55: This will save you money 💰💰

Want the Ad Readiness Review?

Today I share money-saving advice for business owners considering paid ads, explaining that ads are only a traffic source and won’t fix weak foundations. 

I describes a common scenario where clients sign a three-month retainer but turn out not to be ready, leading to weeks of fixing basics like unclear offers for cold traffic, missing funnel steps, broken links, and inadequate tracking (including a client whose landing page platform couldn’t support tracking, limiting optimization and increasing costs). 

I  also mention that even successful ads can harm a business if operations can’t handle the lead volume. 

To set expectations and avoid wasting retainer and ad spend, I  recommend getting “ad ready” first and offer an Ad Readiness Review to assess what’s in place, identify gaps, and ensure infrastructure and capacity are prepared before running ads.

00:00 Welcome and Money Saving Tips
00:38 The Retainer Readiness Problem
02:20 Ads Need a Strong Foundation
03:11 Offer and Funnel Gaps
03:47 Tracking and Attribution Issues
05:02 When Success Overwhelms Capacity
05:49 Setting Expectations Before You Pay
06:52 Ad Readiness Review Offer
08:17 Wrap Up and Call to Action

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Transcript

 . Hello friends. Welcome, Stacy Kovi here with bite-sized tips to help business owners know where to start, what's needed, and whether ads make sense. Right now, let's get started. Today. I want to give you some money saving tips

and this episode may seem counterintuitive to my bottom line, but I think in the long run, I would much rather have you be happy, satisfied, and have the right expectations upfront. So let's get to it. This happens a lot. Someone hires me for a three month  retainer, and on the discovery call, everything sounds ready.

Yes, I'm all ready. I have an offer. I'm ready. I'm excited. They sign their contract, they pay their invoice, and then we have our kickoff call. And shortly after I get into their business manager and start taking a look around, I realize, oh no, we're not ready. We're not ready to get ads going at all here.

And listen, I wanna be clear, that's not a bad thing, that's a normal thing here's what's bothersome about it, you've paid your retainer, right? You've paid a month, and. We have a three month contract

you're ready. You're excited to start getting those leads. And now we are spending days, weeks, sometimes the entire first month getting things ready to start actually running ads. This is where it gets a little bit awkward because you're paying, you're paying me to strategize your campaign and get, and get your ads going, and instead we're either on hold or we're doing little things that I'm happy to do, but.

They aren't necessarily something that you need to spend a lot of money to get done. So,

When you, you're going out there and you think, I'm ready to run ads, I'm gonna hire somebody even if it's not me, you get on a call with someone and you're talking to different providers and they say, so, are you ready to run ads? Do you have a proven offer?

Do you have the right budget? That may sound like, yes, of course I have the budget. I have an offer, I'm ready. But. Ads are not a system. , They're just a traffic source. We are driving traffic to what you've already got in place. So if the foundation is strong and working well, then your ads are going to exemplify that

and you're going to be really happy at the end of the three months.

But sometimes the offer sounds good, but it's not really clear enough for cold traffic,

it could be the funnel. And I've talked about this a lot on this show. , The funnel could have missing steps.

You could think, yeah, I have an offer and I have a website, but. . The offer needs to direct people to the next step, and if that's not set up accurately or correctly, that is not a situation that's ready to start spending money on ads.

Then there's the tracking. I had a client who had an offer. It was a great offer, and was converting beautifully. The problem was she had a specific platform that her landing page was on, and , we couldn't add any tracking software to it, and so.

It wasn't optimized the best it could have been, which really ended up costing her more money and her conversions weren't as well as they could have been. And as hard as I tried, I tried so hard to convince her and get . This software tracked, or let's just put the landing page someplace else and that way we can optimize it.

And then after that, you could send them to the software where you're content was. But at any rate, I don't think that we came to an agreement on that and. It's funny because I think as the ads person myself, we are always the fall guy, right?

It's like, oh, my ads didn't work and it, and it wasn't that. And it's frustrating.

And then this one, this one, I just talked about this with someone, and this one is. What if the ads worked beautifully? Your funnel was all set up and everything worked exactly as we planned, but your business wasn't prepared for what actually happened. You had so much response. It was a wonderful conversion.

And now you have all of these people coming in and you don't have the resources or the infrastructure to handle it. If, if you tell me that you want a hundred leads. Yeah, but you only have capacity to serve 20 people, that's a reputation killer, right? , 

so here's what I wanna say, and I wanna say this with love. When someone hires me , and we end up having to, you know, spend time doing all of these other things and getting everything in order. I don't mind. Selfishly, I don't. I mean, I've already been paid, right? I've already been paid, but I do mind because.

You are not happy. You're feeling like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that, that this is what I'm spending my money on. We're not even doing ads yet,

you just don't wanna have the first chunk of your retainer being spent on silly things like, this link doesn't work. We need to fix this link. So I like to make sure that people have the right expectations.

That's really, really important to me. So before you spend money and hire someone on a retainer, let's make sure all this stuff is set up.

So . Sometimes the smartest move is to get ad ready first, and then hire your strategist or your ads manager., And that's a great segue into this offer , which is a. ADD readiness review, for the business owner who's thinking about hiring an ads person or starting ads themselves and wants a straight answer before spending thousands of dollars on a retainer, and also thousands of dollars on ads.

This goes through and makes sure that we're ready to go and everything's in shape, if not, it will be pointed out and shown. And then, you know, you can walk away with what needs to be worked on before you go out and, and hire someone . make sure that if you hire someone, they have time to get you in tip top shape before the ads start going. And once the leads start coming in and your new clients or your new customers start coming in, you have the infrastructure to take care of everybody. so if you have any doubt at all about if you're ready or not, the ad readiness review is an easy way to, get it done. And the link is in the show notes. , I thank you so much for listening. If it helped,

give it a five star review, share it with a friend, and I'll see you next time.