Why content and paid ads work best together

You need to have an offer that you can sell confidently for free. If you can't sell your offer on your social media organically. You're not ready to run ads for that offer. I used to think content versus paid ads. Yeah, but now it's content and paid ads.

Yeah, very much hand in hand. And there's a lot of strategy that goes behind it as well. Today I've got Michelle here and we're going to be talking about personal branding paid ads. And we're going to go deep into strategy. So this is something that her and I have in common is the strategy side of things.

And we're going to nerd out a little bit. How are you doing it. I'm so excited. Yeah. You can already tell.

I love it I love it. So before we go there, Rachel, give me a little spiel. Who are you? What? Where do you come from?

And what is it that you're passionate about? So, um, I've been in marketing since I left school, so over ten years now. Um. Loved it. Always loved digital marketing.

Always loved social media. But the one thing in all my corporate jobs that I never really got to A dive deep into was paid advertising. So about 5 or 6 years ago, I started running ads for some of my friends who have small businesses, and I was like, just be my guinea pigs, you know, small budget. It'd be right. Like I did it for free for them.

Um, and then I just got to understand the data and the metrics behind it, which is something I really wanted to know because I knew how to run an ad, but I wanted to know how to optimise and get the most out of my clients budgets or anyone's budget. Really. Um, so yeah, started doing that for a few years, fell in love with it, and then started running Shelby Digital on the side of all my full time jobs. Um, and then yeah, fast forward to now, I'm. Yeah, running ads for all different businesses all over Australia.

Full time. Full time. Business. Full time. Hiding the paint.

I love it. Um, so one of the things I'm really interested about is because, like, for us as a company, we've been relying on word of mouth. We've been relying on our relationships. Right. So we've been going strong with that for the last 3 to 4 years.

And there's a commonality in some of the businesses that I've actually worked with when it comes to like organic, organic marketing. So think of content creation and whatnot. And some of these guys are over $3 million in revenue. And all they've been doing is word of mouth. What do you say to these people?

I mean, good on them because it's a lot of work to get. Um, you've got to have a good product or a good service, and then word of mouth is going to spread really well. But word of mouth can only get you so far. So if you're looking to expand into international markets or even nationally like interstate and all of that, for the smaller brands, it's a lot more. You get a lot more visibility when you run ads and it's a lot quicker.

So if you're looking to grow at a quicker pace with less manual hours, that's where ads are a great tool to add into your mix of marketing. Um, but I think like one other thing that I kind of struggle with when talking to them is actually they're getting over the, um, how do I put it, getting over the fear of spending? Yes. It's there's so much fear. And I get it, as a small business, like, you want to make sure that every bit of dollars you put out there actually make you money back.

But if you've never done it, you've never seen the magic of of paid or paid marketing, because what's the what's the stat like? For every dollar you put in there, you get $5 back or something like. That. On average. Yeah.

Depending on. Yeah. What business it is. Yeah. You're basically printing money.

Yeah. Right. If you set it up right and you give it the space to breathe because a lot of businesses, they give up too quick. So at the start they'll run a campaign. They'll last maybe four weeks and they'll say I'm getting nothing back.

Turn it off. We're not doing this anymore. But in that four weeks, that's the most crucial time to actually be understanding your data and understanding. Okay, well, what's working and what's not. And let's optimise it.

So I always tell my clients, give it about 3 to 6 months and that is a long time. Wow. Especially for a small business with a budget and they're not getting any return. I do understand it is a little bit frustrating, but they're not seeing the back end where I'm optimising. I'm reading the data, I'm doing all of, um, like the changes and I'm making it grow.

Um, but yeah, a lot of people just see the money and they're like, okay. 3 to 6 months. Is that, uh, is that depending on the size of your business, depending on the budget? Yeah. Yeah.

Interesting. Like for I've, I've actually heard like and again, I'm so much new at paydays than you are, I can talk for days on person writing. I talk for days on, on content creation. But with price. It's such a new thing for me that like understanding the data, understand the metric.

The rule of thumb is like completely. It's a completely complete new world for me. Yeah. So you say 3 to 6 months, I've heard like, you need to leave your campaign on for like, seven days at least to get some pretty good data to make the next decision. Is that.

Right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So 7 to 14 day window is you don't want to make any changes in that time because that's where you're getting the most you're getting a good chunk of data.

So you don't want to be changing anything before the campaign has had enough time to actually get to where it needs to go. Okay. But that 3 to 6 month window is if you're looking at running a long term campaign that's always on and you want that consistent revenue coming in, those consistent leads coming in to get to that stage, um, you need to give it a little bit longer. There are some businesses that see those results quicker. So it really just depends on the business, the budget they're putting into their ads, the strategy behind it.

If they have a strategy. Um. One of the problems I've actually personally encountered and this this is me being vulnerable about my business as well. It's just like understanding that it's not just the ads. There's so much more that goes behind it.

But one of the things that really I started to understand is What's your offer? What's my offer? What am I selling? People. Right.

Talk to me about that. You need to have an offer that you can sell confidently for free. That's what. That's my biggest piece of advice. If you can't sell your offer on your social media organically, you're not ready to run ads for that offer because ads amplify what you're already doing.

So if you can't organically sell that offer, if your audience isn't interested in it, throwing money behind it isn't going to save you. It's not going to get you the people who do want to buy it. Because if your audience doesn't love it, it's kind of gonna nuts. It may work, but nine times out of ten it doesn't. That's so cool.

That's that's actually really cool. Like, I love that you mentioned that. It amplifies it because I guess what this means is that, okay, well, if your business is already working from word of mouth, that means you've already got something that you can sell. So by definition, throwing money behind it will actually make it to make you more money. That's it, because you're essentially pushing it out to a whole new audience of people.

So if your targeting is right, you're essentially reaching new people who don't know about you but are in the same targeting category as your current audience. So it's more likely that the ads will push it out to people who are actually going to be interested and engage or hopefully purchase. Or whatever it is. That's super interesting. Now where does and this is a good, cool thing, but like, where does content creation come into play?

Yeah. Because the I used to think content versus paid ads. Yeah. But now it's content and paid ads. Yeah, very much hand in hand.

And there's a lot of strategy that goes behind it as well. Just like anything, you want to have a strategy where you're not only doing like creating great content and getting the story and the messaging right, but you want to relay that through your ads as well. So with content for ads, you want to make it feel as natural as possible. So if you think about the last 10 or 15 years, ads used to look really different. It used to be a static tile with a little button.

Say book now or download this or whatever it may be. Lower bar of entry. That's it. Um, but people see that stuff and they scroll straight past now. So looking at the content these days, it's a lot of face to camera.

It's very unscripted, it's very natural. And that's what's working best. For. For paid ads because. People.

Don't know about unscripted, though. I don't know about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

We'll touch on we'll touch on that in a moment. But yeah. Talk to me what you're seeing. What's the what's the trend? Because you study this more than I do.

What's the trend that I should be taking notice of? Uh, because for me, high quality content, high production quality content is for especially for ads. It's not a thing anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People want to see you in selfie mode.

People want to see you in your casual clothes. Quickly talking to the camera. No hair done. No makeup. You know, so that that Instagram real or TikTok style content is doing really well for paid advertising.

Okay. And the mindset behind that is because, um, when you're scrolling Instagram or TikTok, you get you kind of get used to the style that's on that platform. So when you put an ad in there, it's less likely to make people realise it's an ad, so there's less friction there. So then they'll watch it and then they'll click and then they'll realise, okay, I've been taken to a landing page, so this was an ad, but it's less frustrating for the user. Hmm.

It's a little bit cheeky. But it works. What do you mean by that? Well, you're kind of like. Getting them to click on your ad a bit easier.

Hook them in. Yeah, yeah. Hook them in. Yeah. This is something I kind of realised.

And I don't know why it took me so long to wrap my head around, uh, paid ads. Is that the offer is something that you're trying to sell. But how you sell the offer, how you get them to click into the ads is a whole different animal. So for example, like in our field, like with a lot of video marketing agencies out there, you see this, you see, hey, uh, if you qualify, I'm talking to this service based business owners will get you 30 days worth of content in one day. And you're here thinking, what's 30 days worth of one day?

What? What the hell does that. Pieces of content? Or is that going. To be exactly five pieces?

So for me, it took me so long to realise like 30 days worth of content, it's so open that it creates that curiosity for people to actually click or click on your ad, so you can actually book them in for that 15 minute call to see what they actually want to, uh, to, to, to, to book your services for. Right. So talk to me about hooking people into your ads. And how do you strategize that into, into your campaigns for your customers. Yeah.

So I focus on emotional hooks. I find that works really well. Um, I try and avoid any of those big claims. So, you know, if you run ads, you'll get $100,000 worth of leads in 30 days. Like, it's not something anyone can guarantee because you just don't know how the platform's going to work, how the offer's going to work, the campaign, things like that.

So I always advise my clients and even in my own ads, I, um, I always push for more of an emotional solution based hook. Okay, so for example, something like I work a lot in the healthcare space, right? So I work with a lot of naturopaths. And what I advise them is you want to target your audience based on what they're looking for. So say for example, an archer path they're targeting, say, women who have gut issues but they don't know they have gut issues, they're struggling with fatigue.

They're struggling with bloating, um, skin issues, all these problems they're having. So I say to them, okay, well, let's target based off those problems because that's what people are searching for, right? So we need to meet them where they're at and then say, okay, if you're struggling with this, this could be why. And then provide them with some information and then continue your process, like get them to book a call or whatever that may be. Interesting.

So emotional targeting you would call it like okay, well can you can you say, let's say you use me as an example, I'm a real marketing agency. Okay. Uh, I target business owners who are actually looking to create content for their business to, uh, to brand themselves a little bit better. What would be my emotional angle be for business owners? There's a couple.

So I would probably focus more on time. So creating content and definitely the post-production is a very time consuming point. And I know that because I struggle. With that a lot. I have a whole team for content creation.

It's great. Um, so. You can definitely say like, you know, yeah, you can definitely target them around the time factor. Yeah, yeah. And say, you know, why waste 40 hours of time for basic ads?

This is a little bit harsh, but, you know, we've got a team that can help produce great content for you. You know, I mean, you should go get a new client or make some money. It's true. Like business owners, we never have any time. Like our end of day with three things I need to complete.

And I end up doing something completely different. And I'm like, where did the time go? You know what I mean? So I definitely agree with you, uh, on the, on the time aspect. So and quality people want quality content these days and you've got to invest to get good quality content.

Unless you're an expert in that field yourself. Mhm. But quality what does that mean. Like what do you mean. Well anyone can pick up a phone and start filming.

Yeah. Like a dog running in the park. But if you want a cinematic dog running in a park, like, I don't have the tools for that. No ads. There's, uh.

There's so many, like, there's so many things that goes into it as well. It's not just like, hey, this is the ad, you're displaying it, uh, to displaying it to people. You try to hook a mean and whatnot. You you actually and this is in your name. You provide like a holistic approach to ads.

Like what else should they. Should your customers be thinking about when they're thinking about creating ads? I always recommend them. Look at it as a holistic approach, right? So don't just look at the art itself, look at the offer and look at your data before you even start thinking about running ads.

So if you've got an offer in mind, have a look. Has that worked well in the past? What were the metrics behind it? Did you get a lot of reach organically? Did you get a lot of engagement?

How many people purchased or whatever took action? Um, how did that land? And then what you want to do is you want to build a strategy around that. So don't just run the ads, build up your audience interest first. So, for example, if it's an offer that you've run maybe last year, build up that interest again organically.

So then people will have it in the back of their minds and then launch the ad. But then also don't forget to follow up with email communications SMS communications. You still want to be doing all the traditional marketing as well, like DMing people and things like that. So ads work great, but they work as part of your marketing ecosystem. They don't just work because you've put money behind it.

Yeah, that's that's so true. Now let's talk data. Okay. Now you mentioned data quite a few times already. And I think and I think that's something that you teach in your master classes as well.

Yeah. Uh, what should I be looking for? What's the rule of thumb of my ads? Right. So say I've got a working offer.

I'm ready to go to do some ads. What data should I be looking at and how should we analysing it? So it depends on your objective. So if you're looking to reach in your audience and build your social media following, then you'd want to look at your reach compared to how much you're spending to get however much reach you're getting. So you want to make sure your your offers being pushed out or your messaging is being pushed out, but also.

Are you getting those followers on the other side, or is it just reaching people? And if you're reaching lots of people but you're not getting the followers, then you've got a bit of a messaging problem or a bit of a mismatch in what they're looking for and what you're offering. If you're trying to get someone to book a call with you, you want to be able to follow the steps of that process. So again, reach and impressions. How far is the ad being pushed because that's a platform issue if it's not being pushed very far.

That's the first metric you're looking for. Yeah. Reach and impressions I always look at and I always base it off maybe 7 or 14 days. So you essentially want to reach about 20, 30 or 40,000 people in that 7 to 14 days. It does depend on your budget.

If you have a smaller budget, it'll take longer to get to those numbers. But I always base it off once we hit that 30 40,000 reach. Okay, well, this is a good pool of people now. Okay. Have they clicked on the ad?

Have they clicked on the the little Seymour button to read the text? Are they interested? If they did land on the landing page, how far did they get? Did they click around on other pages on the website, or did they go straight to book a call or download the product or whatever they're yeah, you're trying to get them to do interesting. And then what's the next metric you look at after the reach, um.

Cost per click? You obviously want to make sure that you're not getting too high of a cost per click. That is actually between 30 to 50 is where the sweet spot actually is. Is that is that right? Yeah.

And then is that across any sort of budget that you put behind it generally. Yeah. Yeah. I find if you have a really hyper specific offer and it's a little bit harder to reach an audience, like maybe you have a really, really specific audience. Those metrics can be skewed a little bit.

But yeah, yeah, on an average. That's cool, that's cool. Like for me, I've noticed that. Okay. Well to your point, on the hyper specific, uh, what did you say?

Oh, yeah. So hyper specific offer. Like, I realised that, you know, the thing with that is it's going to attract warmer audiences, attract like people that are going to convert, but then it's sort of there, there will be some people that come into it. So much harder to sell to them because they don't know what, uh, what to do. And plus my, uh, cost per click, uh, and my return on investment is actually so much higher.

Yeah. Right. So, yeah. That's cool. Let's talk about let's talk about personal branding a little bit here.

Yeah. What's how is that, uh, played with you in your business? Well, my personal brand is me, right? I am, I am the brand, or I'm trying to be the brand. Um.

It's not. I'll be honest. It's not something I put a lot of time and effort into. And I know I should, um, but my focus for my business is educating. So I find a lot of what I do and who I speak to.

Yes, they want the support with ads, but they've been burnt in the past by big agencies, but they don't know what those big agencies have done. So they don't know what the metrics were. They don't know what the campaigns they run, the objectives. They only know how much money they paid them and what they got in return. So they're missing a lot of that understanding in the middle.

So what I do is I try and fold in a little bit of education in there as well to educate them. Um, it's super important. I feel like and I agree with you, like, it's so sad when I actually talk to a, to a client and they're like, oh no, we spent a whole bunch of money on SEO. Yeah, 5 to $6000 on SEO. They said that we're going to get results in about 8 to 12 months.

And then I look at their website and they haven't posted a blog in like six months. Yeah. I'm like, what are you paying for? Right. Uh, so the educational part of it is actually super important and that I think.

And I think, uh, we talk about personal training at the moment. And I think the educational part comes before the person. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Creating that credibility.

And you're doing that yourself, like, by, uh, by not just, you know, doing the ads, like doing a done for your service, but you're also you're also like running masterclasses or being in front of him that creates that authority, that creates that credibility and that creates that personal branding aspect of it. So yeah, and I also run one on one trainings for smaller business owners. So it's just a one hour zoom call, but it gives them the opportunity to it's very unstructured. But they can come to me if they want to learn how to run a campaign or if they want to understand their data. And it's just a one hour zoom call where I just teach them, you know, this is what's working, this is what's not.

This is how to run a campaign or how to build out a strategy. Are you putting that on YouTube and Instagram in that? No. What are you doing? So yeah, I mean, like, uh, for for us, um, I love we're having this conversation because, like, again, I used to think that it's used to be organic content versus paid ads.

But what we've seen is, uh, some of our clients, they come to us is like, okay, well, I want to get some clients into the door. And I look at the Instagram like, nobody knows you, nobody knows what you do and what's your offer in the first place? And then and and then they told me like, oh, you know what, I don't know. We sell to everybody. I'm like, well, that's going to be a problem first of all, because on social media, uh, whichever platform you use, like whether YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn or whatever, it's specific to a set of customers, but you want to have something that you stand for.

Okay. Like there has, um, and there's this book that I'd like to to, to mention, um, I'm sure if you heard of it, it's called the Story Brand. Uh, How to Build a Story Brand by Donald Miller. And the whole premise of this book is basically positioning yourself as a guide, right? As the when when you talk talking about your agency, you are the guide to the hero.

Who is the person trying to tackle a villain? Okay, so what's the in your case is like you're the guy to someone who's never done that before, who's been burnt by this big agency, right? So I'm here to guide you to understand what that is, is like, so that you can hold that power and actually grow your own business. Yes. Yeah.

And that's the same thing for, for, uh, social media as well, because like, what you want to do is educate your target customers by showing them what's possible with your services. Right. So, yeah. So once, uh, once we have that, that, that, that social media aspect nailed down, ads become so much more profitable. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that's what that's what I've found out in my journey of understanding, like this whole marketing world. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bit of a beast, but yeah, you're absolutely right. You need to have the foundation set before starting to run ads.

Yeah. Yeah. And I just wanted to be a videographer, to be honest with you. So I don't know how. We got here.

It's become this whole marketing thing has become like a whole world of, uh, you need to be doing everything but in sequences. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. So talk to me about more about your business.

Where do you see, uh, where you see it going? What do you want to do? Uh, how do you want to serve your people? Um, that's a great question. Um, for me, I, I'm hoping.

No, no. So my plan for the next five years is to actually educate people on a larger scale. So I would love to be running events, educating people about paid advertising, um, hosting in-person workshops. I love being on the tools and being in that account and running campaigns. It's fun.

It's great. It's so fun. And I love all the data side of it. So for me, that's what keeps me going. Um, but I also love the education side of it as well.

So my goal is to keep educating people. Um, especially the small to medium sized businesses who, like I mentioned before, have been burnt in the past and just don't want anything to do with ads. So those. Are the those are probably like the, the best, uh, target audience for like workshops and stuff like. That.

That's it. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Build their confidence back up so they know what they know.

Because at the moment they don't know what they don't know. They just know okay. You pay an agency and they're going to take your money and you may get a return on investment. You may not. It doesn't like there's no middle.

I'm trying to fill that gap. Yeah, yeah. Between the dice and the big agency. So I would feel that gap by educating, um. And offering services that educate them at the same time.

Okay. Do you do do you do actually in the, you know, you hook them in, you get the lead. Right? Do you actually talk to them about like the sales process or anything like that as well or. So what does that look like?

Because I really this is for me, I realise it's like, uh, Talking to people who comes from ads and talking to people who come from referrals. Totally different. Animal. Yeah. It's there is so much more digging or getting over that, that, uh, that scepticism that they have and I've never encountered that before because my business has been primarily referrals.

Right. It's easy to talk to them. How do you teach your, your, your, your customers to get over the hump? It's a tricky one because a lot of my clients in the early days, I didn't realise I had to educate them on the sales side of it. So I was bringing in all these leads and they were doing nothing about it.

Like there was one client I had in three months, I think I got them about 70 or 80 leads for their. Business. And I checked in with them. I said, hey, how's it going? How many of you converted and all this stuff?

And they're like, oh, nothing. We haven't called any of them yet. And I'm like. In three more. What?

Yeah. Wow. I was like. Um, okay. No worries.

Like, what are you. Doing? Do you know what. These leads. Like?

I was so baffled. I was like, okay, but that's the thing. And then obviously that doesn't reflect very well on me to an extent. Like, I. Hope they didn't blame you for for not.

Knowing. Yeah. No they didn't, they didn't. But then if, you know, if they go off and refer or if they go and have a conversation with someone like, oh, you know, have you run ads before? They'd be like, yeah, but we didn't get anything out of it.

So. Well, no you did. You just didn't do the follow up steps. Um, so now I guide them along the whole process. I also do help with like landing page optimisation and, um, email search sequences and stuff like that as well.

So I do guide them in that sense. Okay. Um, but yeah, I'm finding lately a lot of people have kind of picked up on how they need to sell their own offers, and if they. Don't. What do you mean by.

That? Well. If you don't know how to sell your own offer organically. Yeah. Then I'd try and just guide them in a different direction.

I'm like, okay, well, maybe just test this out organically first. Yeah. So I'll put together a content strategy for them. Oh that's crazy. And I said, okay, well, who are you trying to sell you?

What are you trying to sell? How? Put yourself in their shoes. How do they want to find your service? Hmm.

So I guess the question here is like, where do you stop? Because, like, there's so much like, we can talk about office, but then in office there's like, okay, well, who's your target market? Who's your your who's the demographic who like, what problems do they have? Right. You can go so, so, so deep into that, into that front.

So, uh, but talk to me about that, uh, that three months, uh, three months of getting leads, but doing nothing about it. Right? This was in my early days. Yeah, but this is not the first thing. This is not the first time I heard this because I was watching your your content.

And you mentioned that, uh, you know, some people were already doing ads, but the leads had no way to go. Yeah, yeah. Can you tell me that story? Yeah. So, um, there's a few different.

so that was like a combination of a few different stories I've got. But I've had a couple of clients come to me and they're like, okay, we're running ads. Um, there was one more recently, she's spending $200 on ads and she's sending them to a very, very unoptimised, um, landing page. Um, and then her social media content that she's posting organically wasn't telling a story. There was no brand.

There was no face behind the business. Um, people didn't know why they needed to buy her products. And it was just very much like, this is what I do. And here's a photo of it. And I was like.

I get where you're coming from, but there's a lot more around this. We need to tell people why they need this product. We need to tell people how to buy this product. Um, and once I looked at her landing page, it was just an email for people. To order.

And I was like, okay, you can't even click on this email. They have to copy and paste it and then go into their inbox. I said, there's a lot of points here where people are just going to go too hard. Yeah. Put it in the too hard basket.

I'll find someone else. So I find it. I find it super interesting. It's just like, because we're so deep in this. And I spoke to to to my producer Jerome about this as well, is that we're so deep in this that we understand, like looking from a bird's eye view of what you need to do.

But like, we forget that some business owners, they're 2 or 3 steps behind you. And there are things that are missing to, to to get them to where they need to be. So I find that super interesting, like when you're actually talking about this because we're kind of having the same problem on our front too, where people don't understand how to what's a good storyteller. Yeah, one or more how to create content. What's a framework behind it?

Like how do you structure a thing? How long does it need to be. Uh, what's your opinion kind of thing. So yeah, super interesting stuff. And funny you mentioned that I find a lot of the time clients come to me because they don't know what to do with their marketing.

They don't know how to reach new people. And when I talk to them, they're like, yep, I just know how to fix my client's problem. I know how to heal their gut issues. Mhm. Um, and then I've got to remember okay.

Well they know that I don't know what a natural path does. I don't know what I'm looking at in a blood test. So then I put myself in their shoes. I'm like okay, you don't know what you don't know. So then that's why I fold in the education.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's that's for sure. Um, for us as well. Like, I think one of the fascinating things about marketing and understanding, like what people, people's problem are, is the amount of business knowledge that we get from from everybody.

Right. Like the different types of business and knowing what some of their problems actually are so that we can help them fix it through either, you know, paid ads or personal branding or like content creation and whatnot. It's just picking that strategy and just going with it. Right. Yeah.

So yeah. And trusting the process, the amount of times people change the strategy. Three weeks in. Oh, pisses me off. In the nicest.

Way. They just do things and don't. Tell you about it. Yeah, so I actually had a client once who we were generating leads, um, to a landing page on their website and was doing well, like they were getting 1 or 2 leads a week. It was early days, so it wasn't like a lot of consistency.

And I kept telling them, trust the process. Trust the process. Like it will happen. We're only two weeks in. And then there was one day I woke up and I had all these text messages.

I was like, oh, you know what's happening? We have no leads, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, no worries. Like, I had to look at everything. They had gone and changed the landing page and didn't tell me.

And they had changed. I think they changed the form. So then all my pixel tracking and all that stuff wasn't synced up anymore. Um, and they changed a few bits of content on the page too. And I was like, who changed this and why did you change it?

They're like, oh, we didn't like the way this sounded and that. And I was like. Okay, we. Didn't. Like it.

I was like, okay. Like, fair enough, but you need to tell me. So then I can, you know, there's steps that I've got to do to make sure. I think this is a case for you, for your whole, like, understanding your data. Yeah.

Wow. So, yeah, that was a bit of a, um. Yeah, a bit of a educational moment where I was like, okay, you need to trust the process and not touch anything. Yeah. Cool.

Let's touch on, uh, what's it called? Personal branding. Because we just like our team and I, we just came from the whole the whole Christo event. And one of the things that he says is, if you don't know my story, you don't know me. Yes.

So and these days especially, and we have a quote that we like to say and visual is people buy from people. Right. So how important is personal branding to you? Very important. I always advise my clients like you need to be the face of the business these days.

Yes. It's uncomfortable. Um, and even if you don't want to be the face of the business, get someone to be the face of your business because like you mentioned, people buy from people. And with my clients, I've got some that don't. They don't want to be the face.

They don't want anyone to be the face. They just want to be the brand. This is what we sell. This is what we do. And then I've got others who are the personal brand.

And you can see a very clear difference in even just the ad results itself and the engagement in the social media content. It's very important to have a personal brand because. So it's skewed towards personal brand. Absolutely. Yeah.

It's there's so much more engagement when you have a person behind the brand. Um. Yeah. It's it's wild the results that we're seeing. But to your point with that, there's a book that I like to recommend.

It's called the E myth. And in the book it says that there are three personalities in the business. There's the operator, manager and the visionary. Right. Some people start their business in either three or like one of these hats, like the operator, you've done the you've done the technical thing, you understand it.

You know, you know how to do it better than your boss, for example, like that. But it doesn't mean that you're a very good visionary, right? No, it could mean that you're a good manager. But for the specifics of of this conversation is the visionary part of the business that you need, really need to hone down to. Because as the visionary, as the face of the business, you're the one that comes up with the idea.

You're the one that wants people up to you, to your product. So I think for most people, like if you're out there doing, you know, content, if you're out there doing ads, start putting your face in front of it. It's super important, especially now in the in the age of AI, I reckon. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

And I find people are everyone knows when you've put an AI person on the screen, write a video or photo, whatever it is, we're we're pretty savvy people. We can pick up on that stuff. So we're not dumb. Customers are not. Dumb.

Yeah, they're not dumb. So when you see people trying to run an ad with an AI person like you can't expect to get amazing results if you're trying to hide behind. Have you tested? I haven't know. I'm so curious to see someone.

I just want to see, like the two different attractive to see. Like which one performs. The best kind of thing. So maybe that's future campaign. I test 100%.

I've had. I've had that question as well. Someone come up to me, it's like, hey, I want to create an AI influencer. And I just looked at them and I said, well, first of all, you're lacking that authenticity pays that, you know, most people want to have, uh, with, with wherever they want to spend their money kind of thing like that. So I was just thinking about like, yeah, it's it's could be the future, but I don't think we're ready for that just yet.

Not yet. Yeah. We still want that personal touch. That's it. And I think even in the future, people are still going to want human connection.

So I think it's. Yeah, even if it's just DMing in the comments. Um, oh sorry. DMing in the DMs messaging in the DMs. Slide in your DMs.

Or commenting. Or. Things like that. And yeah. That's cool.

Amazing. Like I think I think this is a great, a great way to to sort of wrap it up. But I just want to recap what we actually spoke about today. For those who actually want to understand like paid ads. First you need to look at your offer, right.

Is it something that you can sell? This is something you can rave it on about. Is this. Is it something that you haven't sold yet? But people are raising their hand up and saying that I want that right.

Then only then do you start looking at paid ads. Am I correct or is it a step in between? Um. Strategy. Strategy.

Okay, so you want to make sure you build out a strategy. You want to have a plan to, um, obviously you've got the offer. It's great. You know, people want it, but you need to have a plan on how you're going to get people from. Oh, yeah, I really like that.

I want that to. Okay. Book a call with me or take that action. Um, because yes, you can put the steps in place. But if you have the wrong messaging all the way through.

Yeah. You'll lose people quite. Quickly. And the strategy could also be like a content strategy. Was it good?

Absolutely. Where they do a whole bunch of content to educate the customers, right. So that they are even warmer because I think what's the stat 21 touchpoints? It used to be 11. But the other thing is 21 touchpoints before someone actually buys from you, right?

So you want to warm up before they get to the ads and they're like, okay, who? There's the offer. There's a price to it. There's a person that's going to solve my issue. I'm going to click a book or call.

That's it. So is that the whole process that people should think about? Pretty much. Yeah. Obviously every business is different.

So you want to tweak it for each business. But yeah, that's pretty much it. Okay. Rochelle, thank you very much for coming on. I had a blast just talking about nerding out about ads and strategies and whatnot.

So I hope that you can come back on and then share some knowledge and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. This is great. Awesome.