Boosting VS Facebook Ads Manager (featuring Jillian Kernats)

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Start Marketing Podcast. It's Joe Sanders with you. Thanks for joining us. Today we're going to talk about the difference between boosting posts on Facebook and using Facebook Ads Manager.

With us again today, we have Jillian Kearns. Jillian, how are you doing? I'm good. How are you?

I'm well. Jillian's coming to us from beautiful Pittsburgh, where she moved to, but that's okay. We still like her and she's still a Cubs fan, which is good. So just like we do in every episode, we have a five-step system to help people create positive and winning digital marketing campaigns that actually drive revenue and grow for the clients that they have.

So what that system is incorporated with is five steps. This can be found in a book called Stop Posting, Start Marketing. It's available on Amazon. I'm going to run through the five steps really quick.

It is find the right audience, create the right content, promote your business as a brand, use ample resources, and analyze the results. That is the basis of our system. You can find podcasts on each of those topics as well as other topics like the one we're going to talk about today. and we'll just dive right into it.

So Jillian, this came up because I was on LinkedIn and I was posting something. We wrote a blog about something, you know, how like marketing people like us have to like write blogs about stuff. It's really boring. But I wrote a blog about something and somebody wrote a message back to me and he goes, Hey, you know, I found, I read, or somebody told me with all my research that boosting posts on Facebook is something you should never do, no matter what.

And, and I took, it took me back. This was like a marketing professional. Like I checked out like his profile, like he, you know, had a marketing professional, digital marketing person. And I was like, wow, that's a very odd thing to say.

And before I just like responded, I wanted to think about it for a minute. So before we even get into what I said, I mean, what would you say to somebody who says, don't ever boost posts on Facebook? What would you right i mean i could kind of see where they would be coming from but i definitely don't agree i think that they're both tools you can use um and more so you want to use them both and balance each other if you are able to um is my opinion on that yeah i i definitely agree and i i i see where he was coming from too in a sense that, well, here's the thing when you do, when you're boosting a post on Facebook, you are using, um, like 10% of what you can do.

If you go to Facebook ads manager, you get the whole a hundred percent. It's like the light. It's like the light versus the full version. Right now.

I, I, so I get that. However, I, as I, as I say many times, like I think sometimes people overcomplicate marketing. And when you figure out, again, I could go back to the five steps of finding the right audience and creating the right content and using ample resources. When you know about how much money it's going to take to penetrate the audience that you have, and when you've built that audience, when you have that audience to find, when you know what kind of content to send to your audience, you've done all the work.

It really doesn't take much more than a boosted post sometimes to generate a tremendous amount of engagement, call to action, whatever it is. I think you see that with our live music venues, right? And our restaurants, right? Yeah.

And so when you're out there doing that, I mean, when you're boosting, when you're trying to promote a venue that has three events that week, you're not going to Facebook ads manager and creating a campaign for each one. You're on the page. And so tell people like, why is that? Why are you not doing it?

Why are you just boosting the post? Right. So if we're talking about why we should boost posts, I think that sometimes simpler can just be better and it depends on your marketing goals. So if you are a small business owner and you're worrying about other aspects of your business, boosting a post is a really good option for you because it doesn't overcomplicate things.

And I think that it achieves some simple goals that most small businesses have. Like when you're talking about our music venues and some restaurants, they don't have any big event coming up or any product they want to sell. A lot of the times we ask them when we onboard them, you know, what are you looking to get out of this? And they're just like, I don't know.

I just know I should be on social media. So a lot of the times it just comes down to growing their awareness and showcasing them, their brand. And those are both things you can achieve simply by boosting posts. Absolutely.

And I'll give you an example So it October right Or almost October And so one of the clients that we are working on right now is a pumpkin farm here in Chicagoland In the Midwest pumpkin farms pumpkin patches and the fall fest in this kind of thing is a big deal. Corn mazes and whatnot. So we have a client working with for years and years and years, and we do other marketing for them. We know who this audience is.

We have it locked down. We know exactly what the interests and behaviors are. We know exactly how much to spend and we can build that audience into a boosted post on Facebook. Because when you're boosting a post on Facebook, you are limited with choices.

You create the ad and then you can select an audience. That audience can only be broken down to geography, interests, behaviors, and budget, I guess. Those are the only things you can do. But when you know what those are, when you have that figured out, it's literally as simple as just going there, boosting the post and sending it out.

And we can do that very quickly. And I've done it several times this year already. Why? Because if I boost it, it'll be approved in less than an hour and I'll get 300 likes by the end of the day.

And then by the end of the week, I'll have like a thousand likes on my post and it'll cost me $30 and have taken me all of 15 minutes to do it. Now, if my client is listening and thinking that, oh my gosh, you know, it's a new time, that's something that you have to earn with the boosted post. If you really have a dialed in, now I would say this much, for like a new client that we're working on for the first time, and we're doing some stuff that's a little more in depth, that might not be something that we're going to do.

Now, for example, so I know Jillian's working on a client that we have that's like a spa, and we're using Facebook ads manager to do some things that you can't do through a boosted post or maybe you shouldn't do. So why don't you tell them a little about what you're doing there and why you're using ads managers as opposed to boosted posts. Right. So she really wants to build up her client base as her main goal.

She wants to bring a lot of new clients in. So we decided to run a lead generation campaign through the ads manager where we're offering $25 off of any skin treatment for new customers. And that's something that we're able to run on the dark in the back end. It doesn't have to show up on the page every day and get really salesy and, you know, annoy people on their timelines every day, but it'll show up and pop up to an audience that we created with more specific options through the ads manager.

And we're able to build up her clientele that way. It's a great point. And that is one of the number one reasons why you use Facebook ads manager. And you mentioned dark ads and we'll talk about that in a second, but you use Facebook ads manager because those are ads that are going to run to the audience you decided to run them to, but they're not going to show up on your page.

So in her case, Jillian's making like four or five different graphics or videos or whatever she's making. She's creating the offer and those are going to run constantly. But if we posted like four or five of those offers on her page every day and then boosted them from the page, it wouldn't work for the branding on it, right? That's our third step, right?

Promote your business as a brand. We wouldn't want to do that all the time because it wouldn't make sense from a branding perspective. So that is a great point. And yeah, when you go over to Facebook Ads Manager, you have a lot more options.

We'll talk about that now, but I want to mention this too. There's this term, it's dark ads, right? Isn't that, I don't know where this came from. I think we've mentioned this before on the podcast.

I don't get that at all. And that's dark ads, essentially, are ads that run on your ads manager that don't run on your page. As far as my understanding of that term is concerned, it's like a real term, dark ads. I don't know.

It took me a while. Somebody said it to me a couple of, maybe last year or two years ago. And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't like that term at all.

All right. Anyway, so that's what you do. So if you have an established business and you really know what you're doing and you really have a good understanding of what's going on in your market. Yeah.

I think, you know, before you move on, I think boosted posts are great option for that. Like you mentioned, like if you're a small business owner, you don't have time, you blah, blah, blah, whatever. But even for like marketing agencies like us, like, yeah, we've run ads through Facebook ads management. Man, if we need to just get some eyeballs on stuff, we probably use boosted posts every day.

I would imagine. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it works. I think it works great.

Now, why you shouldn't use boost posts. Well, I don't know if there's really a reason that you shouldn't, but I would say you're going to be limited. Facebook boost posts limit what you're able to do. So if you're not sure what you're doing and you don't have this figured out, you don't want to do that.

And one of the main reasons that I would say, just from my own experience is looking at your ads on Facebook ads manager, the way that they break it down for you, the information, if we go to step five in our system here, the analytics of it is so much easier to digest digest. It's so much easier to go through and look at and be like, okay, this is working. This isn't working. For example, we run ads for one of our meal delivery companies.

I think we have 10 different creatives going at the same time This is like is this what you can do on ads manager We have like five graphics We have like three slideshows and two what they call carousel posts which are like multiple images within one post Okay We can put all that in one campaign on Facebook ads manager That's a total benefit to you if that's, you know, and you can see what's going to work best. But the cool thing is that when it's in ads manager, you're doing that.

When you look at that in ads manager, you can go, you can just on one screen say, wow, yesterday I threw these 10 ads got 10,000 impressions. here's what the click-through rates were for each. Here's the ones that converted the best. And you have, you have so many more, uh, so much more data that you can dive into, right.

When you're doing that. Now we talked about other things that you can do, like the pixel and lead generation and stuff. So, so Jillian, when you're doing the lead generation posts, you're doing it through ads manager and it's kind of tell everybody like, what, what's that all about? Right.

So Ads Manager gives you a lot more customization. So when you boost a post, you pretty much get to select the post you want to boost. Who do you want to reach, the max budget, and how long you want to run it. When you get into Ad Manager, there's a few more tools you can use to get more specific.

So you have the option of choosing where you want your ads to be placed on the newsfeed, on Instagram and stories, messenger ads. You can kind of choose more specific objectives. In addition to just like awareness or engagement, you can do lead generation or conversions or store traffic. You have a little more creative control.

You already mentioned you can create different types of ads, like carousel ads, and you can add buttons and specific descriptions or multiple descriptions on a single creative to see which one does better. And then just the targeting capabilities for your audience is a little more involved as well. You have more tools there. Yeah, there are a lot more tools.

One of the major reasons that we use Ads Manager is the main reason is so that we can run a multitude of ads to one campaign at the same time without having it show up on the page. Number two, I would say for the options, using lead generation, creating the forms, and completely customizing the ad experience for the customer that's going to see it. The other major reason we do it is because sometimes your graphic is going to show up on Facebook in like about a dozen different ways.

And if you're on Ads Manager, you can adjust those graphics so that they will fit on Instagram better, they'll fit in the newsfeed better, or the mobile version better, things like that. You have complete control over all that. The other reason to use Facebook Ads Manager is to set up a pixel. Pixel is the code that you can put from Facebook on your website and track things.

So if you're trying to sell widgets on your website, you put the pixel from Facebook on your website, you run the ads from Facebook, and then you can see, oh, look, I sold 30 widgets to this one ad. You can track the entire process. You can't do a lot of that kind of stuff with a boosted post. But having said all that, some of that I think might be a bit much for some people to chew on.

If they're new to digital marketing, if they don't really know what it is, I mean, getting into the Facebook ads manager can be overwhelming, I think, for a lot of people. And I don't know if... Here's what I'll say. You don't need a PhD in marketing to run a successful Facebook campaign.

You really, really don't. If you understand the basics of marketing and you understand your audience, you understand your product, you could do it any number of ways. I think a lot of times what people do is they spend all their time trying to learn how Facebook ads manager works or Google AdWords works and those are the things and it takes up so much of their time and energy and effort they get totally burned out from it and then they just go well you know I'm not gonna I'm just not gonna do this anymore as opposed to taking some of the easier options I mean Google has Facebook ads manager light okay it's it's okay it does most of the work for you.

It's limited, but if that's all you, if that's all you need, go for it. And then using boosted posts, I think is also not a bad option for something that you just need to get. You just want to, you want to dive into this new thing. You want to start seeing what works.

You want to get stuff out there. I mean, why not? It's, it's not a bad, it's not a bad option. So I think to, you know, answering that question that the guy asked me of like, you should never use boosted post, I think is taking it a bit far from, from the standpoint of, and you mentioned from the standpoint of, of, of why would you take any marketing outlet platform, you name it and say, you should never use that.

You know what I mean? Like, like if I told you Jillian, like, Hey, I've got a, uh, all I do is work with, you know, I don't know, like, uh, you know, really high-end. All I do is market for funeral homes. And all I do is I think TikTok is a giant waste of time.

What would you say? What would you say? I would say that's silly. Yeah.

And why would you say that? Because you shouldn't just rule anything out that could be effective for you in your business Absolutely Because maybe you get a client that comes to you and says hey we sell I don know we sell skateboards We a skateboarding company and we sell skateboards to millennials and younger and to their kids And so you say, Oh, well, TikTok is a terrible idea for marketing. You shouldn't do that. They're like, no, like in that instance, maybe, maybe from, I'm not sure where I got the funeral home thing.

I'm not sure why I said that, but I don't think you'd be marketing that on TikTok, but like skateboards and marketing. And then like on TikTok, I think is a great, would be a great idea. Maybe not, but it would certainly be an option or something that you would want to consider. And so I think you always have to be very careful when you get into some of these absolutes in marketing, like, oh, this doesn't work or that doesn't work.

Well, it might not work for you. It might not work for your particular product, but I think in certain instances, yeah, I think it could definitely work and it probably will work. All right, Jillian. So as we kind of wrap this up today.

What is your kind of final word on somebody comes to you and says, Hey, you know, I, I want to, I want to run some Facebook campaigns. I want to get awareness of my products and I want to drive more traffic to my website, but I heard that you should never boost posts. I don't want you to do that. What would you say?

I would say that, like I said, in the beginning, it's a balance. I think boosted posts are really great for building your brand's reach and your fan base on your page. And then I think creating campaigns through the ads manager is better for more tangible outcomes you want for your business and using them together can help you achieve all your overall marketing goals. Yeah.

I think that's a great point. It's probably something we didn't even mention is using both is a great idea. Just like in the case of my pumpkin farm, I'll go back to that for these example. We are running this huge event that we're trying to get people to buy tickets for.

It's a direct link from Facebook to Eventbrite and you buy the tickets. We need those ads to run constantly because we need to sell like 1,250 tickets. I think we've sold a thousand so far. We got like a week left.

So we're right on pace and we're able to create a predictable calculated campaign on Facebook that we can tell how many tickets we're going to sell a day by using ads manager. But on the front end, on the page itself, making sure we're getting more likes to the page and more awareness from people that are living within 30 miles of that venue so they could come to the pumpkin farm works really, really well. It would be hard to calculate the event ticket sales in the way that we're doing it with the scope of the event being as big as it is, just using a boosted post.

But it would also be sort of a waste of time and energy to all your just pictures of your corn maze pictures of your pumpkin farm. They just want to get it out there. Always going to ads manager and spending all that necessary, all that time. We didn't really have to.

So again, I think you're right. Having the balance between doing it both, doing one or the other, but also running both at the same time, I think is a great idea. And again, I just go back to saying, I guess the point of this whole conversation is, I really don't think you should ever just sign up right off a marketing platform of any kind, just because you read somewhere that it doesn't work because, you know, it's just, I don't know. It's just kind of silly, I guess it's to say that not to say, I don't know if the guy who wrote that message to me is like listening to this.

I'm not saying that you're silly. Maybe you were just trying to be like, maybe you're just trying to make a conversation. Well, Hey, we got a podcast out of it, but anyway, so, well, great. Hey, hopefully we shed some light on this topic for you.

we have another podcast on this. I was going to mention two other ones. If you're interested, we have a whole podcast that we did about lead generation on Facebook. So if you're interested in that, you want more information, we have one of those.

We also have a podcast that we did on digital marketing goals, where we broke down the five goals that we most, we see with most people and how to sort of achieve those. And those might be two things. If you're new and you're just kind of like trying to figure this out, two things that might work for you. I would also recommend more information on this.

Get the book, stop posting, start marketing. It's on Amazon. Check it out. We go into all this kind of stuff and amongst other things.

So Jillian, thanks so much for being here today. We appreciate it. So please subscribe to our podcast. Check out our website, relevantelephant.

net. We'll be posting the show notes in there with links, a breakdown of this episode as well as some links to some helpful articles and things related to this. If you have any messages or anything, you have questions about anything that we're talking about, please send us a message on Facebook. You can find us on Instagram or shoot us an email to our website at relevantelephant.

net. And until we see you guys again, this is Joe Sanders saying, stop posting, start marketing. Thank you.