Are you feeling overwhelmed by the complexities of paid social media advertising? Dive into the latest episode of The Growth Pod, where I unravel the mysteries of paid social pitfalls and reveal my personal favorite tools for enhancing the paid social workflow. We'll tackle the top challenges, like skyrocketing CPMs, lackluster CTRs, and disappointing CVRs, dissecting their causes and offering practical solutions. Discover how to refine your audience targeting, craft compelling creatives, and construct a winning landing page experience. Plus, get an insider's look at my favorite tools for improving my Paid Social workflow. Whether you're a seasoned advertiser or just starting out, this episode is packed with insights to elevate your paid social strategy. 

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About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

The big question is how do we as entrepreneurs build wildly successful, profitable businesses without hustle, culture, burnout, or venture capital? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. Welcome to The Growth Pod. I'm your host Angela Frank.

I've been a growth marketer and entrepreneur for over eight years and I've been responsible for generating millions of dollars in sales for the companies that I've worked with. In this episode, I'm sharing the common paid social pitfalls, how to avoid them, and my two favorite tools for improving my paid social workflow.

It can be caused if you have a very niche product, but it can also be caused if your campaign goal is very down funnel. So for example, if you have a purchases campaign goal, your CPM will be higher than if you have an impressions campaign goal.

Now this can make sense for your business. Generally, I like to have my campaign goals be as far down funnel as possible, especially for mid to low funnel ads and targeting.

But this is something to keep in mind. You can fix high CPM by one Understanding your customer better.

If you understand your customer, the groups they hang out in, where they are online, and the proper paid social platforms to use to target them, you can lower your cpm. In addition, you can test new audiences. So for example, if you have a weight loss product, maybe you are targeting the wrong audience online.

And targeting something like a keto group or a whole food plant based group might lower your cpm. Testing different audiences will help you identify the gold niches for your business. And third, testing new campaign goals.

We touched on this testing to see do purchases make sense? Do lead forms make sense? Do link clicks make sense? Do video views make sense? Do impressions make sense?

There's a whole host of campaign goals that you can play around with. These may vary by platform, but each platform has a way for you to alter what your campaign goal is.

The second paid social pitfall is low click through rate. This can be caused by uncompelling creative lackluster copy or not including a CTA in your post.

You can fix low click through rate by making your ad more compelling. So one look at your previous creative performance. What in the past has outperformed your ads and why do you think that is?

Create an iteration following the path of success and put some new creative in your account to see if this will outperform your old creative. The other Thing you can do is test new ad types. So generally in my experience, video has higher click through rate than static images.

In your niche, maybe you have an information product where static actually does really well.

In any case, you want to test out your different types of ad creatives to make sure that you are using the one that best suits your product and your niche.

Finally, you can encourage viewers of your ad to take action by adding a call to action in the creative, but also in the copy and making sure that you're addressing any pain points in the copy and positioning your product as the solution. You really need to understand your customer and what they care about and speak to those in your ad.

In the creative and the copy, the third most common pitfall is a low conversion rate. This actually happens on your website after somebody clicks through your ad.

This can be caused by a bad landing page experience, not properly addressing the customer's concerns or objectives, and not having a clear call to action on your landing page.

So if you have a low conversion rate, you're getting lots of people onto your landing page, but not many people actually making a purchase or filling out a lead form. You need to take a deep dive and see what is happening.

Using heat mapping software like Hotjar or Crazy Egg can help you understand what's going on when people land on your landing page. But nothing's really going to substitute your knowledge for the customer. Are we seeing a thread here between all of these pitfalls?

So you can fix your low conversion rate by improving your landing page experience, making sure that the call to action is at the top, right next to the button that you want them to click or the lead form that you want them to fill out. You can also fix this by addressing your customers concerns and objectives.

So in the ad it's important to speak to their pain points and position your product as the solution. But on the landing page it's important to do that but also now address any concerns or objectives. Maybe you have a product that is for shaving.

It's like the best leg shaving product ever. You need to say why that is and address any concerns or objectives.

So for example, I saw an ad one time before a product like this where you essentially rub a stone on your legs and it shaves your legs.

And the videos on the ads were crazy and you could see the before and after and it looked like it was so effective, but there's still not the question answered in your mind, like how long does it take? Is it painful? So it's important to address all of these concerns on the landing page.

Just like it's important for you to address your customers concerns or any objectives on your landing page. Finally, a high acquisition cost can be a symptom of all of the above issues.

Having a high cpm, a low CTR and a low conversion rate will all increase your cost per acquisition. So if you have a high cpa, you need to go through and see where this is stemming from.

Either you are overspending on your cpm, your ads are not compelling, or you are not converting on your landing page. It's really a symptom of those issues. It could be some combination of the three as well.

So if you have a high cpa, you need to diagnose and fix the broken link in your ads funnel. Now I want to share with you my two favorite tools to help assist me when I'm running paid social campaigns. The first is Magic Brief.

I love Magic Brief. I am totally obsessed with using them. Magic Brief saves ad creative inspiration from the Meta Ad library.

Or you can upload your own if you have screenshots on your phone that you've encountered in the wild and you can use as inspiration to build out creative briefs that you can then share out with your team or graphic designer. So an example of me using this in my day to day life.

If I have a client that I think a certain type of ad will perform really well for, let's say it's a testimonial ad, I can go and search the meta ad library for their competitors, see if anybody has a really solid a testimonial ad to then reference. Right? We're not copying, we're referencing.

And ideally I'll put together a library for them of 10 different testimonial ads that we like, different elements of and then we can go ahead and build out a creative brief for their team that says we like this element of this ad and this element of that ad and essentially create something totally new based on the things that we like. And the graphic designer has the visual reference point. The second tool that has been a complete game changer for me is Motion App.

Motion App helps you build out creative performance dashboards specifically for paid social. Right now it only works for Meta and TikTok, but it's still worth it, especially if you are running ads on either of those platforms.

Motion App allows you to share creative performance in a digestible way.

So if I need to communicate to a graphic designer what ads are performing well and what aren't, not all creative people love numbers and not all number people love Creative of course, but Motion app has been instrumental for sharing why things are working and why things aren't.

Instead of my feedback being well that wasn't a good ad, it didn't perform well, or having to open up Meta Business Manager and overwhelm them with data, you can put the data that you care most about on the dashboard. It shows a picture of the creative. It also includes your copy and so you could do both creative and copy now.

So this Motion app and magic brief have both been huge game changers that I've implemented in my day to day work life in the past year.

So my call to action for you today is even if you don't think your ads are underperforming, take a look at your account and find at least one area where your ads can be improved. I guarantee you there's something that you can do to improve your performance this month. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Growth Pod.

I look forward to seeing you in the next one.