I need every single month to make a living, you know, and do the math backwards and then ask yourself, can I do this with my organic social media and if you can. Brilliant, you don't need ads. Awesome. Great. If you can't, that's where ads are going to help you get there. But I just urge you to get the right support, just because they are the sort of thing that you can throw a load of money away on.
If you don't do it properly, and I don't say that to scare people, it is just the truth. And there's nothing wrong with putting that money in. Like I said earlier, you're always going to learn something from ads. If you go in with the right mindset. If we don't have to waste money, why are we going to want to, you know, like we might, if we want, if we're going to spend the money, let's get the most out of it.
You know, and that's where somebody who's just a bit further ahead with the new on the journey can help you get there and help you get there a bit faster.
Teresa: I love that. I love that so much. And it's funny. I think you're right. I think with an ad, it's very written black and white. This is what you got from it.
So you can see so much easier if you feel like it wasn't worth the money. Whereas I've had coaches that I've paid for, which again, in the tens of thousands, where I will happily sit here and say it wasn't worth the money, not my coach, Mary, that I talk about all the time, FYI, someone else, but I can say it wasn't worth the money, but the thing is, I can also say, but I learned so much in that journey, right?
So I could always re caveat the, it was a waste of money with, no, it wasn't a waste of money. Whereas like, You know, it's, it's almost like you're scared to go, okay, I'm going to put that money on an ad and what have I got at the end of it? And even though you know, and I know you're going to end up with stuff like what that is and how much it is, we don't know yet, but it's not going to do nothing.
It's not going to sit there and be like, oh yeah, we just spent it for you and I haven't shown a single person your ad. So, yeah, I love it, I love it. Thank you, Michelle.
Michelle: It's also, well, the last thing I would say is just also bear in mind, like the bigger companies who are out there, they're not sitting there saying, I don't know if I should be doing it.
They are absolutely running ads all the time and hundreds of thousands of pounds on like a short term four week, five week campaign. And sometimes they don't make a profit back on it. A lot of the time they do, but sometimes they don't. But they don't ever sit there and say, I'm never going to run ads again.
Because they look at the numbers and go. Do you know what? That got us in front of this amount of people, which is helping drive brand memorability. And they're always reframing that. And it's, it's lovely because they're looking at it and going, there is nothing ever wasted. And if you can have that mindset of some of the bigger companies and think like a bigger company, you're never going to waste a penny on ads, you know, and it's just reframing it.
Teresa: And like you said, it's a non negotiable. It is, it is what it is. So just to finish off, just cause I'm nosy and I think people will find this interesting. What's the most budget, what's the biggest budget you've had that you've spent on ads?
Michelle: In one campaign?
Teresa: Yeah. One campaign.
Michelle: Gosh. It's been closer to half a mil.
Teresa: I mean, that's nuts.
Michelle: Yeah. That was like multi country. It was a risk actually, that one, because it was a product that nobody knew about. Like it was a very unheard of product for a very big company. Yeah, it was a bit of a risk and it did better in some countries than other, but yeah, it's about half a million on a Christmas campaign.
Teresa: Wow. Wow, wow, wow.
Michelle: It was fun. It was scary when you press publish on that sort of size campaign. It was pretty terrifying, but. You know, when you see that ticking every day.
Teresa: What were they spending a day then on that?
Michelle: Oh God, it was hundreds. It was hundreds every day. I can't even remember the exact figure, but yeah, we, we ran it for about three months and it was hundreds every single day.
In fact, I think we got to a point where we were well over a thousand pound every day with some of them and that was per audience. And we had a few audiences running as well. And it was really exciting, but that was a really funny campaign because part of it got run in Brazil as well. And. You talk about trolls, like we literally had people quoting the Bible on these ads, like it was in a very Catholic country and there was lots of, lots and lots of Bible references on the ads.
And it was an alcohol brand, so it was a bit weird.
Teresa: Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. So us on our smaller budgets, not doing it across all the countries and not being, you know, I talk controversial will be absolutely fine.
I love it. I love it. Thank you, Michelle. Where do you hang out? Where do you want people to come and say hi to you?
Michelle: You can come and find me on Instagram @tinyshellbythesea or @thesmallbusinessadclub. The small business ad club is if you want to learn how to run ads. Tiny shell by the sea is if you're looking for some support, we've done with you or done foreign services.
Teresa: Amazing. Thank you so much, Michelle. It's been a pleasure having you on.
Michelle: Thank you for having me. Been a pleasure.
Teresa: No worries. So thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed it. Michelle really is amazing. And do go and check her out. And if you want to get started with ads, then those courses are awesome.
And I know lots of people who've gone through them and they rave about them. So do go have a look at Michelle and what she does. I will be back next week with another interview because obviously now I've started, I can't finish. I will probably do some solos again at some point. I literally have a handful of interviews in the bag.
So like, I'm going to run out soon. And then, and then obviously I'll open the doors to everyone asking to come on the podcast again, but it is what it is. Okay. Have a lovely week and I will see you then.
