Good morning!
I’ve had a few conversations about ads and audience-building this week, so I’ll share my thoughts on that today.
Featured Video
I saw a photo on reddit a while back of Falls Lake, so I had to go out there to check it out.
One unintentional side effect of making this video was an influx of search-driven traffic to my YouTube channel. We’ll talk about using trends and search for reach in the future.
Using paid ads to grown an audience
Building an audience online is one of the best things you can do for business, for employment, for networking…
But it takes work. It takes a lot of resources. You can either throw a lot of time into it, or you can throw a lot of money into it.
Let’s talk about throwing money at the audience-building problem today.
Advertisements (Ads) typically work like this.
Your ad shows up and promises something specific to your target audience.
They are intrigued and click on your ad.
They like the thing they clicked on and decide to follow you.
So how does it work when you want them to become an audience member?
Well, the thing you promise them should be the content you create. So your ad should point to the piece of content you want them to consume regularly.
When I started my geek culture newsletter, NERD GATE Southeast, I grew the audience primarily through Meta ads. I ran a single video on Facebook and Instagram that promised the target viewer a free weekly email newsletter that kept them up to date on all of the local North Carolina geek culture events, businesses, and creators.
Each subscriber cost me about $0.50 to acquire.
If I wanted to build an audience for a new YouTube channel, I would take my best performing video and run a promotion on that video. I would be very strict with my targeting, and only target the people I knew where the exact people I was trying to attract.
This also goes for growing an Instagram account or anything else.
Now we need to talk about audience targeting and placements, because this is where most people go wrong. In fact, most people running ads for their content skip this portion entirely.
Where people go wrong when running ads.
Nomenclature:
Campaign - Define the goal of the ads
Ad set - Define the target audience, budget, and placement
Creative - Define the messaging and create the video/image/copy that actually gets shown.
Most people know to have a campaign goal. And most people know to have good creative.
But people not used to running ads have no idea how to make ad set-level decisions on audience, budget, and placement.
This is where they go wrong. This is why so many people say “ads don’t work.”
How to make ad set decisions correctly.
Audience
If you make content or have a business with a defined ICP, you already know who your audience is. When it comes to running ads, the decision here is not “who is in my TAM (total addressable market.)”
It’s: “Who out of my TAM is most likely to [achieve campaign goal].”
I.e. “Who out of all my potential market is most likely to subscribe/watch/share/call/buy?”
Because while content is a trust-building game, ads are all about getting people to perform an action.
Budget
This one is kind of on you, but the general rule is:
Lower budget = longer timeline to gather data and know whether creative is working.
Higher budget = shorter timeline to know whether creative works.
Use this to find a budget starting point:
Take what you think would cost to get one person to perform the campaign action.
Multiply it by 10.
Set that as your daily budget.
If it feels to high, you can go lower at first. Just know it’ll take longer to know whether your ad creative is working or not.
Placement
Placement is one of the most important parts of running ads. It’s all about knowing where your audience is most likely to perform the action that leads to your campaign goal.
Is your audience looking for quick entertainment or events to go to? Run a video on Meta ads and only pick Facebook feed, Instagram feed/reels, and Instagram stories.
Is your audience looking to fix their roof after a hailstorm? Run local service business search ads on Google.
Is your audience looking to pick their own long-form entertainment to watch on the couch in the evening? Run YouTube discovery feature placements.
Note of caution: Both Meta and Google have tools they push really hard at you that will choose placements for you based on your campaign goal. The caveat here is that they DO NOT KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. Do not choose automatic placements. Make the decision yourself here.
Hopefully this gives you a good starting point for running ads when you’re trying to build an audience or anything else. Let me know if you have any questions!
Source: reddit. Photo taken by u/natemakesgrain
If you have questions about YouTube or video production for your business, book a call with me :)
Talk soon,
– Matias