082: Paid Social Media for Beginners: Crafting Winning Ads with Grace Glass (Office Hours)

 

Danny Gavin Host

00:05

Hello, I’m Danny Gavin, founder of Optige, a marketing professor, and the host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today we have a very special guest, Grace Glass, who is a paid social media strategist at Optidge. Grace is one of the masterminds behind paid social media advertising campaigns at Optidge. From detailed research to the actual creative – and especially creative – she combines strategic thinking with her creative flair to create attention-grabbing, high-performing ads across all social media platforms. Grace has a master’s in marketing, plus certifications in digital marketing, digital marketing analytics and brand management. And what’s even more special and really cool is, Grace is one of the people who helped design the paid social media courses both at the University of Houston and at Odeo. So Grace is here with us today to discuss paid social advertising. Grace, how are you? 

Grace Glass Guest

01:09

I’m doing great. How are you doing today, Danny? 

Danny Gavin Host

01:12

I’m doing really well. Good, all right, so let’s jump right in. I know this is starting from the beginning, but what is paid social? 

Grace Glass Guest

01:20

Paid social is all the little ads that come across your screen as you’re scrolling all the different paid social platforms that exist out there: your tiktoks, your instagrams, facebooks, all of it and it includes whatsapp. 

Danny Gavin Host

01:33

Actually, a lot of people don’t realize that it’s interesting and so obviously these social media platforms have advertisements and I assume that’s the way a lot of them make money, correct? So how does it differ from organic social media marketing when we say paid social media versus organic social? 

Grace Glass Guest

01:49

media oh, I love this one, okay. So organic social media is all the posts that brands make that are curated and beautiful, on their Instagram feeds or on their Facebook pages, and it also involves a really heavy amount of interacting with customers. So, basically, customer service, where if somebody has a problem with your product or your service, the first thing they’re going to do is message you on Instagram or Twitter or something. And so the organic social people have this really unique balance of 50%. People have this really unique balance of 50% marketing and 50% customer service. They are the unsung heroes of the digital marketing world 100%. 

02:33

And then, on the paid side, it’s a lot more about managing overarching campaigns that are driving toward a very specific result. So, for example, really trying to push one particular sale or one particular product that’s debuting, and all of the money and the focus and the resources are going to marshal behind that, and it really doesn’t have to do with speaking on behalf of the brand to customers and it really doesn’t have anything to do with engagement or introducing yourself to new people. It’s really more about those like, at least at Optage, the way we do it. It’s really a lot more about driving those hard conversions that get to the bottom line. 

Danny Gavin Host

03:16

Awesome. And one thing I would add also is in organic social media, often the reason you see certain posts are going to be based off of the algorithm and, potentially, tags that people are using and engagement, while with paid social, it’s more about pay to play right. So when you’re actually paying for your ad to be seen, then people will be seeing it. It’s not necessarily about making sure you hit the algorithm or not. 

Grace Glass Guest

03:40

Yes, yes, absolutely. There’s a lot more trying to play the algorithm in organic than there used to be. 

Danny Gavin Host

03:50

Yeah, we know about those algorithms, especially in Google. Yeah, so why do you think nowadays paid social is such an important part of a digital marketing strategy and, technically, just a marketing strategy in general? 

Grace Glass Guest

04:02

First of all, there’s only so far that your organic social life can take you. These days, in the old days, like a long time ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago, you used to post and everybody who was following you would probably see your post and maybe the people who were following them might see if they engaged with it and it could spread really naturally, really well on, say, a Facebook or an Instagram. But these days, meta really wants you to pay for that, everybody wants you to pay for that reach, and so if you post on organic social, it might not reach anybody, it might not even reach the people who are following you. And so just to reach the people who are already your customers, let alone people who aren’t your customers yet, you’re going to need to pay up just a little bit, just a little, to get out there. 

04:57

And then, as it pertains to Google, or like an organic or paid Google strategy, I would say that Google is great for people who already know they have a problem and maybe they even already know about your solution to their problem. But if they aren’t aware that they have the problem yet which is kind of a funny idea but imagine like they may not realize that their windows are so thin that they let all the cold in and that there are better windows out there. Like they just may not know the options out there. They’re not going to know to go out searching for a solution to that problem, and so sometimes it’s nice to be able to slide in wherever they’re spending their time and attention, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok, and just say hey, did you know that there are better windows out there and your electricity bills could be lower and you could be more comfortable? 

Danny Gavin Host

05:57

So you mentioned Meta, which these days Meta means Facebook and Instagram. Why, when approaching paid social, would we focus primarily, or at least in the beginning, on meta? 

Grace Glass Guest

06:09

We always think of meta as the first stop shop for paid social at Optage, and that’s because it may not have everybody in the world on Facebook or Instagram, but every type of customer is going to be on Facebook or Instagram. 

06:28

Broadly speaking, whether you’re trying to reach, like moms or small business owners, or maybe you’re trying to reach people with master’s degrees who are looking for you to know something for their job, like a business to business application that they need to make their jobs better. You’re going to find everybody on one of those two platforms, or every type of persona on one of those two platforms, and so it’s a great base to start with, and then from there you can branch out to other platforms where things kind of niche out a little bit more. Maybe on Nextdoor you’re looking for homeowners, and maybe on LinkedIn you’re looking for somebody with a certain job title, but everybody also has an Instagram account or Facebook account. You’re going to find them there too. So when you’re working with a limited budget, it really helps to have one place where you can start. 

Danny Gavin Host

07:21

And often, especially at Optage, we work. We work with a lot of companies that you know aren’t the companies that are spending a billion dollars in digital marketing here but I feel there are very specific budgets and therefore it makes sense to start there first. Exactly, a little bit earlier, you mentioned that the way we approach paid social is usually like we have a goal in mind, a very specific point. So what are some of the goals that businesses try to achieve with paid social? 

Grace Glass Guest

07:46

You can do anything with paid social media. That’s one of the beautiful parts about it. But our most typical campaigns will be purchases. So if you’re selling something on a website, we can promote it on paid social and directly attribute that sale from our campaign straight to the website. The two talk to each other. That’s really important for paid social leads. 

08:11

So maybe you work for a business or you have a client who sells something like mortgages or something where nobody buys a mortgage online necessarily. There’s paperwork and in-person things that have to happen. So it’s a lot harder to attribute that success of one ad or another to whether or not somebody signed up for a mortgage. But if you say you offer them a guide to finding the best mortgage rate for your circumstance like the best mortgage rate for your circumstance and they are maybe your customers willing to offer an email address or a phone number and their name in exchange for that information, then three or four months down the line when they sign up for a mortgage with your client or with your company, you can see that you got their name and you got their email address and that’s the name and email address of the person who just applied for a mortgage with your company, so you’re able to show whoever you’re working for that. You did a good Meta, so could you share with us, like, what are those? 

Danny Gavin Host

09:25

types and, if there, if you have any thoughts on specific types working better for specific goals. 

Grace Glass Guest

09:32

On Meta. There are creative types such as, like a static image, a video GIFs, even carousels, where you have to. It’s a bunch of static images and you click through them to get to the end. Those are the main creative types. And then there are the calls to action. You can associate with them, so things like you could have somebody call, like, if your company just wants phone calls they’re kind of old fashioned that way then you could have the call to action be called now. Or you could even get messages on Instagram. You can have Instagram messages if that’s how you wanted to go through your leads. There’s lead gen forms and sending people to the website. So there are lots of different ways you can mix and match an ad type, especially on meta. 

10:21

I think the question you’re getting at Dani for part two is like is it true that only videos work? Now, because that’s the rumor. That’s not what we found. We found that static images work really well, actually surprisingly well. But the truth is you just have to test and see. You’re not going to know ahead of time. Every account is different and I wish we could know ahead of time that a certain ad type was going to be the winning one, but it’s always a surprise and, honestly, it’s never the one you’re expecting. You’ll go into it so confident, like this is the best video I’ve ever made in my life, and then the static image that you worked on for five minutes just takes off like a rocket ship. Great, great, thank you. You just never know. You have to try, you have to test. 

Danny Gavin Host

11:11

Any thoughts on one specific static ad versus a carousel of, let’s say, four to five static ads? Have you ever tested that out? 

Grace Glass Guest

11:19

We have tested that out and, at least for our accounts, what we found is that the difference in performance wasn’t enough. It didn’t make up enough of the difference in how much more work a carousel is. So, because a carousel might be four or five static images, it’s four or five times the work in developing those images but also building the ads. So it takes four or five times longer to make that ad, but they’re not four or five times better in terms of the results we get and we find that we’re typically, for our accounts, better off doing four or five static ads. However, you can do really fun things with carousels, like you can tell stories. You can do little. Like you know, connect the dots, maps, like as if a person’s walking through. I mean, there are fun things you can do with carousels. It’s the time investment for us, where it’s just, it doesn’t pay off for us. 

Danny Gavin Host

12:16

So along the same vein and connected to what you said before about video, so it sounds like it’s kind of a balance between producing like a really good video and like you’re not even sure if that’s going to work really well. So to me, in my mind, it’s like it’s like a maybe when you are creating a video created for more than just Facebook, so therefore it’s not just for that, or number two, maybe you do like a more basic version of the video and once you know it works, then maybe spend the extra money to make it excellent. I don’t know if you have any opinion on that. 

Grace Glass Guest

12:47

Yeah, it’s the hardest part for me personally, because I am such a details-oriented perfectionist. I hate producing ads that are not perfect, but we’re an agency and we need to make sure we’re using our time efficiently, and so sometimes you have to go with something that’s good enough and not the perfect thing. You had in your mind, your vision, your dream, and it’s oh it is. It’s heartbreaking too, because every once in a while we’ll get the time to develop an ad that we love. We did once for Brian Gavin diamonds actually, am I allowed to say the company name, since it’s your, your dad’s company? 

13:30

totally okay, great, uh, we did it once for brian gavin diamonds. We developed like this adorable mario themed ad where it was like an, an off-brand, like we’re not gonna get sued version of mario, and it’s this old-timey nintendo aesthetic where he’s like jumping and running and he’s trying to get to the perfect diamond engagement ring, like that’s the quest that he’s on, and we were so excited and we launched it and I don’t I don’t think anybody about anything. I don’t even know if people watched it. I can’t remember the watch time on it, but it was so sad, we were devastated. And it just goes to show that even if you have the time to spend on the perfect ad, your time might be better spent trying lots of different concepts than really doubling down on your favorite, because you just never know. There’s no accounting for taste, as my mom would say. You never know what people are going to like and respond to and it’s usually not the thing you’re expecting. 

Danny Gavin Host

14:27

It’s such an important insight. Thank you for sharing. So how does Meta’s ad targeting work? So obviously you’re creating these ads and you now want to put them onto Meta, which would be to show up on Facebook and Instagram. How do I target people so that they see my ads? 

Grace Glass Guest

14:44

Hopefully you’ve done a little bit of introspection ahead of time and you know who you’re trying to reach. I think that’s the most important thing. And then the next thing is you’ll go into the ads manager and you’ll open up their tool called Audience research tool? Yeah, and is this easier with a visual? 

Danny Gavin Host

15:06

we could always add in a visual afterwards. 

Grace Glass Guest

15:08

Okay. Okay, so you’ll go into the ads manager and you’ll begin the process of building your campaign, and step two is where you’ll define your audience and in there you’ll be able to search for different demographics, like parents or people who are single, or certain age groups, things like that. You’ll also be able to search for interests, so people who are interested in dogs, or people who really like baked goods, things that could apply to what you’re trying to promote and you’ll also be able to choose regions. So let’s say, you are working for a business that is really local and they really only service a 10 mile radius around their location. You’ll be able to go in and choose that location so that you’re making sure that your ads aren’t going out to everyone everywhere all at once, right where you want them. That’s physically how you go about finding the audience you want. 

Danny Gavin Host

16:09

That’s physically how you go about finding the audience. So there are, like I would say, imagine like you’ve got a bunch of dials right or a bunch of buttons that you can turn in order to find that exact audience that you’re looking for. But I think the key is, like you said before, that prep of like okay, first understand who you’re trying to target and then, once you go into the meta ads manager, you can try to say okay, are there things there that I can turn on right or turn to where I can reach that audience in the best way possible? 

Grace Glass Guest

16:34

Yes, absolutely. 

Danny Gavin Host

16:36

So you’ve mentioned Facebook ads manager outside of you know, targeting and creating the ad. Anything else that you want to add to that? What else can we do with the Facebook ads manager too? 

Grace Glass Guest

16:48

add to that about what else can we do with the Facebook Ads Manager On the building and launching side? I would say you can also add lists of people. So if you’ve got a pretty good size list so I think a thousand is like the minimum number of people you’d want on this list, so a robust list you can upload it and then Meta will do its best to try to match the people on your list to profiles on Facebook or Instagram. And that’s why they need so many names, because the match rate’s not excellent. So there are going to be some that they can’t figure out who’s who and they can’t match them. But for the ones that they can, that can be a really powerful way to retarget people who are already your customers. But it can be a really powerful way to retarget people who are already your customers. But it could also be a really good way to find lookalikes of people who are your customers. 

17:36

So a lookalike is somebody who behaves similarly online to your customer and you can choose how similarly. So a 1% is like a really tight match, they’re basically your person’s twin and then a 10% match is like everybody in the world. I don’t know why you’re even making this look alike. It’s everyone, so you can decide how tightly or loosely to make the match. And truly the secret there is how big is your audience? You can’t make it such a tiny audience that the ads can’t even run. So you’ve got to, like, find the right percentage where your audience is big enough that it will actually go and perform well, and that’s different for every account, so I can’t tell you the perfect percentage, but percentage match on lookalikes. That’s a really powerful tool, one we use every chance we get. It’s just that not every company who comes to us has a robust enough list for us to use. 

Danny Gavin Host

18:37

And just to clarify, when we talk about a list, we’re literally talking about a spreadsheet which has a list of customers or people who signed up to your email list and it literally has their name, their email address, maybe their phone number, maybe their actual physical address. And you take that list and you’re actually uploading it into Meta so that Meta can then track those people or people that look like them, like Grace just mentioned. And this concept of uploading a list occurs not just in the world of Meta, but also on many other advertising platforms, including Google, Microsoft and others as well. 

Grace Glass Guest

19:10

I think most of the paid social platforms have list uploads now. 

Danny Gavin Host

19:15

Which is really cool. 

Grace Glass Guest

19:16

Yeah, I think for a while Nextdoor didn’t and I was like what year is it? What do you mean? You don’t have uploads. 

Danny Gavin Host

19:24

I didn’t even know they had that. That’s great, that’s good news. 

Grace Glass Guest

19:26

I think it’s still in beta, but I do think it’s available now. 

Danny Gavin Host

19:30

Awesome, All right. So a common question that I get, especially people who have been kind of know enough to be dangerous but don’t really know what they’re doing, what’s the difference between boosting an organic post and creating a campaign in Ads? Manager? 

Grace Glass Guest

19:45

Yes, I love this question personally because I get it all the time and it’s such a good question. So let’s say you, Danny, you work for a school and you need to promote something specific, like you’re trying to get prospective parents who might want to send their kids to your school someday to attend an info session, like a meet the teacher night or something. And let’s say you have 20 bucks and a dream to promote this. That’s a boosted post, it’s a finite budget for something that’s happening in a finite amount of time and you’re probably only going to make one ad about it, because you work for a school and you’re busy and you have other things to do. So you’re going to make one really nice static image for this and you’re going to put it out there and then you’re going to tell Meta to only show this post to parents who live in this zip code, and then it’s going to go do its thing and that’s enough. 

20:48

Now let’s say you worked for the school and you were trying to drive enrollment like the bottom of a funnel that earns your school money. People are enrolling and so you’ve got a good budget for this. Let’s say I don’t know $3,000 a month or something. You’re a school. We’re going to keep it modest, but it’s still a good budget of $3,000 a month and it’s ongoing. Maybe you turn it off in the summer because no one’s enrolling in school in the summer. It’s already too late. But other than that, it’s ongoing and you’re going to be making lots of different kinds of ads. You’re going to have some video testimonials of parents who are really happy with their kids at your school and you’re going to have static images. Maybe you’ll have a guide like this, which is how you can make sure your kid ends up at the best possible school, and it just happens to be published by your school, so maybe it’s going to suggest your school at the end. So you’re going to have different types of ads going for a long period of time with a good amount of budget. 

21:51

Once you get into that territory, what you’re going to need on your end is the ability to compare results. You need to know how this ad is performing compared to that ad, how this audience is performing compared to that audience. You’re going to need to be able to make optimization decisions about. You know how to get the most out of the money that you’re spending and you need to report it to whoever you’re reporting to, to prove that you’re doing a good job and that they should be proud of you, and so you’re going to want the ads manager and you’re going to want a full campaign to take care of all of that. It’s really about how much you’re able to view at a bird’s eye level, to make decisions about ongoing campaigns and for reporting purposes so we’ve already spoken about some of the essential steps to creating a successful paid social campaign. 

Danny Gavin Host

22:52

We spoke about setting the goals, our audience targeting. Now let’s talk about the other two ingredients in that recipe, which will be budget allocation and ad creative. So when it comes to budget allocation, which plainly means you have a certain amount of money that you want to spend on your ad campaign, how do you set that budget? On meta, and what sort of thought and strategy do you have? Because sometimes there’s daily budgets, there’s lifetime budgets, there’s setting that budget at, like, a campaign level, setting it potentially at the ad set level or like sort of the audience level. So if we could get into that, that’d be great. 

Grace Glass Guest

23:26

I think, first of all, you need to know yourself and you need to know your business or the business you’re working for. If this is your number one job, as it is for us, our number one job is to do this for our clients. We don’t set campaign level budgets and we don’t set lifetime budgets, because at a campaign level, we’re saying here you go, a paid social platform, whichever one it may be, you decide how to spend the money. You’re smarter than me. You figure it out, like you know more than I do about what’s going on in this, and we’re going to trust you to spend this in the way that’s going to get us the most results. And that can be really great if you’re not in the weeds all the time getting really into the data and making optimizations for yourself, because in that case, it’s true, like Meta would know more about what’s going on in your campaigns than you do. Or I said Meta, but any platform would know more than you do, and so you could trust them to make some decisions on your behalf about how to spend your money. The same with lifetime versus daily budgets. You could say look, I have $10,000 to spend in a year and I don’t know what to do, exactly how to break it up. I don’t know which audiences need that money or like I’m just letting it go and you could put it into the lifetime budget and just it will not overspend. It may spend a ton of money in June and barely any in July, but that’s none of your business, that’s not your problem anymore. You’re leaving that up to the platform, and that can be again really nice if you don’t have the time or the wherewithal, for whatever reason, to go in and manage these things on a daily basis. 

25:08

The wherewithal, for whatever reason to go in and manage these things on a daily basis. What we do at our agency is go in and manage these things on a daily basis. So we basically maybe once or twice ever have used a lifetime budget and that was for like a very short term, like a two week long campaign. It was a very unusual type of campaign. Normally we’re doing long-term things that don’t have a set end date, and so you can’t have a lifetime budget If you want to have control over the audiences who are getting your money and maybe the level of funnel too. So maybe we’re talking people who’ve never heard of your business before versus people who are repeat customers, right, that’s the funnel, and so if you want to decide how much money goes to each level of that funnel, you can’t just hand it over to the platform and let them do what they want. And so that’s where you’ll do ad set level and where you’ll do daily budget. 

Danny Gavin Host

26:00

So the final ingredient is the ad creative, and I think, if anything, it’s the most important ingredient these days. So actually tell us, grace, how important is creative, and when we say creative we mean the images, the videos, the actual copy in paid social campaigns Also. 

Grace Glass Guest

26:24

I mean, I think you know, when you were interviewing me to hire me, like four years ago now, the thing I said in my interview was hey, you know what I’m going to bring to this department Creative strategy, because it’s very important, it’s like the most important thing, and that was years ago. So, if you ask me, creativity is the most important thing. But I’ll also back this up with someone else’s opinion and that would be Meta itself. Back this up with someone else’s opinion and that would be Meta itself. If you take the way that Meta is structuring its campaign development scheme now, if you will, it’s heavily emphasizing ads and de-emphasizing your audience targeting and your ad copy. Sometimes it won’t even show your ad copy and you might tell it please only show my ads to people who love flowers in Pennsylvania. But it might decide it’s going to show it to whoever it wants in Pennsylvania or maybe they went to Pennsylvania recently. It’s going to decide for itself who it shows your ad to. 

27:27

There’s a lot less control than there used to be on those factors. The thing that we still have control over for now and I say for now, because they are introducing a lot of AI features that are getting harder and harder to turn off. For now, we still have control over how the ads look, and how the ads look determines if your potential customer stops what they’re doing in the middle of their day, scrolling through recipes or cute pictures of their nieces and nephews, that they stop what they’re doing and pay attention to you, Because that’s the whole ballgame when it comes to paid social ads. If you can get them to stop, you’ve got their attention. That’s your opportunity to bring them in. If you can’t even get them to stop, it’s over. 

Danny Gavin Host

28:13

And I think that you know, often when people think about ads, they’re thinking I mean, in some ways, when they think about paid social or social media ads, there’s a lot of like tech and the optimization here and there, but what you’re basically saying is, yeah, there is optimization and things that we can do to make things better, but at the end of the day, the main driver and the main point that you have control of is going to be that creative, and that’s why it’s so important. 

Grace Glass Guest

28:37

Yes, and to be fair here, it’s not that the other things still don’t make a difference. We took over a campaign recently for a new client who was already running ads. They just weren’t happy with the results that they were getting, and the only thing we changed in the first period of time when we started working with them, while we were getting all the other stuff ready to go the only thing we changed was their audience targeting, because we didn’t feel that their old agency was doing a good job with the audience targeting. So same creative, same everything, and we already saw a 50% reduction in the cost per result for that campaign. So it was an immediate snap, and it started performing better. So I don’t mean to imply that audiences make no difference. They do, they obviously do. But I don’t think that it’s possible to say anymore, particularly as platforms remove your ability to dictate where your ads are showing up. I don’t think it’s possible to say that that’s the main thing anymore. I would say creativity is the main thing now. 

Danny Gavin Host

29:41

Yeah, so we have four ingredients, but that creativity is going to be the most important or the main ingredient. Yeah, what metrics should beginners focus on when they’re running their first campaigns? Is it clicks? Is it your cost per result? What do you think? 

Grace Glass Guest

29:54

If you’re running your first campaign, you should take a moment to really reflect on what you’re trying to get people to do and why, and make sure you have that super figured out heading into it. I know that that seems pretty obvious, but a lot of people forget to do that for some reason. I think a lot of times the first work that I see from people is their brand. It’s like coming to this brewery, we’re awesome and we’re here, but they’re not trying to get people to show up at a specific time or to try a specific product, and those are the things that are actually trackable and measurable with your results. So I would say pay attention when you’re designing your campaigns. Make sure that you’re choosing some type of conversion that you can prove came from you somehow. If you’re that brewery, maybe you offer people a coupon for free breadsticks Breadsticks don’t. You don’t get breadsticks at a brewery. What do you get? Free soft pretzels at the brewery, something so that they’ll show up, doesn’t cost you a lot of money, but they will bring you that coupon that they only could have gotten from your campaign. Now you can prove that they came from your campaign and once you have that goal in mind. That’s what you need to be optimizing your campaign for. So set it up so that, whatever algorithm you’re working with, let’s say, the meta algorithm Instagram knows that that’s what you want. They know, they understand. 

31:24

You want people to download this coupon, and they’re going to go after the people who are going to download that coupon. Not just like any old person who might look at your ad and like it, but people who specifically want to download that right. Who might look at your ad and like it, but people who specifically want to download that right and that’s going to give you more measurable results over time. And then, after that, it’s just paying attention to your costs. You know better than any guru out there what is the right cost for a result for you If you’re a brewery and you’re selling beer. 

31:58

For you, If you’re a brewery and you’re selling beer, you probably can’t afford to be spending $100 per coupon download, because not everyone who downloads is going to show up. Not everyone who shows up is going to become a lifetime customer, and so you have to do the math for yourself and figure out what the right costs are. And then, once you know what your costs are, that’s when you can begin to figure out. Is this campaign working? Do I need better ads, different ads, different audiences? Is everything okay or is this great or is this terrible? That’s where you can begin to figure it out. But you’ve got to know those core things of what I am doing and how much am I willing to spend to do it. 

Danny Gavin Host

32:35

And it’s interesting because, Grace, like the way you describe it, it sounds like it’s obvious that you need to set up an actual end goal, end result. But we’ve seen agencies and other people who, whether it’s with Facebook, Google, other platforms where they’ll literally just look at the clicks, look at the traffic and not even know what’s happening in the end. 

Grace Glass Guest

32:55

So that’s why it’s important all the time. 

Danny Gavin Host

32:58

So really it’s really really important, just for especially, people are first starting out to realize that’s not. Those are important little indicators, but at the end of the day, if you don’t know your final goal, how much that’s costing you to actually get people to do it, then you’re really there. There’s really no point of even advertising. 

Grace Glass Guest

33:17

Absolutely. Now, okay, there are some big brands out there. If you’re a Coca-Cola or a McDonald’s, right, that’s different. You’re playing a different game. You’re playing with bazillions of dollars. You can do whatever you want, it’s fine. But I’m assuming most marketers out there don’t get the luxury of working for Disney, unfortunately. So we’re out here actually having to work with budgets and prove that we are getting results. 

Danny Gavin Host

33:45

Yeah, that’s fair, because if your marching orders are, I just want you to know for $5,000, I want the most people to see this. So then, if your goal is for people to see it, that’s a separate thing. But, like you said, most businesses that we’re working with, most businesses that have a limited amount of money, they want to be able to see that measurable return on investment and it’s not enough just to make a physical billboard that people drive by in their car into a digital billboard on Instagram. 

Grace Glass Guest

34:12

Exactly. I think it feels good when you see website traffic, but I think a lot of times when our clients come to us and say what we want is website traffic, we try to counsel them away from that and we try to say, okay, but what’s going to actually earn you money? Because if you’re a news organization and you monetize your clicks, okay, maybe you do want a lot of traffic, Maybe that does improve your ad revenue and that is how you pay your bills. 

Danny Gavin Host

34:35

But most of the time the way you pay your bills is not through traffic. Most of the time it’s through something else, and so think this was before you joined Optage. Even then it wasn’t just about traffic, but it was about, let’s see, what are the articles that people read more of and what are the topics and categories that work better. So even then, it wasn’t about traffic. We still looked at what they did on the website and, based off of that, optimized. So just a side note. 

Grace Glass Guest

35:11

Yeah, absolutely, 100%, 100%. So, yes, and sometimes we have trouble. We have trouble with boards of directors not understanding and wanting traffic and we’re not giving them enough traffic and where’s their traffic? Agreed, but we kind of stick to our guns, right. We’re like look, we’re going to give you quality results here. 

Danny Gavin Host

35:35

So, Grace, what should you do if your campaign isn’t performing well? Panic. 

Grace Glass Guest

35:39

No, I’m kidding, no, so. So I always start personally at the ad level. So if I’ve got a campaign live and I’m looking at my numbers and the numbers just aren’t working out, I mean, first of all, I look at my campaigns every day or every other day, because it’s my job, but your job, this may only be part of your job. So you need a cadence that works for you, right? But as long as it’s regular and you’re checking in, you’re good to go. So if I see something’s not working out, I’ll start at the ad level and I’ll look at the results for each individual ad that’s live and I’ll say okay, so which one of these? Are any of these working? Maybe some of them are and some of them just aren’t, and that’s causing the overall numbers to look bad. But on an ad by ad level, it’s just one or two that aren’t performing. If they aren’t performing, turn them off, Get some new ones. If it’s all the ads, okay, yikes. 

36:37

Now what do we do? So I go down to another metric, a secondary KPI is what we would call that. So instead of purchases, maybe it’s clicks Like did they click through to the website? They just haven’t purchased it yet, right? And so then I’ll be able to see, oh, the click-through rates are great, like people are loving these ads, they’re just not buying anything. Once they get to the website, that indicates that maybe there’s an issue with the website. Maybe I’m sending them to the wrong place and it’s not obvious enough to them how to make a purchase. Maybe what they really need is more information, because it’s a big purchase, like a car or a diamond, right. 

37:16

So, thinking about where you’re sending them and if it makes sense, and then if the click-through rates are low, then maybe what I’m looking at is creative that’s not resonating, or messaging that’s not resonating, and I need to try something. Just try something else, because they’re not clicking, it’s not hitting with them. That’s the worst. That’s the hardest thing for me to say is just try something else, because they’re not clicking, it’s not hitting with them. That’s the worst. That’s the hardest thing for me to say is just try something else, because you don’t know what. That’s where you have to go back to your research and the work that you’ve done building up your campaign. But yeah, you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and try something totally different and see how that goes, but that’s why you want to be checking in on your campaigns pretty regularly, so you can catch it early, before it becomes an emergency. 

Danny Gavin Host

37:58

So it happens to be that paid social is one of the most award-winning parts of Optage. We’ve won the paid social category for five years in a row at local awards that we enter every single year. So I know we have a lot of success when it comes to paid social. 

Grace Glass Guest

38:19

Is there any specific example or case study that you like or that you’re proud of, that worked really well and just want to share a little bit about it? For us, the campaigns that we run that do the best at the awards are ones where somebody has a big ticket item that they’re selling and so the amount of money they’re spending on an ad relative to how much money they earn when we get a sale, that difference is huge. Their return on investment is huge and that looks really great for awards. And so you know, those are the campaigns that we get the trophies for. 

38:48

And it’s not that I’m not proud of that, but I think the campaigns I love the most are the ones where we’re helping nonprofits or like smaller businesses with very minimal campaign cash, like money to go to their campaigns have big success. To me, that’s like the more fun and engaging thing, because you’ve got to be a little creative, right, you don’t have a big budget to work with, you know. Then you get into a meeting with them and they’re like this was the best year ever and that’s so like, that’s so rewarding. That’s my answer personally. 

Danny Gavin Host

39:21

I love that. So that confirms that even if someone has a low budget, or what they’re selling may not, you know, may not have been the highest ticket item out there, we can still generate results for them on paid social media. 

Grace Glass Guest

39:38

Exactly, and that may never be the one that gets the trophy, because, again, the trophy loves the big, flashy numbers, right but it’s the one that it’s a good win when you get that news that, like they had their most signups ever or their most donations or something like that, that’s really good. 

Danny Gavin Host

39:55

Grace, are there any common mistakes that you see beginners make when they’re getting into paid social? 

Grace Glass Guest

39:59

I think I kind of covered this one a little bit already by just making sure you know exactly what your campaign is trying to do and get it done. But I will say we talked at the beginning about how Meta is a good all-around platform because even if every person in the world isn’t on it, every type of person is, every persona is there. But you can have really good success on smaller platforms if, for example, you really know your audience is on that platform. I think I mentioned Nextdoor a couple of times now, but if you know you’re looking for homeowners, that’s such a great way to get in front of them. If you know your customers are researching and doing a lot of thinking before they make their move, that can be a great place to get in front of them and it’s less expensive because it’s less competitive to show ads there. I would say, give a little thought to your platform and to your customer and make sure you’ve got the right platform customer match for what you’re trying to do. 

Danny Gavin Host

41:03

So you see, people, a lot of the success lies in all the things that are actually outside of the platform, even before you jump in, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. So, grace, if someone is just starting out with paid social, you know they’re new to digital marketing. What’s the first thing that you feel like they should do? 

Grace Glass Guest

41:19

I got some great information from you. But there are other ways. There are online courses and they are even free like there’s so many good free educational videos on YouTube. It’s incredible what’s out there. So just finding a way to learn as much as you can about the world of digital marketing and then at a certain point you just have to do it. You just have to like it’s very scary the first time someone puts you in charge of spending their money, but you just have to do it like rip the bandaid off, jump in, get into it and that’s like really the best way to figure it out. 

Danny Gavin Host

42:11

I love it. I’m just going to add one more thing which I know you agree with me on, which is about Canva. You know Canva is a free tool when it comes to designing and really like getting on there, just getting used to creating designs and you know ads. I think that is a huge tool that can be your tool belt. A couple of years ago, you had to know Photoshop, which is a complicated tool, but you know a graphic tool like Canva, which has a free version and you can do so much with it. Just learning it and having the knowledge of that can really take you far, specifically when it comes to paid social. 

Grace Glass Guest

42:44

Oh yes, knowing Canva made a really big difference when I first came to Optitch, because I already had experience from a previous job that I had, and so when I got here the first day, I was able to start designing ads just right off the bat. I didn’t need any time to train up with a tool, and so if you’re still looking for that first job in marketing, if you can start putting together designs, learning how to use the tool, and then you even have something you could show if you wanted to in an interview, right, you could say like I didn’t work for these companies, but I would like these are the ads I would design for them if I did. 

Danny Gavin Host

43:21

Yeah, love it. Well Grace, this has been such an awesome chat. Although it’s supposed to be beginners, I think we hit beginners but also some intermediaries. 

43:30

We went deep, which I love, like that’s so cool and that’s what’s so fun about digital marketing you can always go deep. There’s always so much to talk about. So thanks for being a guest on the Digital Marketing Mentor and thank you, listeners, for tuning into the Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll speak with you next time.