That One Thing Bitesized: 6 Facebook Ad Tips for Q4

If you've been around here for long enough you'll know I manage and build Facebook Ads for Female Founded Coaching businesses. You'll also know I talk to a lot of coaches on That One Thing about their business journeys. But did you know I also work with female founded E-Comm businesses too? Well this is the episode for you! In this bitesized episode I'm going to talk through the 6 things you need to get ready for the biggest season in the E-Comm business calendar: Q4. Because your'e going to need to plan early and start now!In this episode I let you know: All the key dates to have your Facebook ads ready for. How to help your products sell during this expensive time for advertising. How to cross and up-sell. (this is gleaned from my years in luxury retail)How to jump on all your social media channels. How starting early with your Facebook Ads will pay in dividends when the key dates hit. Need some extra help? You can drop me a line vanessa@thesocialally.co.uk - I have a range of services to suite all budgets. 

Transcript

[00:27] Speaker A: Hello.

[00:27] Speaker B: Hello, and welcome to The One Thing, a podcast where I talk to fabulous females about the one thing that made them step out of their comfort zone and change change their life for the better. Because it's only by taking brave steps that we truly grow as a person. I'm your host, Mum social media manager and general sole searcher, Vanessa Carlos. And every week, I'll be introducing a small business owner, a blogger, or a creative to discuss their One Thing.

[01:18] Speaker A: Hello. Hello and welcome back to that one Thing. You know what? It has been a really long time, hasn't it? I took August off pretty much. I had a few clients on the go, but I pretty much taken some time away. I had lots of time in my family, had a summer holiday, all that kind of stuff. And it really gave me the rest that I needed to jump back into my work and also jump back into this wonderful podcast. And today, in light of what is about to hit us, I thought I would talk about, in Facebook ad terms, Q Four, which is the biggest shopping quarter of the entire year. Okay, just a brief recap. Loads of, you know, if you've been on here for long enough and you've been listening for long enough that I run Facebook ads for a lot of service based businesses like coaches, and I have a lot of coaches on that One Thing talking about their biz stories. But I don't know whether you did know that I also have a few female founded ecommerce businesses that I work for as well. So the last year or so, I've really kind of got a real gist about what works and what doesn't when you're heading into this huge shopping season. And I'm going to share with you some of my nuggets of wisdom. Okay? So let's jump right in. First off, I'm going to talk you through all the dates you need to know to get yourself prepared with ads ready for Q Four. Okay? Did you know that people generally start buying their festive gifts? So I know we're going with a swear word here. Christmas, as early as September. I'm going to say that again. September. Absolutely bonkers, right? Honestly, it just blows my mind, but it's true. So you've got to think about your festive gifting ads and starting to test some of these kind of almost like a teaser ads, I would say around October to December time, and you're going to have to have them all running along this kind of time period. Then, of course, you've got Black Friday. Another swear word. I'm really, really sorry. Another swear word. Now, Black Friday is the 25 November, but as we all know, Black Friday is not a day anymore. It's pretty much two weeks. So having some ads running so you can test out what's working and what's not working with your audience ready for the 25 November is again, absolutely key because straight after that on the 29 November is Cyber Monday. And so that's kind of in those two weeks of madness where everybody is trying to get all their bargains and Amazon is going off the charts. But of course, you're a small business, so you have to compete with this, right? Yeah, totally. And then at the end of all of this, you've got the Boxing Day sales on the 26 December. That's when everybody has had too much turkey, too many roast potatoes, and they're just jumping online to see if they can get a bargain, probably to put away for next Christmas. If I'm honest with you. I think I've done that. I don't know whether you've done that too. But anyway, those are the key dates, so we'll start with that. Okay, so I've kind of hinted at this, but I'm going to hammer this home. Now, the first tip is to start planning and executing and testing some ads now. And I'm going to give you some pretty bonkers stats, okay? 45% of consumers start shopping in October. I think we can kind of see if that's the case, especially during this kind of uncertain time when not everybody has a huge amount of money at the moment. I would have thought that it's probably going to be more than 45% this year because they're going to be more likely to kind of spread the cost over the months ahead than they would do normally if they're just racing around on Christmas Eve trying to buy everything. Okay, the next is 25%. Start in September. So we are in the month of September. Now, while I'm recording this, I would probably say again, it's probably going to be more this year, so it's definitely worth testing. Now, the third stat is 59% of women, and I'm speaking to women here, as you are very, very aware, will plan their holiday shopping days before Black Friday and Cyber Monday hit. I do this. I'm sure you do this too. I'm sure you have a little browse around Amazon and all your favorite websites before, you know, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday stuff is going to hit. And you have a little look through and you see the kind of stuff that you'd like before it goes on sale. We all do it. We all do the window shopping usually just before we go to bed. That kind of blue light scroll, we all do it. I'm not even going to go there. So if I need to hammer this home even more, that we need to get started ASAP while this is going on and before you even start to do your testing, please, for the love of all things holy, and I would say this for service based businesses as well. When you start off, get your website speed to its tip top performance. Test it, test it and test it again because I'm going to give you another stat here. Studies have shown that 74% of website visitors are likely to leave a website if it takes longer than two to 3 seconds to load. And this is another key thing on mobile, because we're pretty much all shopping on our phones, right? And I don't know about you, but the amount of times this has happened to me, in fact, I will give you an example. I went on the Tom Ford website because I love their lipstick. And I had got to the end of my red lipstick that I was given as a birthday gift years ago. And honestly, I've just looked after it because I know how expensive they are. So I've just kind of kept it and kept it. But I've really got to the end. I went on their website and it was almost impossible to physically make a sale. For some reason, there was some kind of glitch in between loading what I wanted onto the website to going through to the sale, I immediately clicked off. I thought, I can't be bothered with this, I'll do it later. And then I completely forgot about it. And I will probably go somewhere else, to a better website, and I will buy something completely different. So they've lost a sale there because their website ****. To be fair, it's ****. They need to get that sorted before Q Four hits. So if anyone from Tom Ford is listening, your website ****, guys. Now, in Q Four, there is an awful lot of businesses all vying for consumers attention. So it is vital, absolutely vital, that you stand out from the crowd. And to do that when you're running Facebook and Instagram ads is to make sure that videos are in your strategy, and that's any type of video please test as many videos as you want. You could test out at the company founder talking about the product. You can test out a product on a person actually applying it and seeing how wonderful it is. All these kind of videos really work amazingly well in Facebook and Instagram, all right? They don't even have to be anything fancy, necessarily. They don't have to look glossy. Sometimes the ones that look like someone's just done it on their phone actually perform really well because they look native to Facebook and Instagram, and they do just look like a wheel, so they usually perform great. So things like unboxing a customer jumping on, saying they absolutely love the product, a close up on the product, even, or you could even and this is where my friend Lou will come in, get someone to do a stop motion video, especially if it's a product. They look incredible. Now, we're going to go back all the way back a good eight years ago now, to the time when I used to work in luxury retail, because we're talking about cross selling and up selling now. This is what we were always told to focus on. And I kind of got it down to a fine art. So I do think that's really helped me with doing these kind of cross sell upsell ads because I know exactly how to close that sale down. So what you need when you're coming to creating the ads is on your website. You can dedicate a whole landing page to gift giving, so you can organize it into themes and categories like stocking fillers, gifts for your mum, gifts for teenagers. Teenagers are really difficult, so having like a page with teenager gifts is absolutely golden. I promise you. Use these product descriptions on your website and kind of give it a sense of urgency. Like these gifts are for a limited time only at this price kind of deal. And also this is where your Legion ads will come in because if you've been nurturing your email list and your subscribers to this email list, you can give them discount codes that adjust for the email list. VIP access for a limited time, two for one offers, early bird access. All these kind of buzzwords really help to kind of nurture and love your VIP customers, which should pretty much be your email list. Now this one is kind of timely in that at the moment, in September 2022, on the social media channels at the moment, it's kind of a weird time. We're in like a period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II. There's been an awful lot of very heavy news and a lot of small businesses have kind of found it quite difficult to sell at the moment because everybody's mourning and they're kind of worried that people aren't going to respond very well. I would say I would call bullshit on this, completely call bullshit on this, especially if you're a small business and you rely on this consistency in your business. Just keep going. Absolutely keep going. Because now we're getting into Q Four. It's absolutely vital that you step up and you show up consistently on your socials. So you can use all the tools. You can do product reveal videos, you can showcase your testimonials, you can gather all your user generated content. So user generated content is people that have gone online by their own volition and they've said that your products are amazing. Grab them, lost them, maybe give them a freebie for doing so. And use that video in your ads. They're absolutely golden. You can show us behind the scenes in your business, in your stories. Just go to town. Don't worry about this period of morning. You've got to survive. It's imperative that you do. Okay, so I'm just going to end on this. Utilizing your paid social media is really going to help you compete with everybody when it comes to this. Q Four season and Facebook and Instagram ads can really help you reach more people that wouldn't usually have seen your brand. But it's also the most expensive time to advertise. So if you get things in motion ASAP, then you are kind of spending less money to begin with while you're testing. And then by the time this expensive period hits, you should pretty much know who you're selling to. And so you'll be able to scale super quickly, understanding what works and what doesn't really early. And using all those findings will make sure that you're going to run killer Black Friday ads. Killer Cyber Monday ads. Absolutely killer Christmas sale ads. And you will succeed with your Facebook ads ultimately. And that's what we all want, don't we? So that's it, my love. I hope you found this really helpful. If you need any extra help, I have popped my details in the show notes again for you. Please feel free to DM me on Instagram, drop me an email. I have a number of services for different budgets and I know budgets are tight at the moment, so I've gone on my website and I've made it super simple to get some actually tailor made help for your business. So please feel free. I'm not scary, I promise you. And we can have a really, really good chat because I'd love to talk to you about Q Four and how I can make it work for you. Now, next week, complete change of subject. We're going back to some wonderful interviews and I have the pleasure of speaking to the most incredible lady. Her name is Hannah Beer. She is a money mindset coach, but she kind of also takes it from a clairvoyant type of view. It was an amazing conversation. I was completely blown away by her. You will know that I was completely blown away by her because I came across as a complete blithering wreck by the end of it, and I really hope you look forward to it. I will be dropping it next week. It's lovely to be back. I hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening. I utterly appreciate every single one of my listeners. I love you all and I will see you next week. For now, goodbye.

[20:43] Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening to that one thing. And please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps to get my little podcast into the universe and I'll be forever grateful.