Facebook Advertising Tips for Small Businesses | Podcast Ep 10

Guest – Dahna Borg, Bright Red Marketing

Dahna founded Bright Red Marketing at just 19 and has spent the last decade learning the ins and outs of marketing. These days she specialises in Facebook and Instagram ads for eCommerce. Dahna lives on the beautiful Gold Coast in Australia, and when she’s not working she’s at the beach, hanging out with friends, and drinking too many hot chocolates (with extra chocolate!).

Connect with Dahna

brightredmarketing.com.au

@brightredmarketing on Instagram

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Thanks! And a big thank you to Ricky_ardila for their lovely review:

“Nicci… you have made my life so much easier. It is so hard when starting your own small business to also spend a huge amount on marketing. So these podcasts have made a huge impact in our business, it’s all explained so easily and good to follow. Seriously, you are AMAZING!”

Podcast Transcript: Facebook Advertising Tips

Nicci O’Mara

The majority of small business owners never find any great success with Facebook ads, but with a little know how it can be one of the most effective and affordable ways to advertise. Today on the podcast, I’m talking to Facebook and Instagram ads expert, Dahna Borg from Bright Red Marketing, to pick her brain and uncover some of the best insider strategies that you can implement in your business straight away. So stay tuned

Hello, it’s great to have you here with us today. I’m Nicci O’Mara, your host of the Simply Standout Marketing Podcast. I’ve been really looking forward to recording this interview with the lovely Dahna Borg because I really hate seeing how much money gets wasted on Facebook ads. It’s so easy to create ads on Facebook, as you probably all know, but there are certain things you absolutely need to know if you have any chance of your ads achieving their goals.

Dahna founded Bright Red Marketing at just the age of 19 and has spent the last decade learning the ins and outs of marketing. These days she specialises in Facebook and Instagram ads for e-commerce, so grab a pen and paper, or you can check out the show notes later on our website, and strap yourselves in for some Facebook ads gold. Welcome, Dahna, and thank you very much for coming onto the podcast today.

Dahna Borg

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Nicci O’Mara

Now, today, we’re going to be talking about Facebook ads, which is a really big thing. And as many of our listeners will know from experience, Facebook ads, when done right, work extremely effectively for both cold and warm audiences. But the majority of small business owners don’t get it right, which is why I put you on the podcast today. So first up, for all of those people who haven’t yet seen success in their Facebook ads, is it possible for them to effectively and affordably attract more customers on Facebook?

Dahna Borg

I mean, it’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? It definitely is possible. I think what’s important to note is that, to be fair, Facebook ads don’t really work for everyone. It’s the kind of platform that really works especially well for certain industries. And it definitely works for a lot of industries. But what I find is a lot of those small businesses that really struggle, sometimes they are more in that, you know, the B2B space or they’re targeting people that aren’t so much on Facebook or they’re really high end purchasers

Like there’s a couple of different, I suppose, spaces that doesn’t do so well on Facebook. But in saying that, I’ve seen success with a really broad range of clients that, you know, probably, if you thought about it logically, they might not be the best fit for Facebook, but they’ve ended up working out really well. So I think it’s important to kind of consider what are you offering on Facebook? Like, is it something that is you know, you got to consider why people are on Facebook in the first place.

You know, there is a social platform there. I mean, they were there to watch and read the news, which is now back, thankfully. You know, they’re there to connect with their family and friends, do a bit of shopping, you know, get a little bit of education. You know, not that they should be getting education on Facebook. But seems where a lot of people get there’s from, like, you’ve got to remember what the platform is there for.

If your business fits into that model and it’s a good way to reach your customers, then, yes, most of the time you can get success from Facebook. A lot of the problems come from Facebook who have made a very easy platform. It looks very easy to set up an ad. The problem is that the technique behind it and the strategy required behind it isn’t so easy. So it’s very easy to spend one hundred dollars, a thousand dollars very quickly, and have no idea what happen. And that’s the problem.

So most businesses, yes, Facebook can be very successful. I’ve had clients that were only spending five dollars a day and getting really, really great returns from that to the point where they could start scaling their business. So it’s definitely possible to do and do well on even a small budget. But the strategy behind that is so important.

Nicci O’Mara

Yeah, and that’s the wonderful thing about Facebook. You don’t have to have thousands of dollars in funds to start off. You can start off small, but for someone sort of starting to start out with your Facebook ads, you obviously start with choosing a campaign, so I’ll get you to explain a little bit more about that for someone who actually hasn’t been into, you know, created a Facebook ad. But because I know that picking the right campaign type is really, really important.

So can you explain a little bit more about the campaigns and what they should be choosing?

Dahna Borg

One hundred percent. So basically, when you go and start a new Facebook campaign, if you haven’t been there before, it gives you a lot of different options. You know, there is reach, there’s conversion. Like, there’s so many different options now. We mostly deal with e-commerce clients. So they’re more looking at, you know, your catalogue sales campaigns and your conversion campaigns and those sorts of things. But what’s really important to note, and obviously I don’t think we’ve got time to go through every single campaign type, but what’s really important to know when you’re picking that type is Facebook is very good at giving you exactly what you ask for.

So if you are looking for sales of your online store, you really want to be looking at those conversions and catalogue sales. So catalogue sales is what you would use for your retargeting that uses your dynamic catalogue, if you know what that is. Conversions is when you say to Facebook, I have an event set up on my website, so a purchase of new content, those sorts of things. And you said Facebook, I want these, I want sales.

I want people looking at my product. Where I think a lot of people get caught out is they start picking things like reach and traffic without thinking about what they actually want out of the campaign. So, again, Facebook’s really good at giving you what you want. So if you pick reach, your ad is going to be seen by thousands and thousands of people. But is that particularly helpful for you and your brand? So if just seeing that ad is enough, so if you are just running some brand awareness ads, you want people to see that brand, maybe reach is the right thing for you.

It’s often not the right thing for anyone. We use it very, very rarely. But there are some situations where reach is going to be the best thing for you. Again, with traffic, like someone just going to your website. Is that the ultimate goal? It’s like back in the day when everyone wanted more Facebook likes and you would pay for Facebook likes.

Nicci O’Mara

Yes. That was never a good idea.

Dahna Borg

Why do you want that like? You want that like so someone goes to your website. Why do you want someone on your website? So they pick up the phone, so that they buy something from you. You really want to tell Facebook the end goal so that Facebook can then work with you to get you what you want.

Nicci O’Mara

Yeah. And what about ones like engagement?

Dahna Borg

So again, it’s why do you want that engagement? So, the problem with the engagement metric at the moment is most people who want engagement want comments for social proof. Unfortunately, most of the time you’re going to get likes and views and that doesn’t really work as social proof. So I tend to stay away from engagement because you tend to not even get what you’re asking for in that case.

Nicci O’Mara

Well, that’s very good advice because I know I’ve heard some people say, yes, always just do engagement. But when you say it like that, it is absolutely true. People do just like things. Or I was looking at an ad for actually quite a big person within the business space. And I think that had something like 27000 views of, it was just a very short video. It was probably more like a gif than anything. But they had, I think, 50 likes and no comments. And it was a sponsored post.

Dahna Borg

No people don’t comment anymore, it just really sad, because I like comments as a marketer. I like people commenting on my ads when they’re nice comments, I don’t like the nasty ones. But the comments are what build that quote unquote social proof. So unless you’ve got mega mega dollars to spend and it’s a big part of your strategy, I’d tend to probably avoid the engagement. It’s the same with video views so they can work as part of a broader strategy. So if your strategy is to get a lot of engagement or video views on a particular piece of content, and then you’re going to retarget them later.

So it kind of becomes more of an audience build to create an audience quite cheaply. If you don’t have a lot of existing data, that can work really nicely, but it has to be part of a broader strategy. I certainly wouldn’t have that as the only part of my marketing.

Nicci O’Mara

Yeah, without a doubt. And look, I spent a lot of time talking to my clients about messaging. You can have the biggest budget in the world or the smallest budget. But if you don’t have your messaging right, if it you know, your Facebook ad or your website, whatever it happens to be, if it doesn’t grab people’s attention within basically the first couple of seconds, they’re gone, th especially with social media, they’ve just kept scrolling and they won’t give you a second thought.

Dahna Borg

Yeah, hundred percent.

Nicci O’Mara

And now look at the next thing we go to is obviously audiences, you know, Facebook do make selecting an audience look really simple. But what are some of the strategies that people can use to actually choose the right audiences to get the best, best outcomes from their ads?

Dahna Borg

Yeah, so this audience so it’s called the ad-set level of your Facebook ad campaigns, if you’re not super familiar, but that’s where you set up what your audiences. And this page is probably my biggest problem with Facebook and creating ads for small businesses, because if you don’t know what you’re doing, this is where all of your mistakes happen. So some of the really big things when you’re creating your audiences, I’ll start at the bottom. When you’re creating your audiences, it also lets you select your placements.

Now, Facebook will actually run out of space on the news feeds. So what they’ve done is they’ve created all of these other placements. So you’ve got audience network in the right hand column and in the marketplace. And there’s so many different placements that your ad can be. Most of them are incredibly ineffective for most businesses. So because we specialise in ecommerce, most of ours just go to Instagram and Facebook, right in the news feed. Sometimes we do stories, like that’s it.

If we’re doing re-targeting obviously we’ve got audience network so that it follows people around the internet a little bit. But there are, like if you’re a lawyer and you’re running a Facebook ad, it’s going to automatically default to marketplace. Like there is no reason why your ad should be showing in marketplace as a lawyer. If you’re selling high end clothing, you probably also don’t want to be in marketplace. If you’re selling cute pottery, marketplace is probably a great place for you to be.

Dahna Borg

So I’m not going to tell you what placements to use, but it’s certainly something where you need to really think about the types of content people willing to consume at each of those placements and whether your brand fits into that and that purpose that person has in that environment. So marketplace, you know, people looking for discounts, they’re looking for cutesy things. They’re looking for something in particular. If you’re selling handmade products or things that fit into that kind of.

If you’re a removalist, awesome. Like there’s there’s certain places and businesses that would fit really nicely into that. But it’s certainly not every business. So that’s the the big one where a lot of people end up wasting a lot of money. And that doesn’t matter whether you’re ecommerce business, business to business, a service base, knowing those placements and picking the right ones is really, really important. Now, if you go back up to the top of where you create your audiences, the things that people get wrong with their audiences is thinking too literally.

So a lot of marketers and a lot of branding experts will give you like a persona. And it’ll be like Susie likes to read Women’s Day and she watches Married at first sight. And she has this kind of a handbag and she likes to go for brunch and her favourite colour is pink. And they have this full, long story about Suzy. Now, I have no problem with persona’s, but they don’t work with Facebook, so I don’t like persona’s because to me they’re made up people.

Nicci O’Mara

They’re not real.

Dahna Borg

And I find the marketers who do like personas get so stuck into them. So, when you’re creating your Facebook audience, there’s a couple of key things to do. Any time you can create an audience based off your existing data, that is top priority. So if you’ve got a pre-existing customer list, if we can create, obviously had the pixel installed, which probably should have been the first thing we talked about, get that Facebook pixel installed if you haven’t already.

Like, if you can create an audience, everyone that’s been to your website or everyone who’s ever bought from you or your client list or people in your newsletter. Like those audiences should be kind of your starting point. So if you’ve got a business where people repeat buy and you’re using those audiences as is, that’s what we would call a warm audience because they already know who you are. What we like to use for our cold audiences, so when you want to reach people who don’t know who you are, what you would do with those audiences is create lookalike audiences.

So it’s super easy to do in Facebook. You just create a new audience, look alike, and then you use that pre-existing audience. So, for instance, with our clients, you know, the first thing we test is here’s everyone that’s bought from us in the last 30 days. Find us one percent of the population who most look like those. He’s our customer email list, find us the top one percent of the population who most likely look like those people and they tend to work really, really well.

So that’s customer based audiences, whether they are cold or warm when it comes to finding interest based audiences, which is what most people think of when they’re creating a Facebook audience. The biggest problem people have is that they stack all of the audiences together. So when you’re kind of, you get to the section where it’s like interests and you go, OK, Officeworks, Zara, you know, you type in the seven thousand different interests that you think your audience might have.

What you’ve got to remember is what you’re telling Facebook is- and, so it’s Officeworks and Apple and Woolworths. And I’m running out of brand names, but it’s you’re telling Facebook, and. So if every time you add something new, you’re making the audience really, really big. So what you kind of want to say to Facebook is I’m trying to think of a specific person. So take Susie, for instance, who likes New Idea and Married at First Sight. If you’ve got personas and you sort of want to use them, you would say, OK, let me go all the kind of handbag brands that Susie likes.

And then what you do is you select the narrow buy option and then you go here’s all the TV shows she likes and then use the narrow buy option and then you add the next one. What you end up with is a very big audience, but it’s very specific to the kind of person that you actually want as a potential customer. So what happens if you add them all together? You end up with a very weird, broad audience of people, and especially in Australia, you find out that half the time you’re actually targeting most of Australia.

We have very small population. So what you want to do is really narrow that down. So really making use of that narrower buy option is your best bet. So you can pick three or four really big audiences, but by using that narrow buy option. So, for instance, if you go people who like Apple narrowed by people who like New Idea magazine, that’s a very specific group of people. You have a group of people who like Samsung who read Country Living, again, very specific group of people are going to fall into that.

So really making use of that narrowed buy function and then being quite specific with your gender and your age and those sorts of things, if it’s relevant to your business. So that’s kind of one strategy. I’m going to completely contradict myself and say sometimes it works to go very broad. So if you’ve had your pixel installed for a while, if you’ve been using Facebook ads for a while, if you’ve got quite a big successful business, you’ve got the traffic, those sorts of things going broad can be very effective.

And what I mean by growing broad is go very broad. So, for instance, I’ve got some clients at the moment that have no age demographics whatsoever. I think it’s 18 to sixty five is the default. We have specified gender because we only sell for this particular client female clothes. And that is it. The only targeting we have.

Nicci O’Mara

What about the location?

Dahna Borg

It’s low, it’s narrowed by country because they sell to the US, but that’s it.

And we do it in Australia too. It works. The caveats to that is it doesn’t always work. So it’s worth testing and you really do need to have the data to back it up. So if you’re never touched Facebook before, don’t try using broad audiences. But if you’ve had some success with Facebook ads before, you’ve had some data, you get sales through your website, those sorts of things, it can be worth testing. So what’s happened is Facebook has gotten very good with their algorithm in terms of knowing who fits into some of these audiences.

So what I suggest when you’re creating an audience is you create your one campaign and I recommend you have an absolute minimum of two audiences, because what happens is if you put just one audience, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. So if you have, we always start with four. But it obviously depends on budget because each audience requires additional budget. So if you’re running on five dollars a day, you can only have one audience. So you just make the most of what you can do.

But if you can afford to spend 10 to 20 dollars a day, spend that budget on testing for audiences instead of just putting more budget behind one audience, because what you’ll find is one of those audiences will work far better than the others. You can then take that information and go, OK, well, our Apple versus narrowed by New Idea audience with our best performer. So let’s try and find some other versions of that that are going to get us good results.

Or you might find that one of your lookalike audiences was the best performer, and then you can test other look lookalike audiences. So that’s where a lot of people go wrong, is that they only test one audience at a time. For our client that we had that only had that five dollar a day ad spen, what we did is we did one audience for a week, if we liked the results, we kept it for another week. If we didn’t like the results, we tested a different audience.

After a couple of weeks, we had a pretty good idea of what audiences were getting us, a bit better result. And we just kept making changes until we could scale the budget.

Nicci O’Mara

Oh, that’s a good way of thinking about it. Yes, I would think I’d just do it all and I’m probably one of those, okay, let’s do this fast.

Dahna Borg

I am too and I would rather do that. But this client in particular just, they only had five dollars a day to spend. That was it. They weren’t convinced Facebook guys would work in the first place and we slowly got them there.

Nicci O’Mara

So. Well, that’s good. I mean, not everyone is going to be comfortable spending a lot of money on Facebook ads, especially at the start, because you do want to see that you can get results first. And actually, one of those things with moving onto the creative side of things, you know what they’re actually putting up there, you know, how do you find inspiration?

What do you what do you find with regards to the creative side works the best?

Dahna Borg

Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of inspiration, my secret, which I will share with you all, is the Facebook ad library. So basically you can see every ad that is currently live by every brand that’s running ads. So it’s really helpful in terms of inspiration to see what your competitors are doing, to see what brands and other spaces in other countries are doing. So that’s probably my first suggestion in terms of where to find inspiration.

Nicci O’Mara

With regards to that, how do they find it? Because I’ve actually never heard of that. I knew that you could go into individual pages and look at the ads that they were running currently, but I didn’t realise you could do it on a big scale.

Dahna Borg

It’s still similar to the small scale that you’re seeing. So there’s two ways to access it. So the way that you would be familiar with is if you go to one of your competitors pages, there’s a little section that says page transparency. If you click through that, you can end up and see all the ads they have currently live. The other option is to go to, like literally Google the Facebook ad library, and it comes up and it’s just a giant search engine.

So you can just type like cookies and it’ll come up with all of the pages that have anything to do with cookies. And then you could see what ads all of those pages are running. So it is a little bit you know, you still have to go one at a time. It’s good if you can go into it with a list of competitors that you want to stalk, I suppose, because you can get a little bit lost in there.

But that’s the best way to kind of see what everyone else is up to. My second recommendation on that is to create your own personal what we call a swipe file. So if you see any ad that gets your attention enough to click on it, screenshot it and put it into this folder, what that does, it will create a folder for you of the ads that are actually attention grabbing and then you can use those as inspiration for your ads.

Nicci O’Mara

I got on my phone. I have so many screenshots. It is not funny. Of different ads because I’ve gone, oh, that looks amazing. Quick. I’ve got to actually, I’ve got to remember that one because half the time I never remember to go back and actually look into the to the back end of the ad. So, yeah, I’ve got to say I love that. I’d hate to think how many screenshot I’ve got of Facebook ads.

We have so many, like I would say, we have thousands and we’ve got to the point where they are now segmented into like client types. So if we have a new fashion client that comes to us, for instance, we just go through our slight file, like these sorts of styles work really good for that particular client and that brand. Does the client like this sort of style? And then we kind of create mood boards and things from there.

Dahna Borg

But if it’s your own business, you can sort of do the same thing. It’s really about being aware of what actually gets attention, because when it’s your business and you’re doing it yourself, you’re like, oh, that looks pretty. And then you publish something, but you kind of forget that you’re in a very high competition for attention marketplace. So you’re pretty ad, does it stand up in the, I am literally scrolling through this at a million miles now while I’m watching Netflix, like, yeah, it has to be that attention grabbing.

Is it going to make me stop looking at Netflix to look at your ad? Because that’s how most people scroll on their phones, their normally doing two things at once.

Nicci O’Mara

Oh, I do it all the time and it’s the words and the look that make all the difference. So a lot of people concentrate on just the look or just the words, and you’ve really got to have those combination of two.

Dahna Borg

Yeah, you really do. And the order sort of goes image headline copy. So your image is sort of what gets their attention first. The headline is often the next part that they read and then you’ve got your copy. So if you don’t get the results that you want, that’s kind of the order you want to make your changes in, because that’s how people are kind of viewing the content. So if you run your ad and it’s absolutely atrocious, you’re getting horrendous, click through rates, then you want to start looking at imagery first.

If you’ve made those changes and it gets a bit better, then you want to start looking at your headline and your copy and those sorts of things. The biggest challenge is making sure that the messaging is consistent from ad to website. It’s probably one of the biggest things I see businesses doing wrong is they’ll be like, oh, our website, oh, we don’t like our website, but we can make the ads look amazing. And then people get some add to this website that’s not so great and they get very confused when they leave

So if you’ve got a website that maybe isn’t up to the standard you would like it to be, don’t go and spend thousands of dollars getting spectacular ads made. Because what’s going to happen is people will look at that and be super excited, get your website and they’re like huh, I won’t come back. You need that messaging to be consistent. So it needs to make sense. If I click on an ad about a shirt, I want to land on a shirt page.

I don’t want to end up on a page about dresses. If I’ve clicked on an ad that’s talking about a specific topic. When I get to that website, it better be talking about that specific topic and using very similar language. So I think that’s where, probably your work with your clients really comes into play that that messaging has to be consistent across everything.

Nicci O’Mara

Without a doubt. And when we say everything, we really mean absolutely everything. So everything from if you’re in store, if you’re on your website, if your on social media, you’re labelling, shipping, everything’s got to be consistent because it just makes the biggest difference with, you know, with the user experience and with your branding.

Dahna Borg

Yeah. One hundred percent. So I think from that creative perspective, it’s about making a nice looking ad that tells the story right, but having an element to it that is going to get a little bit of extra attention. So from a copy standpoint, having kind of attention grabbing statements, asking questions, anything that’s kind of going to reel them in a little bit to go, oh, that’s interesting. What’s that? That applies to me. That’s kind of what you want.

So, you know, we really like gifs and videos and things for creative because we just find it works really well. But if you’ve got really nice photos, you know, it’s really about testing. So before how I said you need four audiences, I really recommend you have at least four pieces of creative as well. So that might be two different images and two different sets of copy, because, again, if one of those copies isn’t resonating with people, you can see what’s wrong.

The problem a lot of people have is they have one campaign, one audience, one ad. If they’re copies wrong, there’s no way for them to see that. If the audience is wrong, there’s no way to say that. If the image is wrong, there’s no way to say that. When you do like, I a call it a grid testing model, so four audiences, four pieces of creatives who have two images, two pieces of text, and those make four different ads, if one of them is performing best, it gives you an understanding of why it’s working.

This is it because it’s got the different photo? Was it because it’s got the different copy? And then you can kind of make changes. Obviously, we run on a much higher scale to that. When you’re starting out, that’s really the best way to go about it so that you actually know what’s happening.

Nicci O’Mara

Yeah, and what about with results? How do you, how do you explain to people how to read them so that they can understand whether the ads are actually working or not?

Dahna Borg

Yeah, so the custom dashboard. So when you go to Facebook and you’re looking at ads manager, it defaults to something called performance, which is a very sort of fake metrics, its reach and impressions and clicks. And they sound great, but they’re not going to tell you the full story of what’s happening. So what you want to do is actually set up a custom dashboard. So where it says performance in your top right hand corner, there’s a little dropdown and then is a lot of different options in there.

What I recommend you do is change that to performance and delivery and then go back and change it again and customise your columns. And then you want to customise those columns again and then what you want to do when we spoke before about your goals. So, for instance, if your goal is to get people to make an enquiry on your website, what are the steps that lead up to that enquiry, add all of those steps to your columns. So if it’s hit the landing page, go to the contact form, submit form, like that’s what you want to track in your dashboard.

If you are an e-commerce store and you’re selling things, that’s super easy. It’s view content, ad to cart, initiate check out, purchase, return on ad spend. Like you really want your dashboard to show the full story of your customer journey, I suppose, so that you can see where you’re losing people. So if you’re then looking at your performance and delivery plus your journey at the end of it, if you’ve got a really bad click through rate, you know it’s you’re creative and that could be your copy or the visuals.

Same thing with the cost per click. If you’ve then got a really bad clicks to landing page, then you know that it is an issue with your site speed or there’s something wrong with that landing page. If you’ve then got an issue between that landing page and that first step, like what’s stopping people? Is it a disconnect from add to the messaging on the first page? Is it not telling the right story? If you then got an issue between your view content and your to like what’s stopping people from adding to cart?

Is it pricing? Is it shipping? Is the add to cart button hiding, like, it gives you a much better idea of where you’ve got a problem so that you can fix that problem. If you just look at that straight performance dashboard, you’re just going to have all these fun vanity metrics sitting at you. Going well, your clickthrough rates great today, give us more money and you’re sitting there the whole time going, am I wasting my money, like where is it going? So when you kind of set up that dashboard in a way that you can actually see every step of the funnel that you’re trying to send people through, it gives you a much better understanding of where there are problems.

So a lot of times clients come to us and they’ll be like, our Facebook ads aren’t working, like what’s going on? I had a meeting with someone the other day. They couldn’t break even. They’re spending lots of money, just couldn’t work it out. I took one look at a custom dashboard that I set up for them on the call and I went, you have absolutely no problem with your ads, it’s your website. So their ads were performing beautifully, getting them people looking at product.

And then as soon as people got to their website, they just dropped off. So we went through that. And as I told them, you need to go and speak to a website specialists and get all sorts of things fixed up. I’ve had other clients where we went like, we just need to fix your creative because it’s just not resonating with people.

Nicci O’Mara

And that’s fantastic, because if you think about the amount of money you can save on the amount of money that you can actually make by knowing this information and dealing with it straight away. So, I mean, it might be a few extra steps to put in the custom dashboard.

Dahna Borg

The best thing is to save the custom dashboard. So then it becomes the default and you never have to do it again. That’s my favourite part.

Nicci O’Mara

Oh, do you set it up before you actually, you know, when you’re actually creating the ads or does it matter when you set it up?

Dahna Borg

It doesn’t matter when you set it up. Obviously from a processes side, we set out before we start running ads with our clients just so we can see everything from day one. But if you’ve been running ads for six months and you’ve never set up a custom dashboard, like go do that now because it’s so helpful to see that full picture. The Facebook default ones give you the fun, fluffy, vanity metrics that Facebook likes to give people because they make everything look good.

Most of the time, if you click through rate bads, it’s still going to show a bad click through. Right. But when you kind of broaden out that whole story, it really helps you to understand what’s going on. Like where is the problem? Like what’s going on? And then you can start working on fixing it. If you just make one ad, one audience, one campaign, just look at your standard performance dashboard. Look, you’ve got no hope, like this is where I have problems with Facebook because they make it so easy.

They give you a dashboard. They don’t tell you, you need to make multiple audiences that don’t tell you, you should make multiple creative. And then people look at that and go, I spent five thousand dollars on that. It didn’t work. I’ll turn it off and do something else. And they keep making changes without ever knowing why that first one didn’t work in the first place.

Nicci O’Mara

Look, I think that is a fantastic tip that will really save people money and give them such quality information to work with. Yeah. Look, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see businesses, I mean, you work with businesses all day long on Facebook. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see them making?

Dahna Borg

I mean, the biggest one is thinking you’re too small to have the Facebook pixel installed. I’ve had people come to me that have been in business for two or three years. And, you know, they’re getting great turnover like their business is doing really well. And they just haven’t installed the Facebook pixel because they never got around to it. That’s three years of data that Facebook no longer has access to. So the biggest thing, I suppose, is make sure that Facebook pixels installed like it’s every website platform these days makes that super easy.

There’s sort of no excuse not to. So I really recommend getting that done immediately, even if you’re not advertising , because one day you might want to advertise and then you’ve got that data, then you’re not that business that has grown tremendously, and you now want to start running ad, and I’m sitting there talking to you being like, yeah, we should probably wait a couple of months to we’ve got some data on your pixel and you’re like ahhh. So really get that pixel installed as soon as possible.

And then the other big mistake we’ve sort of just run through. So it’s not testing things. So Facebook works really well when you give it choices. When you say to Facebook, here are the four audiences, I think are going to do best. Which one is actually going to do best? He is the four images I actually think are going to work Facebook. Tell me what’s going to work best? So we go into the approach with all of our clients that we know nothing.

We know a lot. We have brilliant results for our clients. But every time we get into a new account, we start from scratch because every business is different. So we work with multiple fashion brands. The strategies we use for all of them are completely different because their audiences are different. So there’ll be some common lessons and things that we apply across all but the strategies and the copy that resinates and the imagery that works, the audiences that work are so different business to business, if you’re not testing you, you’re really going to struggle to get those good results.

And if you do fluke it and it will be a fluke and get a good result, it’s very hard to repeat that because you don’t know what part of that actually worked.

Nicci O’Mara

Oh, look, I think the information that you have given us in all of 30, 40 minutes has been absolutely incredible. And I’ve heard a lot of people talk about Facebook. I am no Facebook expert. I can obviously go in there and fiddle around the backend. And I certainly don’t, I certainly don’t get anyone to pay me to do anything with Facebook ads because I leave that up to the experts. But, you know, the information that you have just given us from a small business point of view is absolutely gold.

So thank you so much. It really has been great.

Dahna Borg

You’re more than welcome. It’s been fun.

Nicci O’Mara

Now, where can our listeners sort of learn more about the work that you do and get in contact with you?

Dahna Borg

Yeah, so my website, so brightredmarketing.com.au. We’ve got a blog that gets updated semi frequently. It’s my goal this year to get better at that. But there’s always, if there’s anything major happening in Facebook, it’s always up there. And then Instagram, which is just bright red marketing. So they really the best two ways to get in contact. As I said, we do specialise in e-commerce, but I do have a lot of connections in sort of the business to business space.

If someone’s not in the e-commerce space, but on my website, there is a free strategy session. So you can book in one of those we can run through. I can help you set up your custom dashboard. It’s it takes me two seconds. I’m happy to sort of to help out anyone that gets stuck, but it is a free strategy session on there. If anyone does want to kind of run through their Facebook ads and see what’s working, what’s not, whether there’s any kind of improvements to be made.

I have that as a firmly no pitch session. If you get to the end of that and you want to work with me, you can ask. But I’m certainly not going to sit there and try and pitch anyone at the end of that. It’s very much just a let’s go through your ads and see how I can help. Otherwise, Instagram’s always a fun place to come hang out. Otherwise, my website is the best place, the information about what we do and what’s happening in the world of Facebook.

Nicci O’Mara

Fantastic. Oh, look, it’s been so wonderful to have you on here. And, you know, Facebook is one of those, and Instagram, it’s changing so quickly. And unless you are on top of it 24 hours a day, which I’m sure you are, it can be really confusing, especially for small business owners who have so many things on their plate. So, yeah, the information has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Dahna Borg

It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Nicci O’Mara

And I think there will definitely be another episode with you taking us to the next step.

Dahna Borg

I would love that.

Nicci O’Mara

Lovely. Thanks for that, Dana.

Thanks for listening to Simply Standout Marketing Podcast, head over to simplystandoutmarketing.com for the show notes, downloads and even more great stuff to help you grow your business with marketing made simple.