A complicated relationship with ads

I have a complicated relationship with Facebook ads, and I suspect a lot of you do too. They’ve brought me several million dollars. They filled the webinars that sold The Profitable Portfolio, which did a million dollars in its first year, and they built my email list to twenty thousand people. None of that happened when I was dabbling. For years I’d run ads for a little while, couldn’t tell whether I was getting my money back, and stop. It only worked once my director of operations, Cassie, took Claire Pelletreau’s course, discovered that the guy we’d been paying didn’t even have a pixel installed on one of our pages, and started running our ads herself on a consistent budget. She even built a little calculator, so we knew roughly what every dollar we spent would bring back.

Then I decided I needed to go bigger. Last summer I hired an agency with famous names on their client list, a four-month contract and a promise to scale everything, and when it was over I was out sixty thousand dollars. It broke my spirit a little. When I told Claire, she said it was about the ninth time in twelve months she’d heard a story like mine. After that I mostly stopped running ads, and over the next year and a half my list quietly slipped from twenty thousand to fifteen. Now I’m building again, with a big offer coming, and I wanted to ask Claire everything before I spent my own money again.

The case for one simple ad

Claire doesn’t understand why people still teach complicated ad strategies, because the algorithm doesn’t like complicated. Facebook wants you to hand it something small and then let it go find the best people for you. In her world, that small thing is one ad pointing to one sign-up page for something free: a masterclass, a short video, a PDF, a live class. Inside that one ad you might load a couple of videos and a couple of images, and one of those images can be a plain selfie with a line of text on it. Nothing high-production. My face has always been my best-performing creative, and Claire wasn’t surprised.

She meets clients at events who tell her they’ve had the same single ad running for two years. That’s the whole strategy. It sounds almost too simple, which is exactly why so many people abandon it for something that feels more sophisticated and performs worse.

The ad is the targeting

A friend said this to me recently and I nodded without really getting it: the ad is the targeting. Claire explained it in a way that finally clicked. A few years ago, if you wanted to reach pet photographers, you had to hope the platform offered an interest called pet photography, and if it didn’t, you’d target everyone interested in photography and hope your ad found the right corner of that crowd. Now Claire recommends almost no targeting at all. Instead, the ad itself calls out the pet photographer by name, speaks to her specific problems, and offers her something that is unmistakably for her. Facebook already knows who the pet photographers are, and who is likely to sign up for something free, and who is likely to buy, and it puts your ad in front of them.

That changes what a good ad is. Vague promises like “grow your business” worked in 2018. Now the specificity of your words is doing the job the targeting menu used to do, which means the clearer you are about exactly who you serve, the better your ads perform. I’d argue that’s the most important thing in this whole conversation for a creative business: if the ad is the targeting, then your brand is the targeting.

Why ads seem to fail

When I asked Claire why so many people try ads and give up, she named a few culprits, and almost none of them were the ad. The first is the low-commitment lead magnet that brings in cheap sign-ups. If your ad promises six figures in six minutes, or twenty pounds in three easy steps, you’ll get plenty of leads, but you’ve told them it’s easy, and you’ve attracted people who want easy. Then you’re surprised when they won’t buy something that takes work. The second is turning ads off too soon. Claire doesn’t let her clients change anything for seven days, and for an evergreen funnel she wants around four hundred people through it before anyone decides whether the offer works, because only a handful of those people will actually watch all the way to the pitch.

Most of the time, she said, the problem isn’t the ad at all. If people are signing up but not buying, it’s either the offer or the selling. Her own course has existed for twelve years at many price points, so she knows the offer works; when her webinars weren’t converting, it was always her webinar structure. She’s now run a live webinar every Monday for nine weeks, and her conversion rate swings wildly from week to week even when her performance is nearly identical. What keeps her going is remembering that every person in that room is someone she paid to meet, and whether they buy that day or not, the webinar is her best chance to help them know, like and trust her.

She also did the math on the paid lead magnet, the nine-dollar mini course so many of us have tried. You’ll rarely spend nine dollars to make a nine-dollar sale. More often you’ll spend thirty. At a hundred dollars a day, that’s about three new people on your list, where a free webinar with three-dollar leads would bring you thirty for the same money. She’d rather pay more for the right free lead, and right now she’s paying around twenty dollars a lead and still profitable, because the people coming in are the ones who buy.

The question every luxury photographer asks me

This was the question I most wanted answered for my clients. You’re a wedding or brand photographer selling collections at ten thousand dollars and up. You don’t have a course, a webinar or a freebie. Should you be running Facebook ads at all, and what would that even look like?

Claire’s answer was refreshingly practical. Take the brochure or pricing guide you probably already have, repackage it as a PDF, and run ads to a page where people opt in to receive it. Put your starting price right in the ad, so anyone for whom that number is out of reach simply doesn’t sign up, and the people who do are already the right fit. Then make the free thing specific. Not wedding planning, but planning a wedding in Paris, or in Paris, Rome and Stockholm, which tells a bride both that you know European weddings and that you’re willing to travel to hers. Facebook will find the women who are thinking about getting married there. And Claire leans toward the problem in her headlines rather than the promise, the five mistakes to avoid rather than the three things to do, because people want help avoiding the thing that hurts.

I don’t usually coach luxury photographers to build a forever newsletter, because once someone is married they’re rarely a repeat client. But a short follow-up sequence of five or so emails after someone downloads your guide is enough to make the connection stick.

Ads don’t fix a broken brand

I’ve always said ads can’t fix a broken brand. If you don’t know exactly who you’re for, or you’re offering this and that and the other thing, you won’t know who to run an ad to, and you’ll pay to find that out. Claire agreed, and then added something I hadn’t considered. Attention is so hard to get right now that if you’re testing your message only on social media, you may never get enough eyes on it to know whether it works. You’ll blame the story or the brand when the truth is that not enough people saw it. Her suggestion for anyone still finding their footing is to spend five dollars a day to learn whether anyone cares what you have to say, instead of spending a year posting and hoping.

And when you do write the ad, tell a real story. Claire told one on her webinar about a client who was sure setting up ads would take forever, so she sat down at her dinner table while her husband was at a concert, food on one side, laptop on the other, and it took her twenty minutes. If Claire had simply said “my client thought it would take a long time and it didn’t,” no one would remember it. The details are what make people lean in, even when the details aren’t their own life.

Paying for marketing isn’t cheating

Near the end I asked about the people who simply refuse to pay to play. Claire’s first question for them would be whether there’s a belief underneath it that paying for marketing is somehow cheating. She hears it often, and mostly from women. Every business in history has had to market itself, and paying for advertising is about as old as business gets. If you want to spend years trying to go viral, that’s a legitimate path. But some people have more time than money and some have more money than time, and Claire has more money than time. Ads are her easy button. She doesn’t create content for social media at all.

For anyone who has tried ads and felt burned, her reframe is that business is troubleshooting. Ads that don’t work were either set up wrong or promoting something people didn’t want, and the first one is fixable. After that, you’re just asking better questions: are people clicking, and if they click but don’t sign up, why not? She also still asks people who signed up and didn’t buy why they didn’t, which she calls a bit of a dying art. You can only ask that, though, if you have people on your list who’ve seen your offer.

What it costs to turn them off

The story I most wanted Claire to tell was what happened when she stopped. She’d been running ads for more than a year that were doing really well, and then they stopped converting. They still brought in leads, but the leads stopped buying, and she was very pregnant and didn’t have time to dig in. She came back from maternity leave, had to let her number two go, focused on the clients she’d signed right before she left, and never fixed it. For a while nothing seemed to hurt. She even had a great launch. Then, about a year after the ads went quiet, she launched the same program that had sold beautifully six months earlier, and it flopped. She’d assumed her referrals and her old search traffic would keep sending people. They didn’t. It hit her ego and it hit her finances, and in her words, by not spending, she made so much less than she anticipated.

That’s exactly where I am. I’m giving myself five months to rebuild awareness before my next big offer, because I can feel how much of it I lost in a year and a half of quiet. Claire’s advice for coming back was the simplest thing she said all day: you just turn them back on.

In this episode

• How Google, referrals and a crowded market changed the way clients find us
• My $60,000 agency mistake
• The one simple ad, and what goes inside it
• Why cheap leads attract the wrong people
• Seven days and four hundred leads: how long to leave an ad alone
• Why Claire hides the chat on her webinars
• The ad is the targeting
• The real math on a $9 lead magnet
• Writing for different people inside one ad, and why details win
• Ads don’t fix a broken brand, and the $5-a-day test
• Should a $10K wedding photographer run Facebook ads?
• Running ads for a second brand without confusing the first
• Claire’s tech stack
• Why paying for marketing isn’t cheating
• What happened the year Claire turned her ads off

Resources

• Claire on Instagram (she doesn’t post, but she reads her DMs): [HANDLE] https://www.instagram.com/clairepells/

• Tools Claire mentioned: Kit for email, FG Funnels, Leadpages, Airtable, Circle, and Claude for building funnel pages
  
• The Profitable Portfolio: https://darcybenincosa.com/the-profitable-portfolio