AI tools are incredibly powerful, but they’re not magic wands that automatically transform your advertising results. The missing piece isn’t more technology or another tutorial; it’s having a real human guide you through the actual implementation process when it’s most relevant to your specific business situation. You’re not alone in this frustration, and today’s guest is here to show you exactly what you need to bridge that gap.
Amanda Robinson is the founder & CEO of The Digital Gal Inc. and a certified Meta Marketing Partner who has been revolutionizing how businesses approach Facebook and Instagram advertising since 2014. She’s a sought-after international speaker who has presented at major marketing conferences and co-authored the “Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing” published by Entrepreneur Press alongside me and other industry experts. Amanda works with everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and she’s developed a unique system that combines AI-powered Meta advertising tools with personalized human guidance to help her clients achieve measurable results they can’t get from watching videos alone.
Social Pulse Podcast host Mike Allton asked Amanda Robinson about:
- The Tutorial Trap. Why consuming endless Meta advertising content without hands-on guidance leads to wasted ad spend and frustration.
- AI + Human Partnership. How combining Meta’s AI capabilities with expert human guidance creates exponentially better results than either approach alone.
- Implementation Over Information. Her proven system for moving from learning about Meta ads to executing profitable campaigns that drive real business growth.
Learn more about Amanda Robinson
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Mike Allton: Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Everyone’s talking about AI and how it’s revolutionizing meta advertising, yet many markets are still struggling with their campaigns.
What’s your take on that disconnect?
Amanda Robinson: So, even though AI is really coming fast and furious as far as being implemented into all of our businesses, and we are becoming a lot more familiar with AI tools, I have to say, AI and Meta ads are still in their clunky teenage phase. It is coming along, but it’s not quite there yet.
So if we’re relying a hundred percent on just all of the automations and all the recommendations that Meta makes when you’re clicking through all of them menu screens and saying yes, and publish an Ad and trusting all of the AI to do it for you, it’s not quite there yet, including the AI suggestions on captions and primary text, it’s not there yet.
I recommend people lean into these AI tools that are available to them. Anything in the AI world, when it comes to Meta, is called Advantage+. So your Advantage+ creative, Advantage+ audiences, Advantage+ budgets, Advantage+ placements lean into them. Yes, but you still need that human intervention to look at this and say, Is this working for your particular business use case? And sometimes no.
Mike Allton: I am assuming that it’s partly because those built in tools don’t have the same context that say, if I’m working with Gemini directly, I can train Gemini on my business, my target audience, my voice, all the details that would make it a really powerful assistant for my tool, and then when I ask it to create copy for an Ad campaign, it’s probably going to be a lot closer to what I’m looking for.
Is that your take as well?
Amanda Robinson: Yes and No, the AI tools in Meta are pretty vast, and when we’re talking about text, that’s just one component. But I’ll give you an example of where AI is running a little bit of a mock regarding clients and specific needs. I’ll give you one example that just happened recently.
There is an advertiser who is advertising women’s period products and they chose to advertise to females between a certain age, but then because of Meta’s Advantage Plus targeting and it Meta suggesting turn on Advantage Plus so we can expand beyond your chosen audience to help you reach more people who are more likely to be interested in your product.
What ended up happening?
Mike Allton: Sounds great.
Amanda Robinson: Sounds great, right? Yes. Okay, great. Meta knows best. Let’s go for this. The advantage plus targeting that was turned on, even though her ads and her targeting specifically said, I only want to target women, it ended up delivering predominantly to men, and that’s just not going to result in sales.
But when you are the ads manager or the social media manager, or the business owner who is clicking through all of these screens and you’re being presented with the options, where do you want to target? You put in where you say, Who do you want to target? You put in the age, you put in the gender, and you hit publish, there is an expectation that it’s going to adhere to what the choices you were presented with and the choices that you made.
But right now, it’s not calibrated that way, and AI is expanding beyond, but it’s not necessarily helping your specific business use case. So it’s not there yet, and then we are seeing the same thing when it comes to the text that is being recommended. So if you haven’t done ads for a little while, what happens is when you go to create an Ad, you type in the text that you want accompanying your pictures or your videos, and then that text Meta is going to generate additional options for you, up to five different options for your text and five different options for your headlines well, that auto-generated text that it is coming up with it can be a little wild right now.
Necessarily, it’s taking what you’re already putting in, and it’s springboarding and leveraging off of what you’ve already just said, and not necessarily taking into the entirety of the context of your business and what the end goal is that you’re trying to accomplish, so it’s not quite there yet. If we could put in-depth prompts in to help it through that journey for text, yes, but right now it’s just taking your little paragraph, and it’s trying to just give you some additional choices.
Now breathe. With that said, I do recommend that you use all of your five options for text headlines and for text variations. Use the options that you have; you don’t have to use Meta’s suggested options. You can go and generate your own AI text using any of the AI tools that you like to use, or you can even generate it using Meta’s AI, using their Llama model. You can do that with any of these tools; you don’t necessarily have to do it through the ads interface, where it’s still a little clunky, but my recommendation is to have those variations, have those multiple angles of multiple takes.
The same with having multiple images when you create your ads, don’t just put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, don’t run just one single Ad image and say, there’s my Ad, let’s dump some money into that and go for it. You need some image variations and yes, you can do that in the backend of Meta Ad step, different images for your ads and different headlines and different text so that what the system is going to do, it’s going to just mix and match those to find the best fit for the people that it’s putting the Ad in front of to try and get you even better response.
So we all have our own biases, we all believe that when we read that sentence, that makes sense to us, and it gives us the context that we need, but we’re in the business. We’re too close to this, sometimes we need to have other angles that are going to appeal to other people in different ways, and Meta’s mix and match that it’s producing with AI is helping a lot of businesses that otherwise would’ve just typed in one line of text, one headline, hit, publish, and ran with it.
Mike Allton: Yeah. So it’s trying to zhuzh what you put in there, as Molly Mahoney would say, but it’s not quite there yet. We’ve got this promise of AI being able to create all kinds of variations on ads that are designed to perform well, but the built-in AI tools aren’t quite there yet.
Now, you have mentioned to me, and I can vouch for this, so people don’t learn advertising effectively just by watching videos, my own Facebook ads are deplorable.
Walk us through why traditional education content fails when it comes to Meta ads specifically.
Amanda Robinson: Okay, so the first and foremost reason is that every single one of your businesses is so unique, and we’re all starting with different amounts of data to work with.
For example, if you compare a business that just started a Facebook page last week and has very few followers and has no email list and has no engagement in interaction online, and then they try and start running ads and have those ads compete successfully, they’re going to have a much larger struggle than a business who has been highly active on social media for several years, has a built up email list, has fans that they’ve been connecting with regularly and a good amount of organic flow.
So, those are two completely different templates, then on top of that, you have other factors like what’s happening in the market right now, how established is that business that’s selling their product to begin with.
All of those factors you take into account, and then when you say, Okay, now it’s time for me to learn how to do my ads, you go on, say YouTube, or you go in and buy a cheap course to watch so that you can learn how to DIY. Those courses, the second that they’re published, they’re outdated, and I have courses myself that I publish, they’re outdated the second they’re published.
But the framework is there; it’s going to give you the bare bones of what you need, but the biggest challenge is that not only are the interfaces changing all the time, but everybody knows how much Meta changes all the time. When you say Meta, we’re talking Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook and Instagram advertising, as well as the organic platform.
So it changes so often that when you’re watching these videos, a lot of people’s learning styles that they need, you just show them where to click, tell me to click here, tell me to click here, tell me to hit this button. Those buttons change all the time, and not only that, depending on what country and what region you’re in, your screen could look wildly different from someone else’s screen.
So when it comes to the learning styles, you have to put people in a situation where they can understand that my screen might look a little bit different, because the concept here is the important thing that you need to know, and then when it comes to actually learning, you need to be hands-on and you need to be hands-on not watching somebody else’s product or program or example. You need it to be relevant and contextual to what you’re trying to accomplish, your business.
So if you’re creating an Ad for yourself and you are uploading it through the system, and you’re clicking through all the buttons, that’s great. That’s helping you learn how to do it. But wait, there’s more. When it comes to learning ads, there’s just what I call the mechanics of getting in the system, uploading what buttons to click, what you’re uploading, and the basics of how to execute from start to finish for getting an Ad published. That’s one learning curve, then you need to be able to learn, okay, is this ad working? Is it not? What do we need to improve? And then from there, okay, let’s make different Ad variations. Okay? And then from there, let’s start targeting different audiences. Okay? From there, let’s start working on the different platforms that we’re tailoring our content to.
If you try to learn ads tomorrow and jump in and try to execute on all of these things at the level that makes ads work for you, it would be a mammoth undertaking. And it’s too much information for the majority of people who are business owners or running multiple roles to take on and learn, and execute with. It’s too much, so you need to be taking that information in bits and pieces, but you need time in between those pieces to learn and grow.
For example, you need time to learn how to create the ads and publish them. Now that you’ve learned that, give your brain a break. Okay? Now we need to learn how to read the results of that, but to read the results, if you only spent $25 and you’re looking at the results the next day, and you’re like, I’ve had one link click. There’s not enough data to go off of.
But that’s what people are doing, and so you need some time for those ads to run and then you need time to look at what worked and what didn’t, and then you need time to implement the changes that you learned from that into yet another Ad hit publish and people understand the concept that I’m speaking of right now, they get that. But until you’re in the driver’s seat, until you’re actually publishing ads, until you’re seeing your real-world results come back in, and then when you make the tweaks yourself and you republish, now you’re getting better results, it clicks like there’s no tomorrow. It clicks. And once you learn how to do that, it’s a skill that you now have forever, and you keep building on that skill, and you keep learning and evolving with it.
But the biggest challenge I find with businesses getting started with ads is that they never get over that first hurdle. Why? Because they’re watching online tutorials that don’t look like their screen, that aren’t relevant to their product, that aren’t contextual to how they can make their business succeed, and they’re failing before they even get out of the gate.
Mike Allton: So what does this tutorial trap look like in practice?
Amanda Robinson: They’re either micromanaging, trying to do too many components all at once, trying to target too many audiences, trying to go too fine tune and granulated with their targeting and trying to do too much at once with very little budget, and that’s not setting them up for success or they’re taking too much budget, chunking it on one ad, making an attempt, and then at the end of the day saying it didn’t work for me. So there’s no happiness in between, and that seems to be the trap that people are falling into when they’re watching tutorials and following along with what people should do.
The other trap they’re falling into is, I love this example, I use this in almost all my presentations right now, that wouldn’t it be nice if you could take a house, and add it to the cart, and hit checkout, and then just pay the price, and you just bought the house. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that, or if you’re selling the house, wouldn’t it be nice if you could sweeten the deal, you saw somebody added the house to checkout, but they didn’t check out, sweeten the deal by, throwing in a free hot tub to see if that will get them to follow through on the purchase, problem with that is that real estate and other businesses don’t necessarily follow an e-commerce model, but a lot of the tutorials and training out there that people are consuming and learning how to create their ads are built on the backbone of an e-commerce model.
Learning about your return on Ad spend and getting people to add to cart and checkout, and the purchase price, that doesn’t work for the majority of small business owners. For the majority of websites that we’ve all set up ourselves or have had a friend help us create, that doesn’t work for, I would say half of the business owners that I work with when it comes to trying to create their ads and they’re following along with those prescribed templates on how to create their ads that do not pertain to their actual goals and outcomes within their real businesses right now.
Mike Allton: So for either social media managers who are listening who they want to work with, an ads team or whatever, but either they haven’t started Facebook advertising at all and they want to get started the right way, or like me, maybe they’ve been spending money over years here and there, but none of it very well, none of it very strategized, ’cause you talked about how if somebody, runs an ad for 25 bucks for one day and they want to look at the results and there’s no data to look for there.
What’s like a minimum threshold spend for the first 30 days that you think would be a good number?
Amanda Robinson: So, before I give you the number, let me just put in context that, to make Facebook and Instagram ads work for your business, you need consistency and momentum. So if you are trying to start, stop, start, stop, do an Ad stop, and take a break for a while, come back and try it again a few weeks or a couple of months later. You’re wasting your money right now. I would almost advise you, just don’t wait until you can dedicate the actual time to this and some budget to this to be consistent and keep going, and you can do that with small budgets.
What I say is, you spent $150 a month, and imagine if you broke that up into a little $25, a little $25 campaign here, $25 campaign there, $150 is pretty quick to reach in a month. That’s perfectly okay, and if you are consistent with that and can plug your way forward, one foot in front of the other on that, consistently over a year, you will get momentum, you will get results, but what I would say is that if you are at a point where, you say boosting posts or you’re spending more than $500 a month, then that’s the time where you need to be more strategic about how you’re spending that money, and you need to be doing that through ads Manager, not through boosting a post.
You need to be more strategic about your audiences and your targeting and your Ad creative and variations, as well as the types of campaigns that you are running, with a focus on reaching a mix of new eyeballs, new people who don’t know your business yet, and then retargeting your existing communities and existing fans and followers. So you need a good system to be able to kind of service every stage of the funnel at that point.
The more budget you have, the more you can do to bring people from not knowing you to getting to know you, to executing on a sale, the smaller budget you have, the more you need to manage those expectations and realize that your ads are not going to do the full cycle for you, they can only do one component for you, and most likely that’s going to be on the awareness side or on just reengaging your existing audiences. So, with a smaller budget, focus on one thing; with larger budgets, you need to start being more strategic and satisfying more stages of that marketing funnel. So, when it comes to how much you need to spend to make it work for you? I don’t necessarily focus on how much you need to spend; I focus more on consistency and momentum. So part two of that is when it comes to engaging people, engagement is the holy grail of what you were trying to accomplish, because those engagements, that’s your attention span and that’s what keeps your content showing back out in front of people, or even if you’re doing advertising, it keeps your Ad costs lower and keeps your ads competitive.
If you’re not capturing that attention span and getting people to like, click, comment, share, engage, and react, then your ads aren’t even eligible to be shown in their feeds, and you’re competing against a lot of other advertisers who are eligible.
So when it comes to creating content that is hitting that engagement, that’s key. How do we get that engagement? We need to be showing up consistently and we need to our posts to be appetizing and engaging to them, and we learn how to do that by putting out content, seeing how well it performed, learning from that, putting out new content with our learnings in mind, and learning how to adapt and, create better content for the audiences we’re trying to reach. Part three of that is that when you’re doing this on a business page,
Mike Allton: I love a good three-part answer, by the way.
Amanda Robinson: I know, right? When you’re doing this on a business page, not on a personal profile, you have a full suite of advertising tools that are available to you to use, including all of your audiences that you can create within your business account, and all those audiences let you create audiences of people who have engaged with your page, engaged with your Instagram profile, who have watched your videos, who have opened your lead forms, who have clicked on your website, who are on your email list.
You can create retargeting audiences and get back out in front of these people again and again. Every one of those engagements, those likes, clicks, comments, shares, every single one of those is critical to you and helps you grow your audience of people who have engaged with your page, and if you are not growing those audiences and building that momentum, then you are not being as competitive as you possibly could be on the platform, and your ads are most likely going to be more expensive.
But those engagements only really count for 365 days, so if you started this year and then you started going with your ads, you’re building up momentum, you’ve got thousands of people who have engaged with your content, and then your business strategy changed, you threw the brake on, you parked your ads, for now you stop spend and then say nine months from now, you get going again, well those audiences of engaged people are only good for 12 months, so you might get your momentum rolling back up again, and all of a sudden your audiences audience sizes drop off like a cliff because they’ve eclipsed that 365 days and you haven’t reengaged them properly, and we saw that during the pandemic and when a lot of advertisers just hit a full stop on their advertising dollars and a year later they come back and try to advertise again and their Ad costs shot through the roof, and then they’re saying, It’s meta, it’s not us. I’m like, no, you did nothing to continue to engage with your audiences, and then you come back and now you expect that you’re going to compete at the same level that the other advertisers who have continually been engaging their audiences with high quality content, with good quality scores on their content, they can compete, you are not.
This is a very long-winded way to say that momentum matters. So if you’re going to spend Ad dollars to amplify what you’re doing, it needs to be in a consistent, ongoing form; otherwise, you might be wasting your money.
Mike Allton: I loved your second part because that spoke to what you and I were talking about in the Green Room, the importance of paid ads folks working hand in hand with organic social media managers.
For some of you listening, maybe you don’t have to deal with paid ads, which is great. You’re just focused on the organic side, well, that’s cool. Work hand in hand with your paid agency or in-house paid manager because it’s in their best interest to monitor what you’re doing and take the best content that you’re putting out there and amplify it.
Part two or part three of what you just said was fascinating to me ’cause I want to talk about how that competitive landscape has changed with AI.
What does that mean for marketers who are trying to stay competitive?
Amanda Robinson: For marketers who are trying to stay competitive, the tactics that we used to do back in the day of working at your own pace, creating an Ad, launching it, and hoping for the best, don’t work anymore.
You need volume of content and Meta’s systems are starting to give you little warnings and little notes in behind the scenes when you’re getting creative fatigue, it will give you warnings to say, this Ad creative has fatigued, you need to replace it, otherwise, your Ad costs are going to continue to plummet or continue to rise, I should say.
So when it comes to AI, you need to be leveraging the AI tools available to you so that you can produce a higher amount of output to keep up with everybody. What I mean by that is, let me give you an example. I have another advertiser that I’ve been working with, where they had a psychologically high amount of Ad spend that was pumped into one single Ad creative.
They put it out there, they put a ton of spend behind it, and they picked all the areas that they wanted this Ad to show in, and they just ran it all together in one Ad set, well when we look at the results, that content reached 500,000 people, but all of the budget got soaked up into the higher volume urban markets, and none of that budget was spread across the smaller communities, which were more valuable to this advertiser in the end.
So what we did instead is we went back and we created multiple different campaigns and multiple different targeting areas, and multiple different ad creatives that are tailored for the different placements, and put those into the market. And now for less than that amount of Ad spend, we’ve reached over a million people, and more of those ads are being delivered into the higher, more active markets that they need to be reaching. So that’s an example for, I don’t want to say someone was lazy with it, ’cause they’re not lazy, but it’s just one that has worked in the past of just creating the Ad, doing your targeting, pumping some budget at it, and hoping for the best, it doesn’t work anymore.
The landscape is more competitive, you need a higher volume of Ad creative, you need to be more strategic with how you’re spending your ad dollars and you need to have more variations with your text and your headlines, and you need to lean in a little bit harder into what those psychological outcomes are like tapping into people’s needs, not your need as a business, but what their need is as a client or customer to be able to get those ads to perform for you. It’s just not the same as putting a little snippet of text in a cute little picture and hoping for the best that just does not flat out, does not work anymore.
Mike Allton: Help us translate what higher volume means, ’cause I know as an organic marketer, when people tell me, or I hear people talking about a higher volume, they’re talking about going from posting once a week to every day or multiple times a day.
That’s not really what you’re talking about here, necessarily. It might mean it might be that kind of volume, but not on a daily or multiple daily basis. Do we have to put out a new ad?
Amanda Robinson: You know me, I love analogies, and my favorite analogy that makes this part make sense when I’m talking about high-quality content or high-quality ads, or what does quality look like?
I use an analogy of spinach and cupcakes. If we’re at a party here and I have appetizers serving around the room, and I have a plate of spinach when we’re walking around, and I’m serving that spinach to you, are you excited about that plate of food that’s being put in front of you? Just a little piece of plain spinach, probably not, some people, yes.
Now that’s what I would call a niche audience, and if you know your niche, then go for it. But for this party, not really, so instead, if I had a giant plate of cupcakes and I’m circulating cupcakes through the room, people are consuming those and grabbing those off the plate, and I have to go back to the kitchen and load up even more and come back out with more. And that’s an example of what the algorithm is doing; the algorithm is going to continue to load up more of that content and distribute it if people are consuming it, and those are in the form of likes, clicks, comments, shares, and reactions.
If people are doing something with your content, that content is appetizing. If people are not clicking on your content, reading your comments, clicking on the like button, seeing what other people are commenting, clicking on the pictures to enlarge them, any of those proactive little actions that show interest, if people are not engaging with your content, it is spinach, they are not interested, doesn’t mean it wasn’t good content, maybe for your particular audience, they’re just not interested in how that content was packaged so you can package it differently.
When I say package it differently, what I mean by that is if you shared a post from another page to your page, and no one’s engaging with it rather than sharing it from another advertiser or another person, why not create the picture yourself and a caption yourself and explain your take on it, or if you did that and that didn’t work very well, okay, why don’t you get on camera in front of a video, in front of a video or even a green screen and put the picture in behind you and put your face on there and talk about it and explain that.
Is that going to be more engaging and more appetizing? So it can be, you can talk about the same thing, or you can have the thing that you were talking about or need to promote, you can just package it differently so that to your audience, it’s cupcakes, not spinach. But at the end of the day, high quality is whatever your audience is consuming.
You need to learn how to position your content so that it’s appetizing to them. Otherwise, if you are continuing to push content that is spinach, not engaging, not advertising, and then you decide, okay, no one is seeing it, because when I post it organically, nothing’s happening.
So now I need ads, so now I’m going to push Ad dollars on the spinach, that’s not going to work for you either. That’s the one of the other big mistakes that I see advertisers making is just trying to put a lot of Ad dollars behind things that are just not exciting and don’t have momentum already whereas on the flip side, the advertisers who are doing it well are working hand in hand closely with the organic marketing specialists, the people that are creating content organically, paying attention to those numbers and seeing what’s getting a little bit more of a rise out of the audience and then grabbing a hold of that, implementing that into their paid advertising and leveraging that, and anything that already has momentum on it. If you put paid advertising dollars on top of that, it just goes so much further, and you’ll be so much more successful.
So, no, don’t just post more frequently and consider that high quality. It comes down to engagement. Engagement is the secret sauce. Are people engaging with that content? Yes, that is high quality. Are people not engaging? No, then that’s low quality. And then to take that one step further, you need the right people to engage. So, going back to that example of the advertiser who was trying to target a product that’s built for women, but the ads we’re delivering to men.
So the answer to that isn’t, Meta is just serving it to the wrong people. No, let’s go back and look at the creative, and let’s go back and look at the text and the wording and the landing page that we’re sending it to. Do all of these pieces wrap together and package the way we’ve put them, appeal to women, specifically the women that you are trying to attract with for your product, if that’s appealing to them, then we can lean into that and the algorithm will serve it to more of them because you’re getting more engagements from them.
Amanda Robinson: I would say by relying too much on the AI that exists inside Meta, we’ll call it the Advantage Plus Suite of tools.
You still need to look at the results, and you still need to see where your ads are delivering, who they’re delivering to, and if they’re actually matching up with your business objectives. And because AI is still overall in its infancy as it’s evolving, not all of those are hitting the mark right now, so it’s okay to leverage all of the AI tools that are built into the system for you, it’s okay to leverage external AI tools to help you create your Ad copy, even to create the Ad imagery itself, but at the end of the day, you still need to have that human interaction right now.
You still need to have that human intervention to make sure that the ads are delivering to whom you want them to go, and that they’re hitting the right audience, and that they’re delivering the business objective that you’ve set out for.
Mike Allton: Love it. So we’re talking about really two aspects I think, of a human AI partnership on the one end, we want to make sure that there’s a human in the loop as we’re building the AI or building the ads, but we also want to make sure that there’s been some kind of human expertise involved in deciding the strategy to, helping us to understand which buttons to push yes, but also why we’re pushing those buttons, how we’re thinking about it. So, as a business owner who’s been burned, let’s say, from previous Meta advertising attempts.
How would you recommend they approach it now differently, using this new human AI and human consultant partnership model?
Amanda Robinson: I would say if you’ve been burned by doing Meta advertising in the past, chances are you’ve become frustrated and overwhelmed if that’s you trying to do it yourself, and that frustration and overwhelm come from confusion of running into what I call these little snags, I call it like Velcro. You run into a little snag, and then you get unstuck, and you run into another snag. If you run into 10, 10, or 12 of those snags in one sitting, you’re going to throw your hands up and say, I’m done, I don’t want to do this anymore so you get burnt out.
If you’ve outsourced ads to somebody else and you feel like you’re spending all of this money and you’re not getting any results, that’s another set of frustration. And now to add a third layer of that frustration, if you’re now trying to leverage different AI tools to make it easier for you to just go ahead and have it make the decisions for you, it’s not there yet that’s going to lead to more burnout and more frustration, and that’s where it’s helpful to have a real human, whether it’s someone like myself or somebody else with experience just to pop in and help unsnag you and get you unstuck when you run into those little hurdles and barriers as you’re trying to create those ads, as you’re trying to ask the question, is this working? And as you ask the question, how can I make it better, because when you’re leveraging and leaning and relying on the AI tools, that is based on a model of one too many, based on the majority of how businesses act and interact, not necessarily the specifics of what your business needs are.
And as we’ve discussed this whole time, Meta ads require that individual unique knowledge and unique input to make them work for you, because not every business is an e-commerce business, not every business is a real estate business, not every business has the budget to go from brand new person to completing a sale.
So, you’re at a different stage all of the way, and the AI tools right now are trying to appeal to the many, not necessarily to your unique position.
So, having a real human help get you unsnagged and unstuck is going to re alleviate your frustration, it’s going to help you get to results even faster, and the successes out there to be had and trying to learn it from a YouTube video or just a simple tutorial with even a six week outdated video is not going to be helpful for you.
Mike Allton: I love it. And as we wrap up, you mentioned almost at the outset that Meta advertising is changing every single day.
How are you keeping up? Where would you recommend listeners go for ongoing education if they’re the ones who are going to be inside the ads manager?
Amanda Robinson: So, to answer the first part of the question, how do I keep up? I’m literally on the platform every single day, every day I’m opening Ads Manager, every day, I’m looking at client results every day. I’m trying to launch new ads, I’m just hands-on in it, and I see the changes in real time as they’re happening.
I’ll be on a client call with somebody, and I’ll be having them click here, click there, and I’ll be like, Huh. Stop. Wait, this has changed. This is cool. I’ll take a little screenshot in the moment and then we keep on going with what we’re doing, and I’ll circle back to it after to go and explore what the new change is. It changes all the time, so my advice on how you can keep up with those changes and how you make this work for you, the bottom line is that you have to be hands-on yourself.
So, if you are responsible for creating ads or publishing ads, anything to do with ads, you just have to open up the platform, get in there, and you have to do it yourself, and don’t be afraid to get started, and don’t feel like you’re in a position where you have to know everything to get started, you won’t. And if you’re waiting till you’ve learned enough to get started, you’re never going to get started, or you’re going to hesitate, and you’re going to get into that start, stop, and lose momentum.
So don’t be afraid, dive in, put your hands on the platform, get in there, get your hands dirty. Try it out, and if you’re the type of person who isn’t going to be doing ads yourself and you’re going to be paying somebody to do it for you, you need to make sure you’re giving them enough content to keep going with this and keep moving forward and give them the resources that they need, and when we’re looking at what are those resources that help?
I’ll give you one example for me, it’s my Swift Kick in the ads program where we meet on Zoom once a week as a group and people can just ask questions and get unstuck and we go through real case, real life scenarios and help real businesses move themselves forward through navigating all the little changes inside the platform and help them make their ads more successful week over week, and you see the progression, you see the results coming through. So I wouldn’t say there’s no easy go-to answer on how you can keep up, other than just getting hands-on.
Mike Allton: So true. Just have to have those resources where you can ask questions, and Amanda, you have been amazing. As always, this has been such an important interview for folks who do want to connect with you; they want to learn more from you specifically. Where should they go?
Amanda Robinson: You can find me everywhere around the web @TheDigitalGal. You can find me, thedigitalgal.com or Facebook, the Digital Gal, or Instagram, the Digital Gal.
Mike Allton: I love it. That’s all the time we’ve got for today. Friends, don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast on Apple and drop us a review. We’d love to hear what you thought about this episode. Of course, we’ll have all the links in the show notes as always below, and don’t forget to follow and join our Social Pulse community on Facebook, where you can network with amazing experts like Amanda here, as well as thousands of other social media professionals in the industry just like you.
Until next time.
