Kristen
Hey there. I am so excited to have my friend Amanda Kuchlenz on the show today. Amanda is a marketing strategist at Momentum Up Marketing, and she primarily focuses on helping small businesses grow through Facebook ads. If you have ever felt like Facebook ads are too hard or too expensive for you, then you will love this episode. Amanda has a knack for making Facebook ads for TPT sellers feel easy and doable, no matter your experience or budget.
Kristen
In this episode, we are talking about why TPT sellers should be running ads to our stores, the unique advantage that we have as TPT sellers and I will give you a hint it has to do with spending less money on our ads. Amanda also shares some first steps that you should take if you’re brand new to Facebook ads, as well as some more advanced tips and ideas for those of us who’ve been running ads for a while. There’s really something for everyone in this episode. And I am so excited for you to get to listen to our conversation. So let’s get to the show.
Kristen
Hey, TPT sellers ready to seek growth in your business? You’re in the right place. Welcome to the savvy teacher seller. I’m Kristen Doyle. And I’m here to give you no fluff tools and strategies that will really make an impact on your sale. Let’s get started y’all. Hi, Amanda, thank you so much for being here today. Can you tell us just a little bit more about yourself and how you got into Facebook?
Amanda
Okay, well, thanks for having me. Kristen, I’m so excited to be here. This is going to be tons of fun. My name is Amanda Kuchlenz. I am owner of momentum up marketing. And I am a social media agency that specializes in Facebook, Instagram ads, as well as organic strategy. But I actually really love Facebook ads. And let me tell you why. Because you can just skyrocket and do so much better, so much more, and so much faster progress in your business.
Amanda
So I got into this, I’d say like six or seven years ago, I was a stay at home mom, I had worked corporate for a long time, I was a stay at home mom for a few years, and my mind was going insane. I just missed doing things that you know, and like working my brain. And so I started as just a VA doing social media and I have a marketing background. So focused on that.
Amanda
And then roads just lead to Facebook ads. And they are just a ton of fun. So they can be complicated. But the feedback I’ve gotten from people that I have helped with ads is that I make things simple. And like I’m able to teach and explain them well.
Kristen
You do. absolutely! You have helped me so much.
Amanda
Right? My style is like just to take away that high tech part of it because there’s definitely a really high tech part. But I just think that it can be so accessible for the smaller business owner, and especially for people who are running ads for TPT, which we are going to talk about. So anyway, I just wanted to get across that they don’t have to be complicated if you do things the right way. And I’m going to show you how.
Kristen
And I definitely want to talk about some things that you’ve taught me to do for some lower cost ads for people that are just getting started. We’ll get to that here in a little bit. For sure. Let’s just kind of start out with the big question. Why should TPT sellers be running ads to our stores?
Amanda
So I kind of alluded to that in my talking about myself is things move faster when you’re actually putting money behind your marketing. So like I feel like we kind of live in this world of you know, people saying you don’t have to pay for ads, you don’t have to do this, sure you don’t have to do ads in order to really grow and make more sales. That is true. But here’s the thing, that’s true if you have a ton of time, and sometimes you just need to get the ball rolling, right?
Amanda
So it is a pay to play type of a thing. And here’s the thing with TPT, it is like Facebook used to be years ago where you put $1 in and you get $1 back, it may not be as $1 and dollar out. But I will say in this niche, ads are very productive. That’s what I’ve seen. Teachers are really interested in clicking on ads that are going to help their teacher experience be better. So that is why TPT products are great for this.
Kristen
Yes. And I know I am the champion for growing your business with passive income strategies and not relying on social media. But I will say my exception to that is running ads, because I know that I can put $1 in and I might get $1.50 back out or $2 back out or whatever. And I know you and I have a mutual friend who calls it, going to the traffic store. It’s like going to the traffic store to get some more traffic to those products that we’ve been working so hard on.
So I 100% believe in using Ads to grow our businesses, I can’t wait to talk to you some more about them. I know, at least for my own ads, people in my community who are not in the TPT niche, are always shocked at how low ad cost is compared to what they’re paying in other areas than other markets.
Amanda
So, there’s a number that we use in ads, it’s called CPM or cost per mil. And basically, what that means is how much it costs you to get in front of 1000 people. And those benchmarks like for most all businesses start somewhere around $25. Well, it’s like $5, these are the numbers, like so it cost you $5 To get your ad in front of 1000 people, whereas it cost $25 to get other people there, sometimes even up to $100, just for 1000 people to see your ads. So that’s the great part about TPT. And Facebook ads for TPT sellers.
Kristen
Yeah, it can be so so productive. Now, I know that there are multiple types of Facebook ads, let’s talk about what kind of works the best for us as TPT sellers, because we have a little bit of a limitation because of the way that the Facebook pixel works. And the way that the TPT site is set up, we’re kind of limited there. So let’s talk about that a little bit.
Amanda
So TPT sellers should be using traffic campaigns. And basically that just means sending traffic to your store. So one thing that needs to happen is you need to make sure that your pixel is on your TPT site or in installed in your store, or in your shop and also on your website. So the reason why is because the pixel is just this little code that it’s on your website, it’s on your TPT site as well. So it will kind of like ding Facebook and say someone came here, to this pixel code, which is attached to you.
Amanda
So running traffic ads is the best way to do that. And then even underneath the traffic ads, the targeting, it’s kind of like a hierarchy, you have a campaign, and then you can run ads that target different audiences. So here’s exactly what you need to do. If you have ever run an ad before in the ads manager, we’re not talking about boosting, and I know we’re going to talk about that later. But in your ads manager account, you can literally target Teachers Pay Teachers, and you can just run an ad to anyone that is interested in Teachers Pay Teachers the business.
Kristen
And there are hundreds of 1000s of those people.
Amanda
Yeah, and literally, that’s all you need. I know that there’s a lot of sellers, like you, Kristen, who focus really by certain grades, or levels in school. And that can make things a little more complicated. But you can also just target Teachers Pay Teachers and filter out people by making sure that you’re clear in your ad who this is for. So and I know we’re gonna get to that as far as some ads tips.
Kristen
Targeting just TPT can still be a great way to get your resources out in front of people, even if it’s not the exact perfect audience because the longer it runs, the more the algorithm figures out which TPT followers might be interested in your particular product. And I love it for more generic products as well, the things I have that aren’t grade level specific that really could be used for a big range of people.
Amanda
Right. And then you know, even when you’re doing ads to something that is more general, once someone has clicked on your ad and bought something from you, you can retarget. It’s like another one of those words that we use in ads, but they kind of get bumped into a warm audience per se. And that is another type of traffic ad you can run for targeting, which would be warm. And so you can also be sending out maybe your specific ads for fourth grade, for example. You could be sending that out to people, who have bought. So you’re kind of layering through and getting more specific on who you can target with your ads.
Kristen
Yeah. And the longer you run ads, the better that targeting gets in my experience, right?
Amanda
Oh, most definitely. Oh, yeah.
Kristen
So warm audiences, then our people who have maybe clicked on one of our ads in the past, they’ve interacted with our Facebook posts or our Instagram posts, or they’ve been to our website or our TPT store. Is that right? Did I leave anything out?
Amanda
Yes, that’s correct. Or your website as well. Like if you have a website going at the same time, if you have an email list, you can also upload your email list into Facebook. That would also be considered a warm audience, you can even have Facebook create what’s called a look alike audience, which is technically a cold audience based off of people that are on your email list. So your email is likely is a bunch of teachers, right? So you can create an audience and have Facebook use all their algorithms and data that they’ve collected on all of us to expand and another way of finding more teachers to see your ads.
Kristen
Yes love that, that so let’s talk about some of your tips that you have for us for running ads. I know a lot of people who are listening today maybe are intimidated by ads, they maybe haven’t tried them yet, for a variety of reasons, what tips would you have for those people?
Amanda
Okay, so for the beginners who have not run ads in the past, first things first is you do need to set up a business manager account and you set up an ad account as well. There’s a difference between boosting, which is where you maybe make a post organically and then Facebook or Instagram prompts do want to boost this post or promote this? There’s a bit of a difference there, you cannot do targeting like you can do like we were just talking about, you can’t do that as well with the boosting.
Amanda
So first things first is to get your account set up. And if you ever need help with that, I do have a Facebook group, and we’ll talk about it at the end. But where I do go step by step on how to set that up, you can also Google it, I do it a lot. And Facebook will come up as the first response. And you can click on their instructions on how to set up the account. So that’s the first thing I would recommend.
Amanda
And I would also recommend, not allowing yourself to get the sounds kind of silly, but I experienced this all the time when I’m coaching people on their ads is not to get overwhelmed by all the little pieces you can Google pretty much anything with how to set up ads. And so it may seem overwhelming, but just try to have a mindset of one step at a time and progress forward on that.
And then the other thing that I would recommend for beginners would be to really think about building your email list. And I think we’ll talk about that as well here soon. But just really thinking of your marketing outside of ads, you can use ads to build your email list and grow from there.
Kristen
Yeah, let’s talk about that. Now, actually, what would you suggest for people who are trying to grow their email list as far as ads are concerned?
Unknown Speaker
So there’s a couple things you can do, one that I am seeing really great results with is if you have some sort of free resource, maybe even if you have a free download on your TPT page that I’ve seen this before, were you maybe want to show an example of your work before, right?
Kristen
We do lots of freebies.
Amanda
Yeah. So you can take a freebie that you already have and you can run a lead form add to that, and I’m finding really low cost to that. And you can run an ad to that and gather a name and email address and pop it right into your CRM, where you send out emails and your freebie and follow through and nurture your lead.
Amanda
So like I’ve seen definitely under $2, a lead, which is really good in Facebook, you know, lead land?
Kristen
Yes, is really good!
Amanda
I’ve had clients get them under $1 a lead. So I just, you know, ultimately, it is very important to build your email list. So you’re accomplishing two things by doing this though, number one, you’re accomplishing getting more exposure and getting your products out there and your face out there to sell more. So you’re getting more reach and impressions and people are learning who you are. And then number two, you’re getting their email address, which is worth a lot these days, if you are very consistent with your email marketing.
Kristen
Yeah. And if you send them a really good freebie that can go a long way to start building trust with those people who maybe haven’t bought from you before. Because they can see a sample of maybe something small you’ve created or sample of a bigger product, something that can help them to decide that your products are going to work for their students that they are high quality and that sort of thing.
Amanda
Yeah, exactly.
Kristen
It’s so important for us to build our email list because it really is the only thing we can own. Our social media followings, algorithms change constantly, people may or may not see our posts, our TPT store we don’t get any information on who our buyers are. So we don’t own those customers either. But the people who are on our email list are the ones that we own those email addresses we can email them anytime, and we really can grow our businesses through sending those emails out and directing them over to our product.
Amanda
And yeah, and not to mention, like repeat customers, right? Wouldn’t you want a repeat customer, a repeat customer costs you nothing basically. You know, once they’re kind of in your funnel, once you they’ve seen who you are and asked for the free resource, and maybe bought a couple of things here and there. But maybe you introduce a new product and they buy from you again. And you don’t have to pay for that in an ad like that would be free. So it kind of just like, what’s the word like it just all rolls into each other? You kind of get this..
Kristen
Snowball?
Amanda
Yes snowballs!
Kristen
I love that. You mentioned a lead page ad, can you tell us how that is a little bit different. I’ve heard you talking about them recently. But I’ve never run one. So tell us how that’s a little bit different from some of the other ads, we might have run?
Amanda
You bet. So we did talk in the beginning here about traffic ads, being the type of ads, you should run to your TPT store. But lead ads are a bit different. And those are the kind of ad where you will see you will probably start to see some more and more of these on your personal feed, where you see an ad and you’re interested and you click the button and a form pops up on Facebook or Instagram and your name and email address may already be there.
And all you have to do is click, this is like the user experience. And all you have to do is click yes, I want it. And then the ad says thank you check your email inbox, and all of a sudden you’ll be in their email inbox. So does that make sense?
Kristen
Yeah, it sounds like it just streamlines the process. So instead of running an ad that sends them to my website, where I have a landing page with the freebie, I’ve already gotten their attention, they’re already interested. And they tap the button. And it’s basically there.
Amanda
Exactly. It skips the landing page, then you don’t need to create a landing page, if you haven’t already, it kind of just skips that part, and sends them right into your email, CRM, whatever you use.
Kristen
So I can see that being a really good strategy then for maybe some TPT sellers who don’t have a website yet, but they’re trying to build an email list. And I know there are a lot of those out there. Because I see questions about how to grow your list when you don’t have a website yet.
Amanda
That would be a great way, especially if you don’t have a website!
Kristen
And how much are we talking about spending for something like that for a lead page ad?
Amanda
You can do this very inexpensively. And as little as I’d say $5 a day. So I mean, you could I know it’s super cheap. And like I was saying before, a lot of times the goal is to get a lead under $2. Like you could be for $5 a day, you could be having two leads coming into your email list every day. And that just compounds and compounds.
Kristen
Yeah, and I can’t remember off the top of my head now what the number is, but I have heard what the average like lifetime user value is for someone who’s on your email list is way more than $5. Yeah, it’s in the hundreds of dollars easily.
Amanda
Exactly. Especially if you’re creating new products to sell. And I think there’s a statistic out there that says something like 40% of people purchase from email, or there’s some sort of number along those lines, that say sales from emails at 40% is kind of a solid benchmark for that.
Kristen
Right. So that’s something maybe we should all be doing. I know I haven’t been running any lead ads lately. So I should probably be doing that too.
Amanda
You should Kristen, let’s get on it.
Kristen
I know. I know. What about those of us who may be we’ve been running ads for a while we kind of understand the setup. We’ve gotten our feet wet. Do you have some maybe more advanced strategies or tips that we could apply?
Amanda
Well, first I would have you be doing another campaign just like we talked about, I would for sure recommend that. Well, let me ask you a quick question. So how many people do you come across that have some sort of product that they’re also selling like a membership or course are there a lot of TPT seller?
Kristen
Lots of us!
Amanda
Right? So for the advanced people I would recommend again, this is also something fairly inexpensive, running retargeting ads. They can be traffic ads, but they could more likely be a conversion ad. But for anybody that’s clicked on your ads before visited your store, retargeting them with your other offers. And again, that’s something you can add in very inexpensively.
Kristen
Yeah. So taking all of those people who have bought maybe lower price things from us on TPT and retargeting sending them ads to probably our higher priced offers, which would be courses, memberships, things like that. And I can see that also working really well even to send them to big bundles of curriculum that we might be selling.
Amanda
Yeah, very true. And I’m sure if there are big bundles that are time sensitive, maybe classroom setups, you know, that kind of thing that people would be going for at the beginning of the year, you can create a separate campaign just to retarget for that bundle. So definitely something you could do,.
Amanda
I would also recommend if you have a pretty good organic game going, you’re consistently posting. And this is another way kind of on the back end, how to just keep building that know, like, trust is you can run a reach campaign for anyone that has interacted with you and your ads, you can get maybe I would recommend like three evergreen type of ads, maybe who you are a little bit about your shop, or your store, and the type of templates that you offer.
Amanda
And then maybe three ads like that. And you can run a reach ad to go out and drip out to people who have visited you as well. And a lot of times there’s no call to action, but they’re just kind of like these ads that will pop up in someone’s newsfeed that they’ve already interacted with you somehow, but they pop up and they just really increase that that know, like, trust even more.
Kristen
Yeah, I can see that being a really good way to repurpose some of our content that we are creating, whether it’s a blog post you’ve written, and you could record a quick video kind of going through that same content, or maybe even just repurpose if you’re already recording a podcast or Facebook Lives or YouTube videos or anything like that. Can see maybe repurposing some of those videos to put out some really good educational content for teachers as well.
Because I know that’s one of the big ways that we build, like you said that know, like and trust factor is to be able to teach them something that helps them become a better teacher. So if we’ve got that content somewhere else and could repurpose it.
Amanda
Yeah, and it may sound like overwhelming and a lot of work. But once this is set up, you can literally just let it go. Like if you have and I mentioned evergreen, like evergreen type of posts. Like if it’s something that’s not time sensitive, like, for example, you’ve got like an event coming up and you’ve got a date on the post, like I wouldn’t do that, like pick something that’s more like a blog post, like you said, That’s educational, it’s evergreen. So my point is, is that you don’t have to like constantly be doing these new ads, you can just pick three and run those ads, like it just runs for you. It’s great.
Kristen
I know the ads that I have running right now have been going for a while and they really are on autopilot at this point, I check in about once a week and make sure it doesn’t look like it’s tanked or we don’t need to adjust anything. But for the most part, it’s kind of on autopilot. And if it ever, you know starts not converting as well as it did, or I see that my cost is going up or something then we can always adjust or even turn it off and try something different.
But they really can run sometimes just in the background of your business for months, without having to do a whole lot of work on updating them and tweaking and changing content things, especially after the first, week or two once it kind of settles.
Amanda
And don’t we all have enough things to do? What can be automated? Let’s figure out what those things are so that we can work on the big things.
Kristen
Yeah, and as long as you’re choosing the right resources. I know I don’t know what you’ve seen in the clients that you are working with. But I know for me, it typically does not make sense for me to run a Facebook ad to a TPT product, that’s five bucks, because I usually don’t get enough purchases to offset how much I’m spending to get people there. But if I run ads to a product that’s, $15-$20 or more than I usually get plenty of return on the investment that I’m making.
Amanda
Definitely I’ve run ads, low cost ads, for sure. And higher, you know, $100 plus bundles, and the bundles seem to work better when it’s certain times of year. Those are the kinds of things where you kind of start to see how things are working. And if they’re not, maybe it is a time of year thing and you can just turn on and turn off.
Amanda
I do always recommend for sure having some sort of reporting happening, you know, just keeping track of some of the basics like and you can do this just weekly, and you can use your ads manager account to just change the date range. Get these stats, but you know, keeping an eye on click through rates, and then documenting that and documenting just where you’re at maybe just taking a quick audit of of everything, making sure that if it looks drastically different from week to week, then you know, it’s time to make adjustments.
Kristen
It can be really helpful. I know when I’m running really short campaigns, I am good about documenting like every single day because this is only going to be running for two or three weeks. And you really can start to see patterns. And for example, an ad I have running right now my ad costs is starting to creep up a little. And so I’m keeping a close eye on it to see if I need to make some adjustments or maybe turn off one of the audiences or something like that.
But when you’re taking that data on a regular basis, it’s easy to see those numbers kind of shifting and patterns. Obviously, no one is taking daily data, I don’t think on long range ad campaigns. But would you suggest like oncea week?
Amanda
Yes, once a week, and you can do it and just a simple Google Doc with a table just so that you have one line per week, and you will start to see changes. It takes a couple of weeks to settle in. So you know that’s just the best way to do it. And you don’t have to be complicated. It can be very simple. Just looking at click through rates and how those are. And it’ll also tell you if your ads are fatiguing a little bit, you know, like if you do need to maybe bring in some new creatives.
Kristen
I’ve had that happen for sure where an ad has just been running for so long, that I think maybe too many people have seen it, and they are just tired. And then you know, we need to start maybe the same audience, maybe even the same product, but we need to just freshen up the copy, change out the image or video freshen up the ad a little bit. So it doesn’t look like something that people have seen forever and is stale.
Amanda
Yeah, right. And there’s so many different kinds of ads that you can create, you’ve got just the regular standard news feed ad, you can do a video walkthrough of your product. You can do carousel like you can take what you’ve already created in your TPT store. And you can upload several images and make it a carousel.
Kristen
Yeah, that’s a good point too, especially as we are we’re taking photos of our products to update our product listings anyway. So that gives us some built in photos that we can go ahead and turn around and turn it into some Facebook ads. So as we’re getting ready to wrap up, what would you suggest as an action step for everybody who’s listening to kind of walk away from this episode with?
Amanda
I think that is an action step, I would like to see everyone feel a little more confident for the beginners in thinking about starting ads running to their TPT store, I have a few ways that I could help you do that. I have a free Facebook group that I mentioned before that you can join. I have some setup tutorials in there, if you’ve never set it up. I even have a walkthrough of a conversion campaign, which is a little bit different.
But it’s what we had talked about doing traffic, and I’m doing trainings in there all the time. I do have trainings for the $5 day lead form ads that are happening often and keep up to date with all of that in my ads chat with Amanda group.
Kristen
Awesome. And we will put the link for that in the show notes. For sure. I will say if you are just getting started setting things up on Facebook ads, it can feel very overwhelming. But I’m gonna toot your horn for you a little bit Amanda. Amanda is so good at simplifying the process and making it easy to follow and easy to understand without getting overwhelmed. So Amanda is your girl for that head to her Facebook group for sure. And check out some of the free resources and the trainings and stuff that she has in there.
Amanda
Awesome. Thank you, Kristin. That’s so nice.
Kristen
Well, can you tell everybody where we can find you? And we’ll put all of the direct links in the show notes as well.
Amanda
So like I mentioned, my Facebook group is it’s called Ads Chat with Amanda and you could just search in Facebook. And if you go under groups, type in Ads chat with Amanda, it’ll be there under groups. You can also find me on Instagram where I also do lives and educational information as well. And my instagram handle is momentum.up.marketing and you can find me there and of course my website is Momentumupmarketing.com
Kristen
Awesome. Thank you, Amanda, so much for being here today. I definitely walked away with some ideas for some things I need to start in my own business. I’m sure everybody else did too.
Amanda
Awesome. Thanks for having me. I’m just so thrilled that you wanted to talk about this. I’m excited for all of you and your students.
Kristen
Thank you so much for listening today about Facebook ads for TPT sellers. Don’t forget to check out the show notes where you can connect with Amanda and join her Facebook group for lots of free tutorials and tips on getting your Facebook ads up and running, as well as some new ideas for what kind of ads you could run. You can find all of the links in the show notes at Kristendoyle.co/episode19.
Kristen
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, please share it with another teacher seller who would also find it helpful. For more resources on Growing Your TPT business. Head to Kristendoyle.co/TPT. Talk to you soon.
