TCC Podcast #446: How to Use FB Ads to Grow Your Copywriting Business with Tara Zirker

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, if not better on some accounts and so, yeah, there’s been a change, I think most people now have recognized, okay, that was, like, a short lived scare. But, you know, the iOS 15 updates also impacted email, and I think that starting to roll out, where people are realizing what’s happened over the last couple years with email has been pretty dramatic and traumatic for business owners, and so you do have to adapt. And there’s lots of things that change. You do have to stay on top of it. There are, you know, things that shift quite frequently, but our job is to do that for you, so to make it really simple and easy to run and so that you’re always staying ahead of what’s going on.

But here’s the thing, you just have to have a different mindset about it, because all the platforms change, marketing changes all the time. AI has completely disrupted what will happen in marketing for the next, like, five to 10 years, and it’s it’s changing very quickly, so you may as well learn ads and have a little bit more control over your ability to get your own leads and not have to depend on such rapidly changing social algorithms and things like that. 

Rob Marsh: So before we talk about some of the things we need to have in place before we’re ready to do ads. Can you maybe just give us a minute or two on why ads are a better channel, or at least a complimentary channel to just organic traffic on places like Instagram or Facebook or whatever? Why should we be doing ads? 

Tara Zirker: Absolutely. Once you feel the difference of ads in your business, it’s hard to want to ever do anything organic again, because really, you control the flow, and it is, and I’m not saying you really do need to do the organic things that do impact your business. Need to be consistent. You need to have those disciplines of a business owner in that way. However, ads are kind of the easy button. They’re the shortcut. You can just grow and scale so much quicker and build your leads. 

A great example of this is I have one very, very minor funnel inside of my business. It attracts a very sub niche of business owners, but it monetizes really well. So it’s under the radar. Hardly anyone knows it, unless you see that particular funnel, and I spend $10 a day on that funnel, and it generates about anywhere from seven to 10 leads for me per day. So let’s just say, on average, it’s like 250 to 300 leads per month. And what I always tell people, and when I teach, when I show people this funnel, they’re like, oh my goodness, how do I create one of those? And what I always say is, like, if you can like, oh, and I should say, this took me about three hours to set up originally, that includes writing the content piece of it, and it takes me about 10 minutes or less per month to maintain although, frankly, I haven’t spent more than a couple minutes in like months on this thing. So I always say, if you’re spending more than like 10 minutes a month to generate 250, 300 leads a month, then you should be considering ads, because that is just so easy. There’s nothing to it. It took me a couple of hours to set up this, by the way, was about three or four years ago,

I spend about 10 minutes per month maintaining it at the very most. I mean, every like, once a year or so, I have to spend maybe an hour or so kind of refreshing a few things. So I just think, like, if you can, and that’s a great example of why I say the shortcut, the easy button. It’s like, well, if you’re spending more than $10 and that’s $10 a day, so 300 bucks a month, if you’re spent, you know, you spend probably that much in time and energy, and maybe even a team with your social media. I mean, it’s worth it to have at least as a compliment, ads running so that your organic traffic is staying or, I should say ads are keeping your brand much more top of mind for your organic traffic, and you’re able to monetize that organic traffic as well. I will also say you’re able to control the levers a little bit more. You know, with an organic post, you never know if it’s gonna get, you know, if it’s gonna go viral for you, or if it’s just gonna sit there and do nothing and get, you know, 10 likes or whatever, with, at least with ads. Number one, you’re able to test very, very quickly. And number two, you’re able to, like, just have more consistent results and force meta to work for you. 

Okay, so it’s like a 24/7 sales person that’s just always working for you. It’s how I like to describe it. Yeah, I can, I imagine a lot of people listening to like, whoa, wait a second. You know, 250 leads for $300 that feels. Pretty, pretty good, or 200 leads, whatever that ends up being. 

Rob Marsh: Can I just quickly ask, is that for a product or a service that is for a lead magnet and it builds a very sub niche? 

Tara Zirker: So I want to caveat that and say that is very, very, very niche. The average cost per lead for, let’s just say, unless you have, like, a very niche sort of product or service or something like that, you’re going to pay more that’s like, so optimized. It’s start to finish, you know. And also it’s for a niche that just is underserved. And so it’s a very, very cheap lead that actually monetizes very well on the back end. But it’s also a very small market. It really, I mean, the most I could probably spend on it, it would be, I don’t know, $50, $60, a day. It’s not meant to, like, blow up my business, right? It’s not meant to have a $20,000 a month budget on it, but it works very well for what it is supposed to do. We have, like, a whole metric spreadsheet of how much you should be expecting to spend based on your industry, your niche and your funnel type. And those are three really important things to understand.

And I would say maybe three to $8 is probably more average. So you’re not going to get maybe that many leads, but you’re going to qualify those leads. You’re going to know they’re really high value, and you’re gonna be able to, obviously make offers on the back end of that. 

Rob Marsh: I mean, even hearing you talk about that, though, there’s a lot of help there, because copywriters who want to serve smaller niches or undersized like, there’s really big opportunities out there if you’re willing to step away from finance or coaching, you know, these big niches where there’s a lot of stuff happening and everybody seems to want to flock there. It’s like, find the smaller niche, and there’s a massive opportunity. 

Tara Zirker: Yes, and I would say, I mean, I think that we all will find our our little pocket, you know, whether it be a little bit more broader in the market, or whether you do niche down, but I think that is just a great little nugget for success in general. And what I’ve seen in business is, you know, when you can niche down, and wherever you can find that profitable niche, you can go deep, so much easier, right? So much easier to qualify your ideal client and to get better, higher quality clients too, who, number one, pay more, but number two are easier to work with. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, agreed. Let’s talk about what we need to have in place then, before we can even think about, you know, running ads. Obviously if you don’t have a product or an offer, you shouldn’t be running ads. But what else should we be thinking about so when we do run ads, we hit the ground running, and we maximize our chances for success. 

Tara Zirker: That’s right, the first thing that you need is some sort of entry offer. So let’s just say, if you’re focused on building your list, this could be a, I mean, there’s any number of ways to do this. This could be a training if you wanted to do that, or a video, sales letter. This could also be something like some sort of download or free guide, and I will say that where we see the most success with our members and clients is when what they are offering is very specific. So don’t think General. You know, this is the guide for small business owners who want to hire their next copywriter? No, like that is just way too general. So you want something very niche, specific, if you can, and I will say that things like tools perform better than like ebooks. So if we’re thinking like a checklist or a spreadsheet or a it could be like a formula guide or something like that, but if you can think of it as more of a tool versus like an ebook, you’re going to have a much better chance of success. So anything that kind of is a time saver for your client, is going to be like, very magnetic to that client.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So we definitely want that. What else do we need to make sure that we’re ready to go? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, so you want some sort of entry level offer, and I will say too. I will say too. And again, it depends on, I would say level of sophistication with how comfortable you are building and optimizing your quote, unquote funnel, but basically the sales process. But there are plenty of service based providers who are taking folks to a very short video sales letter. So it could be oriented around a result, or oriented around mistakes or something like that, and then an application like right under it. And so you’re going to pay more for your leads, but you’re also maybe going to get folks who want your services, like applying right there for your services. 

There’s lots and lots of different funnels, so you’re going to have some sort of entry level.

Will offer that people are excited to get more information, take that next step with you, and then from there, this is where you now. You’re starting to set up your ads, right so you want to think about a lot of folks will mistake boosting posts or running traffic ads as true kind of back end ads. And I will tell you honestly, there is a tiny bit of value in those, but you only want to spend about 10% of your budget there, 80% of your budget you want to be spending on conversion ads. And in order to do conversion ads, you have to install tiny, tiny bit of tech. Little tech that goes on the back end of your website is called a pixel. You’re gonna install a little bit of code, and this is the ad tech that allows meta to talk to your website and say, Okay, we got conversion. Let’s go find more people that look like that conversion. And that is what allows your ads to get better and better and better. A lot of times, people mistake that they’re boosting a post, they’re running traffic ads, and they think I’m running ads. They’re not working. They never would from that strategy. It’s not really a strategy. It’s like meta is really cheap, inexpensive way of advertising that rarely yields results. 

A great example of this, we had one member come in. Her name was Karen. She’s a realtor, and so service based, and she had spent 1600 bucks and had between an ADS budget and a marketing team, and unfortunately that marketing team was doing traffic ads. I said, this is going to both like, delight you and totally like depress you too… so we’re gonna relaunch this. We’re gonna install that pixel. All we’re gonna do is change one button and tell Meta we want this type of person, not just a traffic somebody who will click but not convert. And she, within 72 hours, she had spent 60 bucks. She had 40 leads. And so it’s just knowing the buttons to push and making sure that the tech is set up correctly. And so that’s going to be your next step. You guys set up a tiny, tiny bit of tech, and you’ve got to make sure that everything is going to be able to track, because that is what allows Facebook to really optimize and make sure it’s working as an actual salesperson for your team, not just like you know difference between having a sales conversation, like having a salesperson versus someone who’s like, just holding the sign on the corner and flipping it around like, that’s the difference in how you set up your ads. 

From there, everyone’s most favorite part on this podcast. You’re going to write your copy. There you go. Easy peasy. We probably don’t even have to talk about that very much, but there are a few mistakes with ad copy that we could talk through. You’re gonna write your copy. Design your ads doesn’t have to be crazy. 60% of conversions are still coming from static imagery. So people think, I’ve gotta do these videos, got to be crazy. Yes, you should incorporate some video if you can, but you can start with static images, and most conversions still happen from static and then from there, you’re going to actually build your ad, takes about 10 minutes, and you’re going to launch it.

And the actual hard part is, after the launch, it’s looking at the metrics, it’s knowing which four metrics to look at, what to optimize based on that data, and honestly, depending on your budget. From there, it’s just monitoring your ads, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. 

Rob Marsh: I want to come back to the four metrics we need to watch, but you mentioned boosting posts, and you said there is a use case where that makes sense. I’m curious what that is, because I’ve heard the same thing. You know, most boosted posts, it’s a waste of money. Don’t do it. But obviously there’s a reason. So when should we be boosting posts? 

Tara Zirker: That’s right. So you can boost, here’s what I will say. I would definitely endorse this, this strategy, if you’re boosting the top 10% of your content, I think this is content that is, it’s already like, getting a lot of visits, a lot of attention, and maybe you’re noticing and and you would need to decide based on what you’re looking for out of your content. Maybe you’re noticing it’s generating a lot of DMS. Maybe you’re noticing it’s generating a lot of followers. Maybe you’re noticing it generates a lot of clicks to your bio. So whatever it is, whatever those kinds of goals are for you, that’s how I would qualify your top 10% and it also could just be views, and that showing, like audience engagement, and you know, that sort of thing. And then here’s what you can do. You can actually repurpose that content as your ads. Okay, so you can make this really easy on yourself, and you can repurpose that as some of your ad creative that’s going to go to that entry level offer. And then the other.

That you can do is boost it, and then on the back end, you’re retargeting that engagement with your conversion ads, so about 10% of your budget you can spend on that kind of ad, as long as so big caveat here, as long as you’re also retargeting that engagement with those conversion ads, and you’re saying, hey, Facebook, these people are interested. Go find the ones among them that are most likely to convert. And this is what I want them to do next. And that is the power. That’s the strategy right there. 

Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s talk about the metrics then that we need to be watching. We’re running ads. Maybe we’re putting $10 a day in it, so we’re sort of starting really basic. But what are we watching to make sure that we are actually having an impact on our business, and not just throwing Mark Zuckerberg more of our money? 

Tara Zirker: First and foremost is your cost per result. We’ve got a big metric sheet of how much you should spend depending on your business, your industry, your niche, your funnel time. How much should this cost? Right? So let’s just say, if you’re targeting audience in a very competitive space, you might expect, you’re going to pay a little bit more per result, versus if you’re targeting a less competitive space, you’re going to pay less per result. So cost per result. And there’s lots of ways to kind of get a general, you know, foundation there, but I’ll just give a couple here. So let’s just say, if you are sending folks to some sort of initial opt in, that’s like a free guide or checklist, or maybe it’s like a, you know, whatever it is, I would say anywhere from three to $8 would be a really good range. And from there, I’d have to, like, slice and dice it a little bit more, depending on what that niche was, right? 

But that’s like a good starting range. Let’s just say you’re sending people to book a consultation or recall something like that. That’s gonna be more expensive, that could be anywhere from 60 up to $500 and again, massive range I’d have to slice and dice it to tell you, like, a more specific range. I usually don’t like huge ranges, but let’s just say, you know, if I’m running maybe I’ve got a high ticket service, and it’s for folks in, like, the coaching space. Okay, probably 250 bucks a call, and I would give that range somewhere between 175 and, like, 300 so I’ve got, like, very specific ranges that I want you to be within. 

The next thing that you’re going to look at is your CTR link, click through rate. So CTR link, click through rate. Click through rate on the link. And that is different than another metric that meta has called CTR all all in my mind, is totally junk metric. Rob, you know how, when you write ad copy, or you’re reading an ad and there’s that little more button, yeah? So they would count that as a link click, and we couldn’t care less about that, 

Rob Marsh: So they’re just seeing the rest of the ad, and that’s counting it. Yeah, that’s garbage. 

Tara Zirker: That’s garbage, right? Or maybe they go to your page, so you might be getting followers from it. But we don’t want to, we don’t want to count that. We don’t want to, like pay attention to that in our matrix of how we’re making decisions and spending money, right? So we want CTR link click through rate and not saying, Hey, I only want people who are clicking to the next step that’s really important. We want that above 1% and copywriters everywhere will love this. This is an easy fix. If that is under 1% meaning, for every 1000 folks that see our ad, we want 10 to well we want. We want 10 or more, usually, like one to 1.5% so 10 to 15 people to click to the next step. And if that’s under 1% or wasting money number one and number two, the easy fix is your ad copy and design. And so that’s where you can really go in and start to,

you know, add in hooks, qualify your leads, more things like that. Okay, the next metric we’re looking at is CPM, which is your cost per 1000 impressions. Now, Facebook will do the math for you, but this is the amount that they’re going to be charging to your credit card. If you get one conversion, 10 doesn’t matter, or none, they’re still going to charge you based on your CPM, which is how competitive your ad is against other competitors, and blah, blah, blah, and that they do a big, complicated formula, and they’re saying, Okay, we’re going to charge Rob $30 per 1000 impressions. We’re going to charge Tara um $45 per 1000 impressions, right? So it’s, it’s a big, complicated thing, but we want to see that CPM under $42 if you’re spending more. And again, great news for copywriters. This is like easy to figure out. If it’s more than $42 on a cold audience. It means there is a trigger word in your ad copy, your design, on your landing page, or even in your URL. 

And a great example of this was we had a client spending. Gosh, I think it was like a $70,000 budget. Maybe it was 100, something like that. But over a very short period of time, three weeks, and everything’s going great. The ads are doing awesome. All of a sudden, overnight, the ads went, I think it was from like $3 a lead, which was our target, was under five, to like 13 bucks a lead. I mean, it’s a launch ruining jump. It’s actually like quarters revenue, like worth of revenue ruining jump, right? And clients freaking out. We’re freaking out. We have very short period of time to fix this. And so I start testing ad copy like crazy. Me and my team were just pulling out words because what had happened was the CPM had risen that much. So CPM went from like $30 to like 150 bucks or something. 

So we knew there was a trigger word, and ads have been running just fine for several days, um, but we had to go in and find that trigger word. So, man, we were, I mean, I got so little sleep during these few days. Finally, on the landing page. So I’m testing ad copy. I’m working with my rep, my reps like there’s literally nothing that I can see in the ad on like I don’t see any problem anywhere. And so I’m testing everything I can think of on the landing page. On the very, very bottom, imagine a really long landing page. There’s a call to action, and right under the call to action, in tiny, tiny print, it says, Bring a glass of bubbly and join the class. And I just had the thought, could bubbly be the word? Like it’s a reference, you know, kind of light reference to alcohol, and could that actually be the word. And so I, you know, I write to their team. I say, can you take this one word off of the landing page? And I, you know, they do that. Within an hour, I go, I launch new set of ads. And CPM, 30 bucks cost per lead, 350 and so that is, there’s certain words, and I have a whole list of them. There’s certain words that just make your ads more expensive, and we just call them trigger words. So that’s a great example of how one trigger word can totally wreck your campaign. And also, it’s also a great example if you get into copywriting for clients, the types of things you want to be aware of and really attuned to. And hopefully, you know, good media buyers should be attuned to those too, but not very many people are all the time, and so they just pay a lot more for their ads. We could be a lot less expensive. So, so you want CPM. 

Final thing is your landing page conversion rate, and you’re spending money on ads, you want to make sure your landing page is as optimized as possible. Another great win for copywriters, because you can, you can test this. You can try different headline formulas. You’re seeing if your landing page is converting under the optimal ranges, simply go in and start testing, and for every 100 people that get to that landing page, you’re either going to say, great, that’s working better. Let’s move on to the next test. Or, oops, that’s not working as well. Let’s try something new, and you can get a lot of data very, very, very quickly. 

We did this a couple months ago, I think it was, we had a landing page, kind of embarrassing for me to say, but it was converting at 12% which we never have. 

Rob Marsh: That’s good. 

Tara Zirker: Well, well, it was, it was for leads, though. 

Rob Marsh: Oh, okay, I’m sorry. Okay, so sometimes you want a lead, converting maybe 30% 30 50% 100%. I thought you were talking about sales.

Tara Zirker: You got it, Rob, If it were sales, I’d be like, Yeah, okay. Sadly, it wasn’t. And I was embarrassed, because I was like, man, well, we did rapid fire Landing Page Conversion Rate testing over 72 hours and had up to 28% we probably should have pushed it a little higher, but that was good enough that our ad costs were were stable enough because, you know, if I’m paying let’s just break down the math really simply, $10 to get 1000 impressions, and I have 1% conversion rate. That means I’ve got, I paid $10 to get 10 people to the page. Well, you can see how my costs would be affected if I have one person convert versus three.

So that’s why you’ve got to know these things. Four simple metrics, you’ll be an expert on these if you just pay attention to them for an hour of your life, you will. And copywriters have such a good instinct for what to change, what needs to be tested, but an hour of your life to master these four metrics, and we teach it in, you know, 10 minutes, but really you pay attention for an hour of your life, you will be a master of these four metrics. And these four metrics control the fate of how successful your ads are, which could mean how successful your business is.

Rob Marsh: I imagine this is going to change depending on how long you’ve been running ads. But how often should you be checking those metrics? Is it every day, every week? I tune in every quarter to see that things are still going what does that look like? 

Tara Zirker: Exactly. So when you launch ads, you’re going to be looking at these every day for the first like three to five days. Then you’re going to look at them once a week. If you’re like most new advertisers, you’re going to be looking at them multiple times a day. But it’s unnecessary, I promise. And then, you know, honestly, it depends on what kind of funnel you’re running, but once things are kind of up and running once a month for a couple minutes, and those are the only four things you’re looking at, by the way, you can look at a whole bunch more. To me, there’s a lot of vanity metrics and a lot of like, fluffy things that just make no difference to the bottom line. Those four right there control everything that is successful about your ads. And so, yeah, once, once a month, the funnel I mentioned earlier is a once a month. Look, for me, with our main ad account where we’re driving folks to our successful ads accelerator, that’s a once a week. 

Rob Marsh: How often should we be changing up creative? Obviously, the numbers that we’re looking at are gonna, you know, affect that. But I think one of the things that certainly worries me, and I’m sure worries a lot of other service providers, is the thought that, well, what I don’t want this to become is I need to come up with new creative and be testing new creative every three or four days, or even every couple of weeks. That becomes as hard a job as posting new stuff on social media organically all the time, right? So basically, I’ve just duplicated the difficulty of social media into my ads account. How often do we need to be looking at stuff like that? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, I just heard a recommendation of, and I was like, Absolutely not, not ever in the million years. Do you need this much? But I heard a recommendation out there, um, of 20 creatives per $1,000 and I was like, I’ve seen, never, would I ever, never. 

Rob Marsh: People talk about, yeah, when you’re launching, you need to have 20 different ad sets, and you need to be sending certain amount of dollar amount until the algorithm figures out which one is the best. And then you’ve got to do you take those two or three and now you’ve got to do 10 different versions of those with different graphics or different copy, you know? 

Tara Zirker: So, yeah, it starts to be like too much to even start to comprehend thing. There’s no way I want to do this. Never, when I would ever… Now, here’s the thing, when you do get up into bigger launch spends and you have a media buyer or an agency that you’re working with, their job is to be doing that level of creative iteration, not, not at Crazy volumes. There’s, there’s a point at which is just, it makes absolutely no sense, like you wouldn’t be able to efficiently test that amount with, you know, properly. So there’s, there’s a certain VA, there’s like a sweet spot of volume for every account. But let’s just put this in small business owner terms. If you are spending $1,000 or less, I mean, a great example. Well, I’ll use both of my accounts actually, one that spends, you know, into the five figures, and one that is like the $300 a month. One that $300 a month one, I’m doing creative update maybe once or twice a year. Very minor. It’s like, I’ll go into Canva, I’ll edit the colors, and I will maybe do a couple of copy variations. I’ll put it back into the algorithm. It rarely requires more testing than that. And that’s where I would say it’s about an hour investment if I’m kind of moving slow in my Canva account, you know, right?

If I am. And this, I do think, is where copywriters, again, have that advantage, because you kind of have a sense of what, oh, that’s working. Well, let’s test this. You kind of have that inner sense and knowing of like, you know, or maybe I want to insert a little more sales psychology into this copy piece, like you don’t have to spend a lot of time there. If on my larger account, or any larger account, I’m, well, let’s just go my larger account, you know, I would say I’m updating creative once a quarter, and it’s not much more honestly than what I just described. Now, when I first got my account to a really great, optimal place, it did take me a little bit more time up front. You know, the first few months I was testing and seeing, like, where’s the right market message fit and what are people really, really glomming on to one of the coolest things I did, and this honestly made all the difference in my copy and my creative ever since was I went through, we have just under 1000 testimonials. I don’t think I had that many at the time, maybe like 100 like testimonial type things. And I went in there, and I saw two things over and over again. So I saw people kept saying effective. I’ve never used that in my marketing. They kept saying effective ads. And they kept saying, you know, I just, I always had such a headache doing ads or these are like, headache free. And I was like, those are two weird things, but I saw enough that I picked up on those signals and I put that in my messaging. I had a great mentor once who said, try not to write anything that your clients didn’t say first, right? And, man, that made all the difference so and that just would never be how I would describe my program to somebody, you know, but we help you create fast, effective ads like that is the key to our whole business, and it came from my clients, directly from their mouths. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s a copywriting trick right there that’s so good, really well known. So while we’re talking about testing and different creatives. What is the kind of stuff that we should be testing? And I’m asking this because I know that some people say you should be only testing big Ideas. And then there are a lot of people who get hung up and testing things like a call to action that says, Call click now versus click today, versus click for more and tests that probably don’t actually tell you a whole lot. So how do you think through testing? Do we need to be testing graphics? Do we need to be testing headlines? Any of that? 

Tara Zirker: Yes. Okay, so when we teach creative testing, we always start with copy, actually. So on test, honestly, we want to you can test lots of frameworks, but we also want to test lengths, short, medium long copy and extra long copy right now is trending on meta. There is a theory that meta is indexing based on copy and so, and this gets into a whole different conversation, but think of it like how we used to write blog posts, or how we still write blog post, very SEO rich. So that’s another trick, or another thing that you can be testing. Then we want to test our imagery. Always. Five to 10 images is what we recommend right now, videos and or GIFs. So you can include a mix there. And then we want to be testing headlines. And so the way that we teach testing right now, we have a really cool way of testing that kind of puts it all together and lets the algorithm decide. You can also test them one at a time, and this is the old school way that we used to teach, which I still love, but is a little bit more of a manual effort. So you can let the algorithm kind of do the testing for you, or you can do it yourself. But the most important piece is that you want to test that mix that I just described, and then idea versus idea versus like smaller tweaks. 

So I would say initially, I would just stick to one framework, and then you can test different copy, you know, frameworks, against each other if you want. So one framework and three different lengths, or four different lengths, if you want to go the want to go the extra long way version, and then from there, yes, with maybe you see like, like, we have, for example, one client who just honestly, it’s the same copy that has converted for years for them, and we will test all sorts of things against it, but it’s that one copy that generates almost all of the results. And yes, what we do now is micro testing within that. And so we’ll change up the call to action. We’ll change up the emojis. By the way, I call that styling, and there’s lots of styling, little tips and tricks, but like the green check mark is one of the best emojis that always test incredibly well on meta. So take that and run with it. But there’s just all these little different things you can test, kind of within your winners. So it’s almost like you want to get some big winners, and then from there you can start drilling down, if you want to, optional but optimal, you can start drilling down into the little stuff. Rob Marsh: Let me ask about targeting. So I know if I’ve done a big launch in the past, and I’ve got, you know, several hundred buyers, I can easily upload those and create a lookalike audience. But for a lot of service providers who are maybe working with three or four clients a month, which nets out at maybe 20 a year, you almost have to have five years worth of those clients to create a look alike audience. So how do I as a small business create an audience of ideal prospects to be targeting? 

Tara Zirker: I’m going to tell you the version of my answer that’s relevant right now, and the version that I believe will be relevant in 12 months from now. So right now you can target based on interests, so small business owner as a behavior, let’s say, could be a great one. Maybe you’re targeting parents. You can target all these different parents. Why would you be targeting parents?

Rob Marsh: I suppose there might be a copywriter you know, targeting parent writing type niches or whatever. 

Tara Zirker: You’re targeting businesses. However, if you’re writing for clients and I will say, I think that if you are writing for clients, having at least some basic skill level on ads can be helpful. So you can, you can write specific copy for specific interests and things like that. But basically, small business owner is a behavior. You can target Facebook page admins as an example, so that you wouldn’t have be an admin on a Facebook page unless you have a business or you’re a thought leader of some kind, right? So there’s lots of ways to do targeting that would like specifically call out to your ideal client within the targeting the answer I will give you a year from now, and I I’m anticipating this is where it’s going, is there’s no targeting period, and the algorithm just knows, and your creative will actually be the qualifier and Tell meta where to place those ads. And so we see, and just to give a little more context there, we see that the way the campaign structure is, you know, for many accounts, it still is this way. But for other accounts, they’re noticing top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Those are kind of traditional how you would think about ads, those are applying less and less. It’s just becoming one big funnel, and the algorithm is going and finding your right person. 

A great example of this Rob is ourselves. I mean, we’re targeting a small business owner spending under 5000 a month in ads, and who wants to really learn how to do it, do it well, and not hire it out yet. Okay? Maybe at some point they will. Maybe they never do. We’ve noticed that our best targeting right now, or some of our best targeting, is broad targeting. I’ll put the ages in, and I’ll put the country that I’m targeting, and that’s it. No interest, no look alikes, no nothing. And Meta is just going out and finding Ito clients for me based on what it knows about me and what it knows I want. So how crazy is that, but that’s where it’s all going.

Rob Marsh: That’s really cool. Do you have to have a history in your meta account for that to work that way?

Tara Zirker: We’ve seen accounts brand new. Start off with broad target and targeting and do really, really well as long as you’re creative. You always do want to have, like you always want to have the geography in there, otherwise, you’re going to get lots of cheap but very random results from all over the world. And that’s not what you want, right? You want qualified leads and customers and things like that. So you always want to put your geography, I will say there could be a use case for age, although it honestly doesn’t matter so much, because meta will figure that out. And if you’re writing for clients, you may want to think about gender, but again, doesn’t matter so much, because Meta will figure it out. They’ll know which ads are more attractive to men versus women. You know, male versus female, that whole thing. So all that targeting is probably going to go away at some point, but for now, it exists. You can use it. It’s not totally necessary. 

Rob Marsh: Interesting. What else should I be asking that I just don’t even have the background, you know, talking about, how do service providers step into this role and become advertisers? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, well, I think that, you know, there is, there seems to be the type of person, a type of person that does really, really well with ads. And it’s not surprising to me that so many fantastic, what we would call media buyers or agency owners who go into ADS. They come from a copy background. I can’t tell you how many of my colleagues, you know, they just wanted to add on a skill set, or they saw an opportunity, or they just really were attracted to advertising. They’re like, I have this great skill set and copy, and I think I could apply it really well to this, and they usually do great. So there’s a real natural fit. And I think that, like when I think through our members inside of our successful ads accelerator, some of the best ones, honestly, are have copywriting backgrounds. They just get it. They kind of understand what needs to happen at that copy level to create a conversion. 

On the back end. They understand sales psychology. They understand the flow. And so there’s a real, natural fit. So whether you wanted to do it for yourself, which I think is great, to keep that expense small in house, learn the skill set. It’s a skill set that will follow you the rest of your life, from business to business, whatever you do. It’s an amazing skill set. Or maybe you do want to get into writing copy. For ads clients. I mean, that’s a very lucrative niche, niche, or maybe you want to actually build the skill set and run ads yourself or experiment with it. I think there’s lots of approaches, but I do think that copywriters have a real natural fit.

The things that I would be aware of that are shifting trends and stuff is like, how do you bring AI into that? 

Rob Marsh: That was gonna be my next question is, how are you using AI? It for, I mean, obviously meta has got it running in the background, helping to find the right prospects and all of that. How are you using AI in the foreground, you know, in the planning, the strategizing and the writing of the ads? 

Tara Zirker: Yes. I mean, we’re using it heavily, and we still depend on our copywriters. I will say, you know, my, my big opinion is, and I think for all professions that are being touched by AI and it is massively disrupting, right? Is like, I don’t think any of these professions are going away, but they are definitely shedding their skin and what I what I’m seeing is the AI can replace the average almost across the board, and it will enhance the exceptional. And so I think that you that, no matter, you know, if you all marketers are being, you know, very, very like, impacted by AI. And I think that’s where we just have to take our skill set to exceptional. You know, you can’t be good. You have to be great. If you’re great, you need to be excellent. And that is, I think, where the opportunity lies. 

In preparing for this interview, I asked AI its opinion on like, specifically for like, ad copywriters. And I was just, you know, we went through a whole conversation that was really good. But here, and I said, be brutally honest. And it said, Okay, here’s the brutally honest future state snapshot for AI and copywriting, ads and copywriting, excuse me, and I thought this was so good. It says number one, AI is going to write more first drafts. I think that’s across the board, probably already seeing that. Yeah, 100% smart copywriters will edit for tone, angle and conversion. Number two, and this, for me, is where all, all marketing is going. Um, anything that’s impacted by AI, this is 100% where I see my clients wanting, if I’m thinking of like, ad clients, for example, this is where they’re at, and this is where we’ve been moving for a long time. So you know, kind of works out well, but clients want outcomes and not assets. So copywriters will be hired to optimize funnels or drive ROAs, not just write a sales page or write ad copy. And I think right there is all of the value in what’s going to happen and be disrupted over the next five years, like even, you know, even my clients that are heavily using AI themselves.

They want that human, not necessarily analysis, because AI can do the analysis, but they want the like, what are your insights? What are you seeing in other clients? Like that is where all the value is. Number three, it said multi disciplinary thinkers will rise. The copywriter who understands ads plus Email Plus audience journey will be 10x more valuable. When I saw that, I was like, Oh, my goodness, yes, yes, yes. Like, from an agency perspective,

that’s it. If you can understand the entire customer journey and how copy, not as an asset, but as an outcome, is going to impact every place. And if you can look at an analysis, or conduct an analysis with AI and say, This is where you know, this is this is where the market is really interested in our message, this is where we’re losing. This is where we’re losing that we’re losing engagement, right? Like that, right? There is huge. And I think that is the value, at least from my agency’s perspective, my training perspective,

that is where the value is at.

Rob Marsh: I couldn’t agree more. I actually teach a college course on customer journeys and helping you know students see how journeys come together and the various platforms that you know and how they all fit together. And the more I teach that course, the more it strikes me that that is a superpower for marketers, if you can understand even lead scoring and attribution and how it all fits together. It makes a massive, massive difference. 

Tara Zirker: I agree. I think if you skill up or re skill in just any one of those, like what you just said, you know, analytics or attribution or understanding customer journey. I mean, that is where 100% I think that’s where all of the future lies, and not just for copywriters, but everybody in marketing.

I saw a great study by Procter and Gamble, and they did this study kind of establishing what a baseline output is for the average person, like in just like the average worker, yeah, and so and marketing is, for sure, the most. I think it was marketing and sales is going to be the first wave of massive disruption all other industries will follow with AI, except probably some offline, you know, specific, like manual labor industries. But it was very interesting. It showed kind of the baseline is what the baseline always has been. It’s just the average output. And then they showed an entire team and their average output. And here’s what’s crazy. Rob, a person, one person, AI, enhanced employee outperforms an entire team. Oh, wow. So we got to wrap our minds around that. That is, if we want to understand, how do we provide value in this next wave of innovation, which is AI that right there is what we’ve got to wrap our minds around. And how do we become AI enhanced, and what are the skills that companies will be wanting and hiring for? I think you described it so beautifully. It’s that, it’s that attribution. It’s that, you know, being able to, like, score a lead. It’s being able to look at a funnel and say, this is where we’re dropping off. Here’s our tools, and copy is definitely one of the biggest tools to fix it. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. We’re running out of time, but I definitely want to ask a question about, you know, formulas or hooks, or if you had to set up a new account, and it absolutely had to succeed, you know, if, if it doesn’t work, Tara is banished from Facebook ads or whatever, is there a hook or a formula that you would lead off with that you would try first, because, you know, it tends to perform pretty well, or it’s a good starting point to start to build off of?

Tara Zirker: Yeah, anything that is around problem awareness is where I would go. So, and I know I’m like, rusty on all my formulas, but like, problem or pain, the interrupts. So maybe it’s not this, but it’s this, right? And then, like, the invitation, the CTA, that’s where, if I’m like, Oh, if I’m really betting on success and I really need this to to do, well, that’s where I would go. So

you know, if I’m thinking about my customer, for example, sometimes they’re not even aware that traffic might be their issue.

They just know they’re not getting enough sales. But it’s like, is it the offer, or is it the traffic? And so anything that I can do to bring awareness to that problem, like maybe their conversion rate is fine, or obviously, everybody always wants their conversion rate to improve. But the bigger problem is they’re not getting enough eyeballs, and they don’t even understand, like, if one to 3% of your audience converts, well, then I need more audience. And so anything I can do to bring awareness to that issue is really, really helpful. So that’s kind of a little case study there. How I would think through that. 

Rob Marsh: That makes a lot of sense. Again, thinking about copywriters and content writers who may be working with, you know, three to six clients a month, you really don’t need to close that many clients. You know, if you can, if you’re pretty good, you know, you’re closing, say, one out of three or one out of two calls. You don’t need that many leads. And that’s where it seems to me, what you’re talking about, even the $10 a day type ads that drives, you know, if, again, if you were to get 20 leads into your business a month, and you close a third of them, your your business is just fine, and you’re probably making 10k or more a month.

Tara Zirker:  100% I think for any business owner it’s valuable to understand that, but what you just shared is gold, because so many people don’t realize what it takes to actually create a conversion. If it only takes three or four calls, well, then I know, and I only need two or three clients, those numbers just got a lot easier. Yeah, exactly. 

Rob Marsh: Okay. This has been eye opening for me in a lot of ways. I’ve followed you on your list for a long time. I know you do. You know regular trainings, and you’ve got this accelerator. Tell us a little bit about the accelerator, and of course, I’m going to link to it, thecopywriterclub.com/tara, if anybody wants to check it out. But tell us just a little bit about what you guys do in the accelerator? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, absolutely. So we take clients and we show them how to run ads within a couple of hours, we’re gonna have your ad set up. So big nutshell version is, if you want to run ads, we have six fast and easy levels. They’re 20 to 40 minutes a piece. The unique thing is, everything we do includes one on one coaching, so every time you finish one of those levels, we’re gonna have one of our coaches hop on a call with you and actually audit your work, make sure that everything is set up for your success before you ever spend $1 so your tech is in place, your design is great, you know, like your offer is really top notch, so it is a full like one on one, done with you. Program really affordable, really well priced. And you know this, I would say, is for someone who’s spending less than $5,000 you’re not quite ready to outsource. It will help you do that when you’re ready, but you just want to get these ads set up and working quickly.

Rob Marsh: Would this also work for somebody who wants to create ads for clients? Would this give a baseline for that person as well.

Tara Zirker: 100% we don’t have a specific agency track, but I would say about 20% of our membership is agency owners who’ve gone through a program. Some of them have even hired team members and put them right through the program. And so you’re going to learn the nuts and bolts, what you need to do, set up a client account, and then you’ll have ongoing support. We have so many agency owners who just you’ll have after the program. We have, like, a membership portion on the back end. So every month you get a call, so you’re not in a group call. We do have those. You’re getting an actual call to make sure, like, you know what? Let’s try tweaking this. Or here’s something we’re seeing work on accounts. You could try this on your client account or so. It’s really cool. Very hands on. 

Rob Marsh: And Tara, if somebody’s not quite ready for that, they just want to be on your list. Can they also get on your list there at that same link, or do we need to give them a different link? 

Tara Zirker: You know, if you go to youradkit.com that will get you the anatomy of a perfect ad, and it just kind of walks through what an ad needs to be really successful. And that will get you on our email list.

Rob Marsh: Perfect. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes. I really appreciate you taking the time to walk me through all of this, especially from the service provider standpoint. You know, we see Facebook ads for products so often, and it’s nice to take a look at it from this other direction, where it may benefit so many more of us than currently use Facebook ads, and I used Instagram ads WhatsApp, but so thank you for all of that. I really appreciate it. 

Tara Zirker: Thanks for having me. Great to be with you. 

Rob Marsh:  Thanks to Tara for the masterclass on Facebook ads and the analytics that actually matter, what to watch and look out for. If you found Tara’s insights valuable, make sure you get on her list… I shared a URL during our interview that will take you to The Successful Ads Accelerator: If you want to add Facebook ads to your skill set, and a lot of copywriters would benefit from knowing how to use ads on Facebook and Instagram… you can find out more about Tara’s program at thecopywriterclub.com/tara  You could join Tara’s program and be running an ad for your service in less than two hours. Be sure to check that out at thecopywriterclub.com/tara

I’ve got to admit, I find myself wanting to use Facebook ads but worry that the algorythm changes faster than I can keep up and I’m a bit worried about messing up my ads account.

We’ve used ads in the past and had varying success with them. We’ve filled our programs using ads, but also had the opposite experience and spent more than we could justify, so this kind of discussion is incredibly helpful to me and I hope helpful to you too.

If you’re interested in diving into this a bit deeper, we’ve got a training in The Copywriter Underground called “Engineering Successful Facebook Launches” that will walk you through using Facebook and Instagram ads to launch a product or service. If you’re a member, it’s in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.