65: Meta Ads Q&A: Boosted Posts, Sales AI, and What Actually Works

I’m back from Social Media Marketing World and the AI Business Conference, and I’ll share key takeaways next week, but today I’m answering a few quick listener questions. 

I explain that how long it takes to build a warm audience depends on what you already have- an email list or a Facebook/Instagram following can count as warm and if you’re starting from scratch, my brand awareness strategy at about $5$10/day can build a solid warm audience in roughly 90 days (sooner with more spend).

I clarify that $5/day is enough to start for brand awareness, but you shouldn’t expect overnight sales. I also cover why boosting a post often doesn’t produce sales and how Ads Manager campaigns differ. 

Finally, I address AI in Meta ads: I don’t think you should worry, but you should watch for Meta’s auto-on AI settings, turn off what you don’t want, and never give external AI tools access to your Ads Manager.

00:00 Welcome and Updates
00:55 Warm Audience Timeline
02:43 Is Five Dollars Enough
04:01 Boosting Posts Myth
05:37 AI Features in Ads
08:08 Wrap Up and Next Week

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Transcript

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FAQT:65

Speaker: [00:00:00] Hey, friends. Holy cow, I just got back from Social Media Marketing World and AI Business Conference and, oh my goodness, my head is swirling so good. It's full with just great stuff. Stay tuned for next week and I will go over some key takeaways from the conference. But in the meantime, today I'm going to just answer a few simple questions that rolled in while I was gone, and let's get to it.

This is Facebook Ads Quick Tips Podcast, and I'm Stacey Covitz, your host. Thank you so much for being here. If this is your first time, welcome, welcome, and if you are here as a regular, I thank you so much. Okay. Let's start with this one. "Okay. I keep hearing," and [00:01:00] I don't know if that's from me or not, "that I need to build a warm audience before I sell anything.

How long does that actually take?" . This is a great question, and I will give you my answer, which is the same answer I give for most questions, which is, that depends. You could already have a warm audience. Do you have an email list? If you have an email list, you could certainly use that and target your email subscribers.

Do you have a Facebook following or a, or an Instagram following? Those are all also considered warm audiences. Now, if you're talking about, and I don't know, 'cause you didn't specify, but if you're talking about you're brand new and you're, you have no social media presence at all and no following, then it

If you do the strategy [00:02:00] that I suggested, which is the brand awareness strategy, you would have a pretty good warm audience after 90 days. It could be sooner. It depends on how much you're willing to spend. If you spend more money on the front end, it will take a lot ... It, it won't take as long, so that's up to you.

I teach, like, $10 a day, five to $10 a day, and that's about 90 days where you have enough people, you should have enough people to start, if you want to, start selling. But if you spend more than that, that will happen much sooner. So I hope that helps. If you need more clarity than that, you can always reach out.

Okay, here's another one. Okay, this one is pretty much... This one goes hand in hand with the one I just answered, which is, "$5 a day actually enough, or are you just saying that to make it sound easy?" That's great. [00:03:00] Um, I mean, does that sound easy? It doesn't make it easy, but it makes it probably more doable. - A lot of people think that only big businesses or people with large budgets can do ads, and so I talk a lot about $5 a day

because I want people to know that even with small budgets, you could still do ads if it makes sense for your business. So I will say yes, it is actually enough to start, but that depends on what you want. It's cer- you're certainly not gonna blow up overnight and have tons of new customers and clients with $5 a day.

The $5 a day strategy that I talk about is mostly getting brand awareness, so absolutely that's enough. Um, but if you spend more than that, it will go quicker, and you can do more things [00:04:00] if your budget is bigger. Okay, here's another one. This is a good one. I love these questions about boosting posts. "I boosted a post and got zero results.

Does that mean ads don't work for me?" .. I get a lot of questions like this, ... A- and I talk to a lot of business owners who tell me that ads didn't work, and it turns out when we start talking, that it really was that they boosted a post.

And I have several episodes about boosting posts and the differences between boosting a post and going into actual Ads Manager, which is part of your Business Suite, there's a lot of differences. If you didn't get any results by boosting a post, that kind of tracks. ...

. by results, if you mean sales, yes. That, that tracks. That doesn't mean that it didn't work, and that certainly doesn't mean that ads didn't work, . Boosted posts have a [00:05:00] purpose, but for the sake of this podcast and when I'm talking about ads, I'm talking about in Ads Manager using your audiences and your pixel and your ad sets and all of that

I would say if you got people to see your ad or your boosted post and that's all you expected, then it worked. But we can talk more if you, if you wanna know, you know, if you're looking for sales or something like that, then boosting a post isn't the way to go about that.

I will do one more, and then I will end this 'cause we're probably, probably at the five-minute mark already here. I keep hearing about AI for ads. I see a lot of people talking about AI for ads. Is this something I need to worry about? Well, you definitely don't need to worry [00:06:00] about it. No sense worrying.

But I talk also, I do talk a lot on the podcast about there are certain features that Meta has integrated into Ads Manager, and a lot of them are AI. I talk a lot about wanting to make sure that you're aware of those settings and which ones they are and where to find them, because I don't agree that those should all be turned on.

And unfortunately, and this is a beef I have, unfortunately, Meta, when you're in Ads Manager and you're creating new ads, most of the AI features are automatically on. So they're auto-populated to be on. And if you don't know what you're looking for and you don't know or don't understand what that means and what that could do for your ad, [00:07:00] then turn them off.

Um, talk to me. I will show you where to find them. They, they're sneaky and, ugh, it, it really does bother me a lot. But anyway, do not worry about AI for ads. There's certain things that make sense, and there's certain things that don't. I learned at the conference, um, a lot of really fantastic ways that you could get some assistance using AI, but, and this is a, this is a big but Please do not let Claude or any AI, whatever AI wants to get into your ads manager, like connect it to give it access.

That's a hard no. Um, I could get into more reasons why. I don't know that, that most of my audience is doing that. But just in case, if there's a lone person out there that is [00:08:00] integrating their Claude with Meta Ads, turn it off. Okay. Well, that's it for now. , Like I said before, next week I plan on going over some key takeaways that I learned at Social Media Marketing World.

It's a fantastic conference. If you have never been, I highly recommend it. And that's it for now. Come check out my school community if you want more information about what we're talking about, and I so much appreciate you. Take care.