Hello, my lovely friends. Happy Wednesday or whatever day it is that you listen to these episodes. We drop these every single Wednesday. I know some of you guys like wait for them to be dropped, and you are messaging me the day that they dropped telling me your feedback. I love that. Some of you guys are a few weeks behind. I love that as well because you like to binge it all.

However you listen to this podcast or listen to podcasts in general is phenomenal with me, and I love your feedback. So whenever you message me and you let me know how this is all landing with you, I eat that shit up. 

So today, what are we talking about? We’re talking about something that shows up a lot in my higher level containers, a lot of my students that are making well over $100,000, and that is ads. Paying for ads, paying for leads, funneling people into an ad sequence. I’m going to talk to you guys about the basics of this. 

Because my idea of ads has evolved a lot in the last few years. I have grown a lot in understanding what ads work versus how to know when to pull ads and all that stuff. So I’m going to talk to you guys today about you know when is it time to start running ads? How do you know how to allocate your ad money? How much money I spend on ads and the evolution that I have taken with ads, and what to do if your ads, quote unquote, don’t work.

If you love free content, like here on the episode, I highly suggest that you hop on my email list in 2024. We are revamping my email list. We are going to be funneling in a lot more good, juicy, free content to my email subscribers this year. We have a whole plan of action with it. 

So if you’re not on there, you can hop on at hellyescoachingonline.com. When you sign up for my email address, you also get a free two day class for growing your Instagram and selling on Instagram. So that is just a little treat from Hell Yes Coaching to you. So without further ado, let’s talk all things ads. This is episode number 140. I am your host, Becca Pike, and it is time for your weekly dose of Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s go.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

All right, friends, I’m feeling efficient today. So let’s just jump right in. Number one, when do you know that it is time to start running ads? Okay, let me be clear about this. No one has to run ads. Okay, I have a friend who’s making over $15 million per year in her company, and she has never run a single ad ever. 

I also have a friend who is making about the same amount of money, about 15 million per year, and she says that running ads contributes to 90% of the success that she’s had. So there is no right or wrong here. Even though ads are a phenomenal marketing tool, I just want to simply debunk this whole dialogue that’s going around stating that organic is better, or there’s some sort of trophy or award for growing your business organically. Fuck that. 

Okay, you get to do whatever you want. If you like to grow your business organically, then do that. If you want to use ads, then do that. But whatever it is, don’t do anything that doesn’t feel good in your business. All right. 

So let’s say you are a person who you want more clients, but you don’t want to pay for ads. Okay, that sounds great. But you have to be doing everything possible to organically bring in clients without running the ads. 

So this is like weekly emails with CTAs, daily social media posts, reels, hosting monthly webinars, hosting a podcast, YouTube channel, having funnels, having freebies, going to networking events, doing social media, cross promotions with other shouldering businesses, right? Amping up your Google and social media reviews.

These are some of the main like lowest hanging fruits to obtain clients organically for those of you that prefer not to invest in ads. But it is important that if you are doing all of this work, if you’re doing all of these things, then you’re not just throwing spaghetti against the wall. You actually know how to convert your leads into clients. Because the last thing that you want is to have a bunch of leads, but none of them are converting.

So people are coming into your DM, people are inquiring over the phone or through email, but they’re not actually converting to anything. Not what we want. So if you are going to run things organically, this is somewhere where you have to be like I am willing to learn how to convert my leads. I’m willing to learn how to market well. I’m willing to learn how to use hooks and incentives to bring people in the actual door and not just grab their attention for them to walk away.

So that is for the people that you want clients but you don’t want to pay for ads, right? You’ve got to be doing all the things yourself. You’re not paying for anyone to bring in your leads. So you are the one in charge. 

But if you’re a person who doesn’t want to do things organically, you don’t want to market every single day, you don’t have the desire to work that hard each day, or you don’t have the desire to learn how to market efficiently, like from a mentor, then it’s time to run ads. 

Okay, so let me say this as clearly as possible. In order to have a million dollar business, your business has to be marketed constantly. So it’s either you marketing, you’re the one pulling the strings organically, or you’re paying for someone else to be pulling that weight for you. 

You have to spend resource. So either the resource you’re spending is your time and energy marketing every day, or you’re spending money so that something else is marketing for you every day. There is no other option. You have to market constantly. You’re either the one doing it, or someone else is the one doing it for you in ad space. Without consistent marketing, you’re not going to create massive business wealth. Okay. 

So let’s say that you do want to spend money on ads. Where do you allocate your money? So I’m going to break this down by brick and mortar and online companies. Brick and mortar people, I highly suggest focusing on SEO because your business needs to bring in local people. Having 100 people who follow you from your city is way better than 80,000 followers from around the world that aren’t in your city, right? 

You don’t want a bunch of people piled up on your Instagram that can never buy from you because they live 3,000 miles away. So your focus as a brick and mortar owner is SEO and Google ads. SEO being search engine optimization. How soon do you show up when someone types in your industry in your city in their search engine? If someone is saying massage therapy, Lexington, Kentucky, are you the last one to show up, right? That’s what we’re asking. 

So I want you to stop focusing every ounce of your energy on social media because we are not looking for a massive pool of people that live everywhere. We’re looking for a smaller pool of people that live locally. Having a nice social media presence is awesome, by the way. It should be your cherry on top though. It’s just like the last little cherry on top, just the last little thing that you do that you’re proud of, okay. It’s not the foundation of your pyramid, your marketing pyramid. 

So you want to focus on SEO and Google ads. Simply put, people use Google. They use it constantly to find where in their city they can go to receive your service, and you want to be at the top of that list. While you’re at it, Google reviews are everything. Google reviews are going to help your SEO. Google reviews are going to help you convert clients once your ads start bringing people to your website. You want to go ahead and focus on Google reviews and gamify it. 

We have been focusing on Google reviews for years. Because of this, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of five star reviews at my brick and mortars. So do whatever you need to do here. You can give people kickbacks. You can do coffee gift cards, $5 off your next service for leaving a review. 

If you want to up the ante even more, gamify it to your staff members. So like whoever gets the most Google reviews in this month gets a $500 Amazon gift card. Have it on a little chalkboard in the back of the office. Make it known who’s winning, how it’s going, talk about it every week. Gamify it. Make it a thing. Google reviews are gold. 

All right, online companies. For you, I would focus on social media ads as well as some Google ads. So you have no limitations for who can hire you, right? Someone in Egypt and in Indiana, they could contact you tomorrow., and it wouldn’t matter either way. You could handle them. It didn’t matter because you’re online. 

So an online social media presence is perfect. This can be the bottom foundation of your marketing pyramid. That would work, right. So just be certain that you’re funneling them into an email list though so that you can own that contact, and you can communicate with them without having to worry about the Instagram algorithm gods. Okay. So whatever you do with the online company to bring in leads, be sure that you are converting them into emails.

I often have people ask me what it looks like for me to spend money on ads. So I’m going to be really honest with you. I’m not going to be the coach that’s like I don’t spend any money on ads. I don’t need to, and marketing has just come so easy for me. I can just do it every day. I’ve got $80 trillion to show for it. 

No, here’s the thing. My ad has fluctuated throughout the years. In the beginning of my brick and mortars, we spent $0, right? We didn’t have the money to do it. But as the years went on, we began funneling money into SEO and Google ads, and we noticed that they were paying off very well. As time has gone on and we’ve been able to grow our team, we have been able to spend more money, right?

So some months, we earn near $8,000 to $9,000 per month in just one of our brick and mortar companies. We are of the minds of like we will pay quite a bit of money to get one lead because we are so confident in our retention that we can keep that client for a minimum of five to six massages or five to six months in the yoga studio. Therefore, paying higher money for one client will pay for itself several times over because our retention is so honed in. Right? We actually spend $0 on social media ads for our brick and mortar. Okay, just fun fact.

Here at Hell Yes Coaching, my online company, we spend anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 per month, but this fluctuates based on when I’m launching new things. So if I have a masterclass coming up, I’ll funnel more money in. If I have nothing launching, we will bring the ad spend back down, right? 

If I’m in a season of selling, my ad spend is up. If I’m in a season of nurturing, my ad spend is down. If I weren’t willing, though, to do so much organic marketing, I would likely bring that number up. But since I am doing a lot of social media, a lot of emails, a lot of podcasts regularly, I don’t need as much ad spend. You see how this works?

It’s imperative that you have a very clear metric to be able to tell that you’re getting a return on your investment. You need to be able to see the numbers. You need to be able to see that who is coming from your ads and paying you, and you need to add that up and know that you are getting paid more than what you’re spending on ads. 

Especially after the first three months. It can take like being in the red in the first three months while Google learns you and understands your ad spend and understands your audience and starts funneling smarter leads to you. 

All right, this is one of my favorite ad questions. What if ads don’t work? Here’s the deal. Advertisements do work, period. There is no ads don’t work. Advertisements are the backbone of marketing. They do work. But if you’re someone that’s like I tried ads, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work out for me. I want to encourage you to give this another shot. 

Ads might not work great at first, or if you aren’t willing to like roll up your sleeves and find the kinks in the system and really look at it from afar. It requires an evolution and a lot of communication between you and your team. 

So, for example, if we put out an ad, and it’s not doing well, we don’t just assume that it’s not going to work. We don’t give up on it. Instead, we might throw out an A/B test to see which one does better. Then we’ll like ask ourselves okay, where are we losing people? Is it on the sales page? Or are they on the sales page, and then they click to the checkout page, and that’s actually where we lose them? 

Or is it before they ever even get to the sales page? Are we losing them on the actual ad itself? Like is the ad not bringing in very many leads? Then if that’s the case, we might play with the hook. You know, the first sentence that’s supposed to be the attention grabber. We’ll change up the hook to see if it performs better. 

Then we might change photos and see if a different photo is more grabby. So we tweak, we adjust. We wait. We watch. We reassess. We tweak, we adjust, we wait, we watch, we reassess, right? Can you see how this is not as simple as like oh, ads didn’t work for me. I tried some ads, it didn’t work. 

It requires becoming a scientist and getting your goggles on and really dissecting where your ads went sour, and where your audience dropped off within your funnel. You will want an awesome ads team. There are so many out there, but they are going to help you with this. You don’t want to be doing this by yourself. Okay. 

If your ads team isn’t being clear and precise on how well your ads are doing, or if they aren’t dumbing it down enough for you to understand or there’s just a lack of communication, it’s time for you to let them know that you want to understand better. And for you to be vulnerable enough to say hey listen, I don’t understand what’s going on. What does this mean? What does this look like? Okay. 

So when people always ask me do I hire out ads, abso-fucking-lutely. Unless you consider yourself an expert at ads. Okay, if you’re an expert at ads, I am removing you from this. But if you are just someone running a business, don’t go out there just trying to boost a post and thinking that you are using your ad money well. Okay? 

Boosting a post on social is the same as throwing your money into your grandpa’s wood burning stove and hoping it turns into a client. Okay. Don’t cut corners here. Ads can literally make you rich as fuck. So this isn’t something that we want to like kind of try. Go all in and lean in. 

But let me warn you. This is not something you simply throw at an ads team and hope that they let you know If it’s not working. This is somewhere that I went wrong. In the very beginning of growing a business, I hired an ads team, and I just gave them a shit ton of money every month. I was just kind of thinking they’ll let me know if it’s working or if it’s not working. I don’t really know what’s going on. They’re the experts, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it was such bullshit. 

It wasn’t until I woke the fuck up. I think I was getting coached on it one time. One of my coaches from a long time ago was like you need to know everything that’s going on with your ads. You need to know what all of the words mean. If you don’t, you need to get in there and roll up your sleeves and be like what does this mean? How do I know that this is converting? Where is this look, and then whenever I was coached on that, I went back to the ads team, and I did just that. 

I remember being like oh, shit. I’ve been funneling money into something that hasn’t been working for a long time. The ads team hasn’t been telling me because they’re just making good money. It was just the biggest wake up call. So you need to know if your ads are performing well. You need to be the CEO. 

You need to ask a lot of questions, be vulnerable with saying like I don’t know what that means. Can you explain it to me? So that you know when it’s time to tweak, and that you can take charge and be a leader. Just because your ads team understands ads better than you does not mean that they understand your company’s needs and desires better than you. Okay? 

I hope this podcast has helped you a bit when it comes to ads. If you’re looking to grow in 2024, I’m curious, are ads in your future? Are they in your future? Hit me up. Let me know. I love you guys, and I hope you will have the absolute best week of your life. 

P.S. if you are looking to kick in the door in 2024 and you want to come into my world, you want to access my entire body of work, monthly business coaching calls, access to my monthly masterclasses completely for free, or included I should say, as well as my paid community, you can join The Circle membership today. 

This is my year-long absolute no brainer and the most bang for your buck. This community is growing every single day. We are having the best time in here. I want to see you jump in. I want to celebrate with you. I want to grow your business with you, and I love you guys. Have the best day. Goodbye. 

Hey guys, this podcast is the blood sweat and tears of a lot of different people. The planning and the preparation of each episode is extensive. My team and I are really proud to bring you this free and abundant content each week, and we hope that you’re loving it. If you are, the very best thank you that we can receive from you is a review and a share. 

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Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to today’s episode. If you’re looking to get more clarity and momentum for your business, visit hellyescoachingonline.com. See you next week here on The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast.