This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, hey, what's up? Welcome back to the Side Hustle School Podcast, your daily guidebook for transforming a passion or hobby into a profitable business. It's an audio guidebook. It's a podcast, okay, but it's just a short little conversation, 10 minutes a day or less, trying to help you make extra money without quitting your job. Now, today's question comes from Mia, a Boston-based listener who is venturing into the vibrant world of event planning.
Now, Mia has got her eyes set on corporate events and weddings. These are two industries that require both a meticulous eye for detail and a touch of creative flair. So specifically, she's looking at using social media ads as her marketing strategy. And we often look at organic methods and word of mouth and how can you start with who you know, but that's not the only way. So like many first-time advertisers, she's unsure about how much to spend, where to start, how to design her ads for maximum impact, which is actually several questions rather than just one.
But let's see if we can help. Let's see if we can help Mia and anybody else out there who's thinking about using ads for their new side hustle. Detailed question in my answer coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]
Hello, I'm Mia from Boston. I'm starting a side hustle in event planning, really trying to focus on corporate events and weddings specifically.
So I'm thinking about using social media ads to attract clients, but I don't know where to start or like how much budget to put toward it. And like, what's the most cost-effective way to use the platforms for marketing? I'm particularly interested in targeting an ad design to maximize my return on investment. [Music]
All right, Mia, thanks for reaching out. So let's talk about social media advertising.
Just a little disclaimer at first, I often encourage people to do something else before doing advertising, at least make sure your strategy is going to convert, at least make sure you have a landing page, a conversion process of getting people signed up to be your customer or your client. There's a lot of money that's wasted on social media advertising just to kind of put that out there. Now, having said that, if you're gonna do it or you're gonna experiment with it, nothing wrong with experimenting, you could always just spend a small amount of money and see how it goes. So first, let's determine your marketing objective. Really important to have a clear objective with social media advertising.
Like, are you trying to raise awareness, generate leads or inquiries? Do you actually want people to make a booking? Like each goal requires a little bit different strategy and approach. So then from there, you wanna research which platforms your target audience uses most. You know, obviously like Facebook ads and Google ads, those are the most popular, the most known.
They also tend to be pretty expensive depending on the search terms that you're going for. Pinterest, LinkedIn, you can often spend less money and reach a slightly different audience. So definitely start small with those budgets, test different ad formats, images, messages. Like the more testing you can do, the better. Like this is how people win the social media ad game is by testing lots of different stuff.
And then once you've identified what works, that's when you increase your investment. Targeting is really critical. You might wanna consider retargeting ads as well, which is where basically someone visits your website but doesn't book right away. You can then retarget them on Facebook and other networks to remind them of your service. And then last but not least, make sure throughout this whole process you are tracking and measuring.
Because again, lots of money is wasted. If you can figure out what social media ad money is working, then that's great. You know, you can always do more of that. So keep track of your results. It really is a blend of art and science.
Mia, good luck, keep testing, let us know what happens. Listeners, if you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Love to know what you're up to, what you're working on. We just have an amazing community of folks out there and I wanna make sure we can be as supportive as possible. So let me know and I do keep tuning in.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to the daily podcast known as Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
