Speaker 1 0:00
Music. Hello friends. I'm Amanda Barr and I'm Rebecca Lew Brennan, and welcome to Dance principles united the podcast together.
Speaker 2 0:10
We are passionate about helping studio owners with the business of running their studio
Speaker 1 0:14
Join us as we talk everything from marketing, systems, studio culture, motherhood, life and everything in between. This
Unknown Speaker 0:22
is the dance principles United podcast.
Speaker 1 0:28
Hi friends. It's BEC here from Dance principles united. I hope you are amazing. We have the incredible Nathan with us today. So excited to chat to you about all the things. But first of all, Nate, how are you?
Speaker 3 0:42
Hey, back. Always good to do a podcast with you. Yeah, doing really well. Obviously, like week two back here, we're recording this in back in New South Wales, term, school term, which means that for us kids out of the house, which means we're actually getting shit done, right? So really good on that front and settling back into everything.
Speaker 1 1:03
So, so good, so good. I always love doing a podcast with you. I feel like it's been a hot minute, though. I have to say,
Speaker 3 1:09
Oh yeah, I know that's what I was thinking, as well as like, Amanda. Amanda's holding all the, all the limelight with you, right? She
Speaker 1 1:14
is, she is, but I'm super excited to chat today, because I think those of you who are listening out there. This is a total game changer. It has been for my studio, and it's something that Nathe teaches so well in tribe and SGC, and it is all things Facebook ads. And you know, it's, I know a lot of our clients, when they first come on with us, Natha always like, I've tried Facebook ads, but they don't work, and we know they do, right? Like we know that it's a definite thing that works
Speaker 3 1:45
100% and it's something that ties in, like we talk about so much that our members give us give us shit about it, that we need to, that they're going to print t shirts. Oh, no, we did T shirts, didn't we? That it's all the things and marketing for our studio is, it's a massive, big flywheel of all the things. And in 2025 paid socials is a huge part of that. It all ties in together. Paid socials ties in with, obviously, the organic socials that we do, and that ties in with having a good website and getting out the community and things like that. But we know that for brand awareness, for getting in front of people's eyeballs, that paid socials is the main thing that we can do to drive those, those inquiries, which turn into enrolments. Yeah,
Speaker 1 2:32
well, one of the things that I always say to the our clients is the phone is where everyone's at, like everyone's scrolling every single day. I don't know if I've told you this, Nate, but I have an app on my phone called Be present that tells you how long you've been on your phone for on the day. And like, Yeah, but it also, like, says just really funny. Like, it just comes up with little funny text things all the time, just kind of taking the mickey out of you of what you know you've spent this long on it you're now, you know, I don't know, like, making so much money for Pete for social media or something like, it's just like your algorithms are out of control. So, like, it just says these funny bear to things. But it's true, like, we are on our phone more than anything else now, and it's your shop window. Like, I know we say it all the time, but it is your shop window, and it's so important to have that that money behind it, 100%
Speaker 3 3:26
like, you used to have to pay big bucks to get, you know, to get a main street, like, access, to have foot traffic. Like, that's what advertise. That's why rents on Main Streets and things like that used to be so exorbitant, because it was all about getting the foot traffic, because that was such an effective way of getting people to see your business. Now people are carrying like, you've literally got that shop front window with your Instagram and Facebook profiles. So if you're not utilizing that, then you're wasting potentially the biggest opportunity you've got out there to get in front of people's eyeballs. And having like, I keep saying, like, having that strong, organic game is important, but we know that that's not what people see, that that's like designing your shop window, but we need to be spending the money on the paid ads to get people to actually look at it, because if we're not spending the money, then people aren't actually clicking through and checking out our socials a lot of the time, or at least new followers. Aren't we know that those what we're putting on socials that our current families and our current followers are seeing, but new followers aren't seeing it, if we're not paying to get in front of
Speaker 1 4:29
them, yep. Now those of you who are listening to us right now who are thinking to yourselves, yeah, but I've put money behind it, and I've done all of that, and it just doesn't work, which was totally me, I have to say, before I learnt about this and started doing it properly, I would boost a post and not get anything from it, or I'd put an ad together without knowing what I was doing, and surprise, surprise, wouldn't get anything from it. You know, what would you say to those people? Because, like I said, that was totally. Me, guys, so no judgment here, but tell us what you'd say.
Speaker 3 5:04
Number one, the biggest brands in the world are shifting a higher and higher percentage of their marketing budget, literally every single week into paid socials. And so if those companies, and we're talking like I said, like, think about any massive brand that you can think of that you buy from. They are all the data is out there that they are shifting more and more of their advertising spend every week. They're not doing that on a whim. They're not doing that because, oh, it doesn't really work, right? They're getting access to much better data than any of us have access to, and they're making decisions in the millions of dollars around this thing. So, number one, we know it works. And number two, we can also only improve what we measure. I understand and have complete empathy around the fact that these like when, when I say Facebook ads, I mean Facebook and Instagram, because it's all under one platform. But social media, paid social media ads, can be daunting. The don't get me started on how archaic and ridiculous the Facebook ads platform is, and it's hard to navigate right? I completely understand that, but once you understand it and understand that, as dance studios, we operate in a local area, we're only advertising realistically to people within a 10 to 15 kilometer radius. For most of us, that Facebook ads in that setting is much, much easier than, say, the multinational company that has to try and advertise to the whole of Australia, or even, like I always talk about for dance teacher Expo, us trying to sell find dance teachers to sell tickets to with dance teacher Expo from Australia and New Zealand is actually fairly complex and complicated, and we have to use a lot more of the tools in the Facebook Ads Manager, so that becomes quite difficult. But for local area advertising that we need to do for our dance studios, if we know where to look, and if we know that small sort of subset of tools that we need to use, then it's definitely something that we can use to our advantage and get loads and loads of value out of
Speaker 1 7:12
Yeah, absolutely. Now I know that you are such a rock star in our tribe and SGC with breaking it down for people like me who find it very difficult to understand this stuff, but you make it very simple for them to understand. But for our listeners out there, what would be like the first thing that you think that we need to know about with Facebook ads?
Speaker 3 7:33
Yeah, and look, it's a thing. It's it's always going to be a process. And with anything, you've just got to start somewhere, right? And of course, you're not going to be from like zero to ninja level within after watching one YouTube or doing one training, and that's okay as well. But the reality of it is, before I jump into the number one thing, I think it's probably important to note that why I'm so passionate about helping dance studio owners at least understand this themselves, is that it's a massive bug bear of mine that I see not just dance studios, but far too many small businesses. Look, I'm just going to call off what it is. I've seen too many businesses get ripped off. Okay? It is, it's a it's a thing out there. There's plenty of great providers out there. We know 100% but there's also lots of marketing companies out there that have taken businesses I've seen for a ride, and they do that because of what I said, because it is quite technical, or it looks like it's quite technical because the ads manager is and they get in there and they try pretend to wow you and does you with all this technical jargon, and then tell you that you know you need to spend, because to get a good Facebook Ads Manager, you typically need to spend northwards of 800 to $1,000 a month before you've spent a cent on ads. Whoa, right. And then they're completely right for those, those advertisers are going to say to you, you need to spend minimum five to $600 on top of that, then on ads, because they can't do their job properly without that sort of budget, and they can't get the sort of data they need to make your ads the best they can be. So to get anybody in externally can be really, really expensive. So that's why I'm always really passionate about people getting it and understanding themselves. Now, if you happen to be able to grow and scale your studio to the size where you can afford to bring somebody in, fantastic, but if you at least understand it yourself, then you're going to, number one, get more bang for your buck, and number two, you're going to be able to ask the hard question. Questions and make sure that basically, you're not getting taken for a ride, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 9:47
Natha, I'm sitting here, and I remember the time when I first got my ad set up properly and set it up myself and learnt about it. And. To get the leads in. And it's so exciting. I got so excited about it. You know, when you do do it properly, when you do learn about it, when you do understand it, and you start getting those people actually coming through your doors, it's, it's so motivating, don't you think 100%
Speaker 3 10:16
especially for people a little bit competitive, and you like to see anyway, what are you saying? And but you also like I completely understand as well why people that little fear of the unknown, and if you've done it before without much understanding around it, you feel like you've thrown money at it and you haven't got results. I completely understand why you're reluctant to spend more, right? But that's why it's important. If we can work on your understanding, on doing it the right way for dance studios, then it's going to be an absolute game changer.
Speaker 1 10:50
Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree it has been a game changer in my studio, absolutely has been a game changer. It's been incredible. All right, so back to that first thing that you think, yeah, what do you think is the first thing that they need to understand or do, as
Speaker 3 11:06
with anything, just going back to basics, right? The The first thing to really dive into and look at is the basic structure of how Facebook Ads work, and when we're talking about that, I'm a dog person now back so it's okay that we've got the dogs going on in the background. Because, you know, like in another life, I'm sure it wouldn't have been, but for those that are listening, but like Amanda and I, are now dog people, so we completely understand. I am still shocked by that. But anyway, even Amanda even took him for a big walk yesterday. Yeah, I know, I know. I know, right? But, yeah, the basic structure of how those Facebook Ads work. So making sure, like, very quickly, like we have campaigns, we have ad sets and we have ads, that's the basic structure that we see all the way through everything we do in Facebook ads, and at each one of those three levels we do different things, right? So being able to just go and understand, like I said, what needs to happen at each level, that's the key to being able to set up your ads effectively from from where you need to be, and making sure that you're spending your money most effectively.
Speaker 1 12:18
I love that. I love that. And so what would your next thing be? So you know, they've they've learned their basic stuff. What would the next thing be?
Speaker 3 12:27
Amazing. So after you've gone and watched YouTube on setting up those absolute basics, and like I said, I'm going to diverge a little bit, but when you go in, guys, obviously there's like 14 billion videos on YouTube on how to set up Facebook ads. And the problem with most of them is they try and often teach you everything in one go. And look at all those advanced tools within that first you know, 15 minutes of the video that you don't need to so if you're looking for some training on that, yeah, YouTube and just look for basic Facebook ads set up and go from there. But then once you are feeling a bit more confident with that, then the next thing you need to really understand is the campaign objectives and how that works. At that campaign level, like I said, we start from the top and work our way down. And at that level, we start all we basically talk about within what we need to do for dance studios operating in a local area, is we just talk about, what is the objective of this ad? Is it to try and collect leads? Is it just to try and drive people to a website or a landing page? Is it to try and just get some brand awareness out there for like, quite often, we're not going to use this one, but a main purchase, a main objective that a lot of businesses use, is called the purchase objective, where, obviously you're trying to get people to to buy something. So that was like for dance teacher Expo. We would run purchase as a campaign objective, trying to make people buy dance buy dance teacher Expo tickets. So understanding exactly what that is is absolutely key, because this is where I see a lot of studio owners, unfortunately, wasting, wasting a lot of money, because they're doing things just like driving, putting a Facebook ad to send people to their website, which you know, like, that's okay. It is getting our brand in front of eyeballs. But once we get people to our website, there's just so many ways and places for them to go that it's just generally not not an effective use of our spend.
Speaker 1 14:30
So what would be a better thing than taking them straight to the website? So
Speaker 3 14:34
that sort of like it ties into and this is what we're big talking about with our studio growth club members, a lot is making sure that we craft good offers, right? So if lots of dance studios, we know offer a free trial, right? And yes, I know that you'll have, like, book a free trial from your website. But put just a very a separate. It. We call it a landing page. So just putting a separate page on your website that has no other ways to get out of it. Basically, there's no menu on no menu bar on it. There's no buttons to like about us and contact us, or they literally just the Facebook ad sends them to a page, and the only thing they can do on that page is book a free trial. Yes, of course we like we're going to put a little bit of a blurb about the studio, some photos of of some kids having a ball in our classes, but making sure that if our objective, if we want people to enroll, which generally sends them through that free trial, that we're really clear on, once they click that ad. There's only one thing that they can do. Well, they can click off as well, obviously, but we're just making sure that they don't get distracted once they do that. And then, like, another thing, for example, like, you know, we just had the the offer that we did with our members as well around preschool, like the free uniform offer. And again, we did that, and what we're finding works really well at the moment. The moment is the lead forms, right? A Facebook lead form. We know that Facebook, the whole purpose of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and these billions is that they don't want people to leave Facebook or Instagram, right? That's what keeps their revenue churning. So we think that they probably not penalize you, that's probably not the right word, but they reward you more if you keep people on their platform and fill in one of those Facebook lead forms and send them off Facebook or Instagram to your website. So with our free uniform offer for people, we were just trying to collect their lead information. So we set it up as like a lead objective, and within that, we just tried to collect their information. They clicked it, there was only one thing for them to do, was to claim that offer of that free uniform. So just making it really clear and laser focused that when they click on this ad, there's like, there's no distractions for them, and they've sort of got the only thing they can do is take that offer or opt out.
Speaker 1 17:09
There's less friction for the client as well. Though I just think, like, I don't know about you, Nate, but as soon as I have to jump onto a website, I won't stay on there. That's too hard for me. As soon as I have to navigate through something, forget it. As soon as I have to put too many details in, I'm out. Like, you know what I mean? Like, the less friction there is, I think in today's day and age, the better. And I think that is creating a lot less friction for our consumer, oh,
Speaker 3 17:35
100% because we know that there's and there is good friction and bad friction within that as well. We know that exactly what you're saying, that there's a relationship between the amount of questions that you ask and the amount of leads you get. If you ask too many questions, well then you're not going to get as many leads. But we also know that if you only ask two questions, if you only ask for name and email, sometimes you also get a lot of junk. So there's a real sweet spot, and that's why it's like really important to test and get feedback from loads of our members. That for some just collecting name, email and phone number, works really well, and they get really high quality leads through that. For some people, collecting name, email and phone number, they still get loads of what we call like junk inquiries. And so what a lot of them have done is they just asked for one more question, like, what style of dance most interests your you? And just by putting that one extra question, it just adds that tiny little bit extra friction, but not enough that that opts people out. So yeah, there's definitely that fine balance there within that.
Speaker 1 18:44
And I love what you're talking about with testing it like, you know, you're teaching our people in tribe and SGC to actually try these things and see and get results, and then know what works and what doesn't work. And you know, just knowing that, okay, we're not getting the best quality leads. Let's try adding that. Question seems so simple, but it's if you're not measuring it, how would you know that? Yeah,
Speaker 3 19:07
and without a doubt. And the worst, the worst thing you can do with your Facebook and Instagram ads is to set and forget them. Yeah, they're not things that should be put on, at least initially. You can't just put them on and leave them for a month and sort of see what happens. Yeah, nor do you need to be refreshing every 30 minutes and seeing what happens the best. We've just got an amazing new group of members that we're doing some Facebook ads work with at the moment. And what we're talking about with them is that, because a lot of them, it's their first sort of time seriously looking at Facebook ads, which is so exciting and we're talking about that, we put these ads on and we just let them go for three or four days. Within these ads, we do the objectives and all those sorts of things that we'll talk about later on, but we do all those things, and then we just let Facebook do its thing for a little bit. And then after three or four days, when it's spent a bit of money and Facebook, like, picks winners for us and stuff like that, then we come in and we just make a few adjustments. We like, Ah, well, that's working pretty well, but that's not working so well. Like, and we just let the market decide, and that's the the biggest thing that too often as creatives, we get a little bit caught up in needing the video or the photo to be perfect, and needing like that. If that students hanging upside down off the bar, then we can't put like or if this person's hair is out of place, or the foot's not quite pointed perfectly, we can't put it up there and look, maybe your audience resonates with that. And not putting and not having that foot pointed might might not work, but you've just got to test it, because the only thing that matters it's not what you like, it's not what me and Beck like. The only thing that matters is what a potential new parent is going to like. So if you put the perfectly pointed foot out there, and it's the one that gets the leads, awesome. That's what you go with. But if you test that one against a kid that's not quite doing the right thing, and that second one gets all the leads, well, then you've got to take that feedback as well. The only thing that matters is the feedback.
Speaker 1 21:14
Haven't we found that a lot with the ads that even with pause like I'll find that something that I think would never work, has just worked so beautifully. And then other things that I think this is going to be the gun thing that's going to work so well hasn't worked. Like that's the thing. It's there's there seems to almost be no rhyme or reason to that in my head. But as you said, you've just got to trust the process and trust what is working at the time, right? Yeah, without
Speaker 3 21:41
a doubt. And once you are more confident with understanding the setup and what you're doing, then all this testing stuff is actually just quite easy. That's one thing that the the ads manager does make it really easy for you to do, like, ah, these two, these two photos and videos aren't quite working right now. Well, I'm just going to duplicate and just add a new photo, and away we go. It's like it ends up being once we know what we're doing and once we understand it well, then it ends up being a two minute process just to set something up and keep it going again. I
Speaker 1 22:13
love it. I love it. And so people out there, Nat, you're just saying to check on YouTube, get your basics, start understanding it better,
Speaker 3 22:23
100% so like, just, like, just start, like, you've got to, and you've got to commit to spending some money on it as well, right? Like, you've got to think, okay, like, I'm willing to spend $250 to try doing a campaign properly. And maybe that means spending $20 a day for 12 or 13 days, but getting something out there, having a clear objective around that, and actually trying to achieve a specific goal with it. Rather than just, I'm going to put up. I've heard of need to put up ads, so I'm just going to chuck them out there and hope that I get some inquiries. It's that that that approach probably isn't going
Speaker 1 23:05
to work. Yeah, and I know that you're really big on teaching everyone in tribe and SGC about that side of things, like how much you know, what sort of things you're going to get from how much you get, and all of those metrics are are so crazy to know. And when you're knowledgeable on those, it makes a huge, huge difference as well. Oh,
Speaker 3 23:26
absolutely like. And I think, look, to be honest, that could almost be a whole nother podcasting that as well. Should we? Should we? Should we? Because we, as always, we're like, do we have enough to talk about? Do we have enough to talk about? I think, why don't we? Why don't we pause here BEC for our audience, and we will do the second half of that, because there's loads more that I want to dive into. And rather than this being a big, long, 60 minute episode, let's do part two. Facebook ads with Nathan and Beck.
Speaker 1 23:55
I love it. I love it. Well, we look forward to chatting to you guys in part two. We hope you've enjoyed this and have been inspired. Of course, if you would like to learn from the amazing Nathan, you can certainly join our tribe. We would love to have you in there. It's $39 a week, which is a lot cheaper than those companies that you were talking about, where they're charging, you know, $1,000 a month. You can learn from Nathan, step by step, how to do this stuff, set them up and have the incredible success that our members have had. But we hope you have the most incredible week, and we will see you guys next week with part two. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Everyone. Bye, bye. We
Speaker 2 24:32
hope you enjoyed this episode of the dance principles United podcast. If you'd love to learn more from us, we have a special offer just for our podcast listeners, go to the link in the show notes right now to get two weeks free in dance principles, United tribe, we would love to see you there. You.
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