135 – How to run successful paid ad campaigns to increase conversions with Daniel Daines-Hutt

In this episode: Discussion – How to run successful paid ad campaigns to increase conversions with Daniel Daines-Hutt
If you’re anything like me it’s necessary to keep a stream of new work flowing through your business. We all know the value of creating amazing content and making sure that you’ve thought carefully about the SEO impact that this content will have.
The problem with this approach is that it’s quite hard to keep motivated; content creation is often not the core of our business, and we have better things to do. So what happens is that it never happens. Therefore this mechanism for creating new leads is dries up. So what options do you have then?
Well one tried and tested option is to pay for ads. I’m sure that you’ve all played with this at some point in the past, but in the same way that writing SEO suitable content is a bit of a skill / art form, so is understanding how to do paid ads. There are heaps of pitfalls and ways to go wrong, and conversely there are ways that you can be better at spending your hard earned money on ads to ensure that each dollar is working as hard as it possibly can.
So, you make the effort to create content, but you notice that almost nobody is finding it and consuming it. That’s a double blow, and quite demoralising. After all, if you create zero content, you cannot gripe about nobody reading it. But if you did create the blog posts and articles for whatever niche you’re interested in, you’d hope that someone, anyone, would actually consume it at some point!
Daniel Daines-Hutt is an expert when it comes to paid ads, and that’s what this show is all about. Driving traffic to your carefully curated content so that people consume it and convert after consuming it!
I have a confession to make… I’m hopeless with paid ads. In the past I have played with running paid ad promotions to try to drum up some business for website builds. My problem was that I never took the time to learn the platform. To understand how the ads could be configured and targeted. I never got to grips with who had converted and how I might track that. In short, my paid ad spend was a complete black hole. I would spend money each month and would have almost no idea if any or all of that money had been wasted!
This was all back in the day when Google ruled the paid ad space. But now we have a new giant, Facebook which has been the weapon of choice for many years.
The great (or horrific, depending on where you stand on privacy) thing about Facebook is that that have a heap of data about you and your past interactions with the platform, as well as an increasingly large volume of data about what you do off the platform. In other words they have a real understanding about you and what you’re into, what you like and what it is that makes you click. Their platform therefore is amazingly optimised and can super target almost anyone.
So what kind of things that you target with Facebook ads? The answer is almost anything. Perhaps one of the most powerful things that you can use is location. You own a restaurant? What about targeting people who are walking down your street at this exact moment? You can do that. Another powerful option is to target people based upon their career. You want to just contact business owners linked to your geographic location. Now the ads are starting to get properly targeted and more effective.
Daniel explains that the key to making your paid ads cost effective is to keep testing your ads and readjusting who it’s targeted towards. Often at the start of running your ads, you might well be burning through cash. This is because you’ve not yet gathered enough data to know where your adjustments need to happen. If you can push through this phase then the increase in data will lead to greater focus and a reduction ad spend.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of using paid ads is retargeting. This is the idea that you can create paid ads and only push them to people who have in some way interacted with your content before. No more spraying the ads all over the internet. Now you can dramatically reduce your budget and hopefully show ads just to the people who you already have some kind of relationship with.
Daniel explains how to set up successful campaigns and what it is that you need keep an eye on as the campaign rolls out so that you’re tweaking it and thereby reducing the cost to you whilst at the same time getting a better conversion rate.
It’s a great chat in an area that I know almost nothing about.
Mentioned in this episode
AMP my content
Guide – romoted content
Write less content
Create killer content
Email lead capture guide