EP. 3: The importance of people seeing your Facebook Ads at the right time (P.M.T Approach mini series)
What’s this episode about?
Final of a 3 part mini series about (what I like to call) the P.M.T Approach. It’s all about getting your marketing in front of the right people, with the right message at the right time – see what I did there 😉.
This episode is all about the importance of the right timing when getting the right message to the right people.
Episode key takeaways:
The most Important timing consideration with your cold audience
How long does your warm audience stay ‘warm’ for? (and how to keep them warm!)
Someone makes a purchase (hurrah!), do you still serve them Ad’s?
The key audiences when you have a sale or are launching a new product (and why timing is key!)
KEY LINKS:
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Read the transcript:
NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Hello, and welcome to growing pains. The marketing podcast for parent and baby brands who want to grow and get more consistent sales, but without the overwhelm of feeling like you have to be online 24 7, I'm Sophie, your host, and a Facebook and Instagram ad strategist who specializes in parent and baby brands as well as a mom of two.
Join me each week as I alongside some wonderful guests, she had practical tips and advice about how you can use and combine marketing strategies to get more impact for your effort. A quick warning, before we start, I can get a little bit sweary, so just be careful of any little ears listening along.
Hello, and welcome to the third episode of growing pains. This is actually the third in our mini-series looking at the PMT approach, which is making sure your marketing is targeting the right people with the right message at the right [00:01:00] time.
This episode is all about timing. And if you haven't listened to the first two episodes, I really recommend it because I am going to be referring back to those episodes quieter. Okay. So let's get started with our cold audience. Now, as a reminder, these are people who've never had a few, but are likely to be interested in what you offer now in terms of timing.
Actually, this is a message more about consistency. Really. We I've talked about this in the other two episodes, but we really want to be bringing new people into our. All the time. And if we're not bringing new people into our world, then we haven't got people moving through the funnel and it's really a risk that we could get stagnant.
And that's where those consistent sales can really start to become a bit more sporadic. And we then maybe start to feel the need to be on social media more. We're really pushing sales from our warm audience, more like people on our social media and our email. And you're asking sort of the same people over and over again.
We really need to be bringing new people into our world all the time. So with our cold audience, it's just more a case of [00:02:00] consistency. And making sure that we're excluding our warm audience, hot audience, and people who've already purchased from us from that cold audience. So when you're building your interest based audience or your lookalike audience You can actually also exclude people as well.
And I would always be excluding your warm hot and patches audiences are, I will go into building our audiences and a bit more detail in another episode, but just for now, just know that you, so you would say this audience is as cold as possible. You need to exclude all those people from. Okay, so let's move on to our warm audience. Now, this is where it gets a little bit more interesting. These are people again, who are already in your world.
They probably follow you on social media. That may be on your email list. They've been on your website, they've watched a video, so they know you in some way. We've talked about the messaging that we would give these people. And this is much more about assuming they know about us, and now we want them to take the next step, which is really to, you know, go onto the website, look up.
And buy [00:03:00] from us, ideally. So in terms of timing, you might think, well, we want to be doing that all the time as well. And yet we do, but we want to be thinking about what people are kind of experiencing and how warm is warm. So someone's in our cold audience, they've seen an ad and then they're going to join our social media.
Great. They're warm. Right. But what happens in a months, time, two months, Three months time. Oh, they still warm. And that's what we kind of have to work through when we're looking at these ads, like how warm is a warm audience. And there will be a period where they then go back into the cold audience if they haven't engaged with you for a time.
So the way that I kind of navigate this is we look at the other marketing that you're doing alongside this. So let's first of all, talk about using marketing together. So let's say that you're emailing people regularly. Sometimes people say to me, well if people are on my list and I'm emailing regularly, then why do I need to use Facebook ads to target them as well?
I'm really, the answer is [00:04:00] unless you're getting a hundred percent open rate, then you need to be. Using ads to get in front of people because otherwise the likelihood is they might not be seeing your ads. They might be going into your Derrick junk mail. They might just not be opening them. And they might just need a bit of a reminder that you're there to be honest and often that's what we do with these warm audiences before I'm doing like a big launch, or if we are getting into a period where we are going to really push sales, we'll actually run ads to our Walmart.
To remind them to go back on to our social media, to go to, we engage with our email list to go onto our website. So it kind of become warmer again because people can kind of drop out of this warm pot quite easily. So maybe they read an email from you and then they see an ad as well. You're just increasing those touch points to make sure that they see you plenty of times and then take the action that you want.
So that's kind of the way you can use your marketing together now in terms of making decisions about [00:05:00] how womb they are with Facebook person parameters almost already. So when you're setting up your audiences there'll be like a maximum amount of time that it can pull the data from now. I think off the top of my head, now it changes all the time with social media.
It tends to be 365 day. And then with website related things, it tends to be 180 days. So six months versus like a year. And then with, with your email list, you upload that data. So there's up to you how long you upload it for. And I really would encourage you to clean your list regularly. So you, you know, that you're less than you're uploading. Those people are kind of maybe have opened an email within the last three months or engaged within the last six months. Think about those kinds of timescales. So if you go back, so I'm going to run some ads and I'm going to have a look at people who've engaged with my social media.
Do we think that a year. If someone engaged with your Instagram a year ago, and we're running ads to them with a messaging, assuming that they know about your brand, they know about your ethos and they [00:06:00] know about your products. Do we really think that that is going to happen? And I think that's something that we can a common thing we can think, okay.
I want as many people as I can in this audience. So I'm going to include like all the way back for the last year. And actually I tend to work more. On six months maximum, normally more like three months, a two to three months, rarely. That's going to be your warmest audience
and you can do some wags. They say you have people who haven't engaged with you for like a year. You could run, like I said, like an engagement campaign to bring those people back into your world, to make them more again, and then run more conversion ads to actually get them to go into your website or buy and using people that have engaged in the last two months so that you know, that those people are your kind of hottest.
Oh, hotties warn people if you like. So yeah, I tend to start with something called it like a warm 90, where we look at everyone who has been active in your world over the last 90 days. If we're getting good results with that. And then we tend to stick with it. If we [00:07:00] haven't, we're not getting the results that we want.
I might move down to a warmer 60, which is everyone who's engaged in our warm audience in the last 60 days. Just to try and bring in a, it's a real balance between. And enough people in the audience that Facebook has something to work with. So volume versus people that actually warm enough to take the action, because if you make it too big, like I said, you're just going to dilute the audience with people who don't know who you are and kind of don't take the action you want.
So there's always a balance. And again, I would test, test, test. And try different things, but yeah, start with maybe the warm 90 and then maybe move to the warm 60. And you can, depending on your numbers, like I know some on some of my ads I've run for much bigger accounts. We've done like a warm 30, whereas literally people who've interacted in the last 80 days, but you do have to have quite a big pool of people to be able to do that.
Because otherwise Facebook tends to just circle the same people and the same kind of people get the same ads over and over. So, yeah, so that's the kind of timing I'd be looking at for your warm audience. [00:08:00] Now, the other interesting one is your hot audience. So that's when people actually have added to cart or initiated checkout.
Now, at what point do we. Saddened them ads. Now we want to make sure that these are really, really relevant. So we want to make sure they obviously go up to them quite quickly, but we also don't want to make them last too long. So say I added something to cart three months ago. if I haven't bought it by now, it's probably not relevant.
Especially with parents. I find like time moves on with the kids quite like quite quickly. I mean, it does depend on your product or service, but really I'd say For people who've added to cart, I'd be running ads from between like seven to 28 days. So immediately from the point they've added to cart.
And then I would either be up to seven days or up to 28 days, somewhere in that thing. So I wouldn't be sending our ads to people who've added to cart over 28 days. And now the big, big caveat here is if you've got enough data. So you really need to be getting quite a lot of people adding to cart, to run [00:09:00] separate, add to cart ads, because otherwise they're just not going to feed out.
If you're only getting like two to three people adding to cart every week. That's not enough people for Facebook to optimize. And in that case, I would combine your hot and your warm audiences. And that would be the point where you would include people, like say you maybe do a warm 60, you would include people that had added to cart 60 days ago.
And that's fine. But if you're doing a separate ad, really focusing on people who've added to cart, then I really would only do it for like seven to 28 days since they added. And then finally, we're looking at people who've already purchased from you. This is massively varied, depending on what you offer.
And like I was talking about in the last episode with the messaging if people are likely to renew with you or buy from you, you know, use the timings of that. So then we knew every three months or you offer a subscription that lasts three months, like then absolutely run your ads. So they would see the ads every three months or three months since they purchased from you.
It'd be how you [00:10:00] set it up. The biggest rule of thumb here is the, I would normally exclude them from all your other campaigns for at least seven days after they've purchased from you. Like if someone's purchased from you, we don't want to keep targeting them. They've just bought from. We want to kind of give them a little bit of a grace period before we pull them back into our ad campaigns.
Again, I normally leave at like seven days. It could be up to 28 days. It really depends on what your kind of product is how expensive it is, how likely they are to buy it again. Like if they're really, really unlikely to ever buy it again, then you could just not include them in your campaign. Going forward.
I still would maybe think if you're launching new products or services, like include them there, but generally if you're e-comm and it's more of like there's lots of different products and they are likely to potentially buy again, then you do want to reintroduce them, but maybe just give them a little bit of a grace period where you're not including them.
And again, you just want to test out, like you don't want to annoy them, but you also don't want to miss the opportunity to get those sales, because if they love what you offer okay. [00:11:00] Then they might want to kind of buy from you again really quickly. So again, I know I'm saying this all the time, it depends on what you offer that if you want to chat about this more, make sure you come over to my Instagram because I talk about this stuff all the time, and I always love chatting on my DMS or on pace about what your product or service is and you know, the different timings of ads and that sort of thing.
So make sure you come and follow me. It's. The underscore social underscore pod. This has been the third episode in our mini series. Talking about the PMT approach is something that I love talking about and something I talk to my clients about all the time, and I really hope that it's helped you solidify in your mind how.
How you need to structure your marketing and not just your Facebook ads, but your marketing in general, to make sure that people are moving through your funnel and helping you work towards getting those consistent sales.
Thank you so much for joining me this week to [00:12:00] go alongside this. Mini-series I've created a special download for you all. That's going to help you look at how you build your audiences, craft your message, and get in front of people at the right time to get your copy, you can go to the social pod.com forward slash PMT approach.
Or just click on the link in the show now. Before you go, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can receive new episodes, right when they're released. And if you ever enjoyed these podcast episodes, I'd really love to ask you to leave a review in apple podcasts reviews are one of the major ways that apple ranks their podcasts, and it only takes a few seconds, but really does make a massive difference to new people.
Finding me. Thank you again for joining me, Sophie, in this episode of growing pains, see you next time.
