FINAL MEGAN
===
[00:00:00] Mia Fileman
Are you tired of empty promises and stolen ideas? Me too. Got. Marketing is a podcast for marketers and small brands who want real talk and clever strategies without the bs. Running an online business is hard, but everything gets easier when your marketing starts performing. I am Mia FileMan, your straight shooting campaign loving friend here to talk marketing, running a business, pop culture, and everything in between.
Let's dive in.
Hello, friend. You know I'm a campaign tragic and I've said it a thousand times. You don't need a big budget to run a bloody brilliant campaign, and today's guest is living proof. Megan Winter is an award-winning meta ad specialist and the founder of Loom Marketing. But until recently, she didn't think that campaigns were for small businesses like hers.
That changed with the, it's not You, it's them. Campaign she created after hearing me preach the virtues inside Marketing Circle. So what happened next? Ah, just a casual 127% lift in traffic and a 700% increase in organic engagement. So in today's episode, we are breaking down how she went from campaign skeptic to campaign convert, and why this campaign nearly made her poop her pants. Yes, really welcome to Gut Marketing. Megan.
Megan Winter
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.
Mia
You have been a meta ad specialist for over a decade now, but until recently you didn't. Believe in the power of small business campaigns. What has changed?
Megan
Well, I think it's not that I didn't believe in the power of campaigns, it's that I didn't believe that polished or produced campaigns were for small business.
I thought it had to be scrappy, and I also had this really funny idea that my clients didn't want [00:02:00] me to be like. Too shiny or like too presented. I guess. It's like this weird mindset thing that I had. So what's changed? I mean, I've been around you for too long, obviously, and I thought, you know, I just have to give this a crack and I have this mentality of do it well or don't do it at all. So after being in Marketing Circle, I thought, we'll just give it a crack. And have a go. Yeah. I really understand where you're coming from with this idea of like the very produced, especially considering that a lot of small businesses were social first, right? Yeah. And I think I've also, like, I've worked in corporate and I saw the level of budget and effort and time that went into producing campaigns, and they would just take forever with not a lot of real.
Objectives, they were like, oh, we're gonna produce this campaign because the marketing manager's gonna get their bonus. Like that was pretty much, you know, the kind of metrics that we were working to. It's like, and that even as a meta consultant, like coming in and working for some really big, well-known global brands, they were like, we just want this many likes or this many follows. And I kind of got a little bit disheartened from campaigns and I think I just needed to have a bit of a reset and a refresh and really. Get back to what they actually are and what they can do.
Mia
Well, we're very happy to welcome you back into the fold. So campaign is not a pineapple word. I've mentioned this before.
It's hard to describe what a campaign is to people because it's different for different people. So I'd love to know, now that you've just gone through this process, what is your definition of a campaign?
Megan
So I think a, a campaign is really just a defined effort with a clear goal wrapped around an idea or an insight.
That's kind of how I think of campaigns.
Mia
I love the simplicity of that. That's awesome. Keep it simple. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so let's talk about the fear factor. You said you were pooping your pants about the investment. What got you over the line to spend a couple of tens of thousands of dollars on this campaign?
Megan
Yeah, I think all up, I. Spent about [00:04:00] 15 grand and that's a lot of money. Like for a small business, it was a big investment to go and spend it within a period of a couple of weeks. What got me over the line, I was actually in one of my calls, so I run a thing called the ROAS Lab, which is where I coach people to learn how to run their own meta ads
And I heard my own advice. I was like, something that I always say is until you test, it's just a guess. And I was like. Oh, yep. I'll tell you, Tess, it's just a guess. So I guess I have to just have a crack and see what happens. And the other thing that I say to my clients all the time is, nobody cares about your business as much as you do.
Nobody is sitting there thinking about you or nobody knows all of the things and can join the dots as much as we can for our own businesses. And again, I heard myself say that and I was like. Oh my God, I have to actually do this for myself and just, yeah, I figured I just had to kind of take my advice.
Take your advice. Like I'm paying to be in Marketing Circle as well, uh, listening and hearing what you have to say about campaigns. And the other thing that I think helped get me over line was actually just really going into the catastrophization of it. So going into the, what's the worst thing, like the.
Really the worst thing that could happen, and it wasn't that bad. So I just kind of thought, worst case scenario, you know, I spend $15,000 and either nobody knows about it and nothing happens. Or you know, people laugh at me and I make a fool of myself. Yeah. Yeah, and that's not that bad. Yeah, who cares?
Mia
Yeah. I honestly believe that the fear of like making a fool of yourself coming off cringe is kind of a necessary part of the process. That's when you know you're doing it right, because it means that you're really pushing yourself outside of your safety comfort zone.
Megan
Oh, a hundred percent. I think, you know, I was just really leaning into the cringe, and that almost got me across the line.
I was like, this has to be cringe. It's meant to be cringe, and I am scared. About this, like I'm feeling the fear. So that's what I have to do. Like every time I get presented two different design options, I go with the one that makes me feel nervous or the one that makes me feel a little bit scared because nothing good happens in the safety zone.
So yeah, fear is good.
Mia
Totally. Alright, well let's talk about the campaign. So it is a Valentine's Day campaign with a twist. It's an anti-marketing campaign. Where did the idea for, it's not you, it's them come from.
Megan
I think it evolved over time. Like I really switched my messaging around maybe towards the middle of last year to say, meta ads can suck the life from you.
Or I would say to my clients, like, meta ads can suck the life from you. And that's what I, I'm here to kind of overcome and I'd switch my messaging to reflect that. And then I kind of was just really paying attention to what my customers were saying. And because I was so focused on. Getting my marketing right.
I think I've been the marketer that doesn't market themselves for over a decade, [00:07:00] and I'm always looking for client insights and never really my own. So I had all of these conversations with business owners and people who had used agencies in the past, had been with coaches, had joined really, really well known mentoring programs, and I was just hearing the same thing over and over. Insight from my clients and from my students was that it's not meta ads that suck. It's actually the people who are using them and teaching them. And it's actually that a lot of agencies really do kind of suck right now, and the whole model around that. So the idea really just came from listening. To my customers listening to the conversations that I was having with business owners, pulling that one little insight out and going, you know what?
It's actually not you. You don't suck. Your business doesn't suck. Even meta ads don't suck. It's the people that are using them suck in the way that they're using them. And so I really just leaned into that. Yeah, it kind of evolved from there.
Mia
Yeah. I mean, I always [00:08:00] say that marketing is just really good listening.
Tell me why many meta ads. Agencies suck today. And I 100% agree. And that also validates that this insight is quite universal because you know you've got the right insight when everyone's like, yeah, that's so true. They suck. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, what specifically is sucky about them.
Megan
I mean, even just the messages and things that I got from people with the little kind of subtle messages that I had throughout the campaign, people were like, oh my God, yes, that happened to me. So it is really universal. People are. Picking up, you know, they, they were picking up the subtleties of it. So, I mean, there's a few things.
One is that you are sold the shine. Like you people put their best foot forward. They usually put their founder in front of the marketing on stages, all of those kind of things. And then. Either they do the onboarding or a really great trained salesman will do the onboarding, and then you're kind of palmed off to basically what I would call an expensive intern.
So, you know, people were like telling me that they were having experiences with agencies where they were explaining to the interns like what Synergy was and what customer insights were and what creative thinking was, and. Even, you know, I mean, not to mention the intricacies of meta ads, because meta ads have to be marketing first, and so you can't just be a junior running a meta ad campaign. You have to have a really solid understanding of marketing first, and then the meta ads come after that. So there was really like the expensive intern that I kept hearing over and over. That's definitely an archetype. Yes, the expensive intern. I've had one of those. Yeah. And then I set up a bad ads hotline.
So it was kind of like all of the things that people were were telling me. So there was the expensive intern, there was the cookie cutter approach. So the cookie cutter approach is where the copy of the ads. Could literally be any brand. And I've seen this so many times with clients that have been with other agencies and then they come to us and you know, I say to them, this copy is really not you. What's happened? And they've said, yeah, we pushed back on that. But the agency said, we have to trust them. This is what sells. We have to go with this. And it is so cookie cutter. And to me that's. Such a, you know, it's such a common but really bad problem that we are seeing in the industry. The other one is that you just have to spend more. So a lot of agencies and coaches and mentors will say Your ads aren't working. Just spend more. And again, really, really common popular advice. That is just really bad advice. If you are spending more on something that's not working, you're telling the machine that you're happy with the results. And for it to keep going in that direction.
So I leaned into that idea. And then the other one was, we are just testing. So we're just testing forever. Basically, you know, three, six months have gone by and the agency's telling you, we're just testing. We are getting really valuable insights. We can't stop now because all of that amazing, you know, momentum and insights that we've gained will be lost, which is a myth. It's a really great myth to keep you on with them. Those were the things that I just heard over and over again. I also chucked in. A funny one that I hadn't actually heard before, but I thought it was hilarious, which was, you know, your ad campaigns aren't working because Mercury is in retrograde. So I mean, it's pretty much the same.
It's pretty much what agencies are telling their customers. I just heard those things over and over and over again, and I was just sick of hearing them. And so I just thought I've gotta, I've gotta do something about this, but I don't wanna just like call it out. And it's not about like shaming agencies or anything like that.
It was, it was just like no fluff, straight shooting. You know? This isn't good enough. Our industry sucks right now because of this. And I don't wanna be a part of it. I wanna be a part of the solution.
Mia
Yeah, I honestly think you can get away with almost anything if you wrap it in humor though. So I think that that's really clever on your part.
Megan
Like I said, we lent into the cringe and we really went there.
Mia
Okay. So then how did you move from this insight that you gathered around sucky agencies to concept and then eventual. Execution.
Megan
I had an idea, so I had a, a little spark of an idea towards the end of last year and I thought, I've gotta do this properly.
It does lend itself to Valentine's Day because it was all about the relationship, that it's not you, it's not them. It's, you know, the agency's kind of. Gaslighting and you know, bait and switch and all that kind of stuff. And so I gave myself a deadline for one, which was kind of a, I wouldn't have necessarily picked to go that tight with timeframes because you know, 14th of of Feb, everybody kind of shuts down over Christmas in January.
So we literally had a few weeks to pull this thing together. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. But self-imposed deadline, lots of shower thoughts, lots of just. Brain dumping. Uh, and then I roped in the experts really quickly. So I had this idea. I was mulling it around. I kind of had a few bits and pieces and yeah, I just roped in the experts as quickly as I could.
So, and, and we just fitted in like Parkinson's law, kind of said, okay, we've got a couple of weeks to pull this thing together. So we pulled it together in a couple of weeks. And yeah, that was kind of how we went from insight to conception. There was no fanciness about it. It was. Still pretty scrappy and scrambly, but that seemed to work as well.
Mia
Yeah. Well, we both know that marketing is a team sport, so who were the experts that you brought onto your team for this?
Megan
Yeah, so I, I think I actually ran it through Marketing Circle in potentially a hot seat towards the end of last year, and that kind of gave me the idea that. I had to park this. I couldn't just do this as like a scrappy campaign, which I was thinking of doing.
I was thinking of doing it as like a more of a quick and dirty, which everyone said like, no, this has legs. You need to do it properly. So that was a good sense check when I was bringing it to life. So the actual execution of it. So Steph Hansen for creative direction, photography and videography, and pulling all of that together, [00:14:00] the visual assets.Renee Wallace from Cultivate Assembly for the actual like design, the graphic design side of it. The night before I went live, I asked Brooke Huckabee to just check that my Google Analytics was all tracking, uh, which it wasn't. So she jumped in and made sure it was, and I had a walking meeting with you and I think a couple of, you know, just sense checks with you. Just doing that, bringing people in. I've always worked in such a silo and bringing people in. It just like. It really upleveled it, but it also sparked so many more ideas and really just took it to that next level. So yeah, it was, it really was a team effort and it was so fun to work with. You know, those people who are amazing at what they do.
It was just it. It could have gone so badly if I had enough, got people who were so good at what they do, and it was just having those x. Spurts there who really just took it and ran with it. I could give my vision, I could give my, you know, outcomes and, and kind of direct or lead the [00:15:00] direction of it, but then I was so confident that what they would deliver would be bang on, and that's how we could actually deliver it in the timeframe that we did. So, yeah. Yeah.
Mia
Well, that's certainly a dream team. All the people that you mentioned, Steph, Brooke, Renee, like absolute masters in their field. When it comes to campaigns in and in different ways. So yeah, I think you surrounded yourself with the best in the business for sure. A hundred percent. Yeah.
Marketing Circle Ad
Does your marketing feel like guesswork? Be honest. Join Marketing Circle the membership for female entrepreneurs who wanna nail their strategy, boost their creativity, and create marketing that actually pays off. No cookie cutter templates and broken dreams, just practical marketing, training, mentoring and support To help you grow your business, you'll work directly with me, a legit marketing expert, and tap into a brains trust of clever [00:16:00] business owners who bring their expertise, ideas, and support to the table.
We are capped at 45 members, so apply to join today.
Mia
So you spent, you said $15,000 on the campaign production and only about a thousand dollars on ads, which is interesting 'cause that's the opposite of what most people do. So I'd love to know why that split.
Megan
I mean, ads are an amplifier. Full stop. If I could just tell people.
What ads actually are, it will just amplify what you already have. And so if you put bad ads in, you'll get bad results out. And ads now are really just all about the creative. They're not about the targeting, which is what they used to be a couple of years ago. You know, I was. Training in the Facebook Ads Academy, teaching people to run funnels and things like that, that is so outdated now because the machine is so powerful.
It knows who to put your ads in front of if your ad is good. So if you've got good creative ads, will just [00:17:00] amplify that. I wanted to make sure that I had great creative, so I spent most of it on the great creative. Also, knowing that. The lifespan of that creative would be much more than the actual effort of the campaign.
Like that video will last a long time. And also, I kind of wanted to just test what would happen with organic as well. So I didn't run ads until, until it had a chance to go with organic. And I always recommend that my clients do that as well, because if people are gonna buy from you organically, why would you spend money on them?
Ads. So I did that really intentionally. And yeah, that's kind of why that massive difference there in the investment. But that's usually what I would recommend to clients as well, is just get the great stuff and put the great stuff in and then you'll get great results. Now it's an asset that you can reuse.
Mia
Like as your campaign strategist, I would recommend that you rerun this campaign next February. [00:18:00] No one's gonna remember it, and if they do, they'll be like, oh, I loved this the first time. Here's the sequel.
Megan
I think because I had such a short timeframe, there are a lot of things that I would do differently, and so I was.
Thinking, okay, I could run this again and I would do it differently to make it a little bit different. I also kind of had like a mini campaign inside the campaign, which was the Bad ads hotline. I'm going to run that again completely separately towards the end of this year. Or maybe I'll give myself a few months break and then I'll run that as its own campaign.
That really could have been a standalone campaign, but I kind of smooshed it all in because. Overachiever over here. I wanted to do all the things, so it's got like a lot more life in it, for sure, for sure.
Mia
For sure. I'd love to know what you would do differently in those learnings, but first let's just talk about the results because they were awesome.
127% lift in website traffic, 700% increase in organic engagement. What about leads? What about sales? What about paid?
ffic, 700% increase in organic engagement. What about leads? What about sales? What about paid?
Megan
So what was really interesting with the stats as well is because I didn't run ads until it had had a chance to prove itself organically. So I had some of the, the teaser content, so the actual like little snippets of video, they went viral organically.
So you know, the reach was, it was like 70% engagement from non followers. And the campaign was all about awareness. It was an awareness building campaign. I really just put the. Creative in front of people and I did set up, like I had, you know, a landing page and I had call to actions and things like that, but the actual conversion campaign will come next.
So all I wanted to do was get people to go, oh, I know who she is and I know what she does now. And because I think in the last. Couple of years as well. I've really gone from consultant to marketing strategist to leaning into meta ads. And now I realized, okay, well I have to focus on building the business, which is Loom Marketing, not Meagan Winter.
And so this campaign was all about just really repositioning, so 500% increase. In profile visits, which on the [00:20:00] Loom marketing side, people kind of knew me but didn't necessarily know Loom Marketing, so I was really, really happy with that. I don't have like a quantitative metric on this, but the dms and the feedback that I got from people, like I had people sending me voice notes.
Going, oh my God, I think I know who you're talking about. Like they thought I was talking about specific agencies because they had had that specific encounter and I was like, well no, I'm just talking about, you know, most agencies. There are obviously some that are not, but I also had lots of clients wanting to uplevel their creative.
Again, I don't have like a quantitative around it. More of a qualitative kind of observation, but that was really interesting. I did have, and this was, this was like a soft kind of thing on the back of the campaign. Like I had people filling out my form to book a call with me, and that wasn't the aim of the campaign, but I had people like completing my quiz as to, you know, whether they should do their own ads or outsource to a non-agency agency, which is I think what I'm gonna have to call myself now.
So like I had. I had a lot of that and I had like people referring me to their audience and sharing and, and all of that. But really it smashed my expectations with traffic and awareness and engagement, which is what the campaign was all about. And then now I have to run another campaign, which is the conversions campaign on the back of that.
But you know, that's kind of the easy part.
Mia
It's gonna convert so much better for you. Because you've done this brand awareness piece, and that's the thing that people don't understand. Like you going and spending $15,000 for brand awareness, people are like, Ugh. And what? You didn't make a whole bunch of sales.
You are like, this is an investment in my brand. This is top of funnel brand building. And like $15,000 is a lot for SMEs. Yeah. But it's a drop in the ocean for bigger brands who we directly compete with. So I actually think that this was. 100% correct strategy for you, as I advised you at the time that yeah, we need to run, I say a solid brand awareness campaign at least one per year to make that investment in the brand, rather than just milking our audience with frequent sales and conversion campaigns without having done that creative emotional brand building piece.
Megan
Oh, a hundred percent. And because most of my clients, so I've got, I've got two kind of channels that people can come into. One is to learn how to run ads themselves, and I can run a conversions campaign for that. I know how to do it. I'm pretty good at it. And people who want to learn how to run ads are looking for the content that I would run in that type of campaign. So I kind of feel like I have that nailed. On the flip side of that, it's my clients in the done for you service. They're all word of mouth, and I don't think that's gonna change too much. I think a lot of the people that come to us are word of mouth, because I don't stand up on stages a lot. You know, I've done a little bit of.
Speaking here and there, but it's not my main marketing strategy. I don't go out there and people don't know about us a lot, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Like there's a lot of agencies out there who are on the front end and they're really just marketing themselves, and then they kind of get the clients in and they flick them to the team and they don't have a great result.
So there's a pretty high churn, but they're happy with that. Whereas I'm all about getting people in, becoming part of their team. I've got a rule that I would only have clients that I would have. Breakfast with or kind of change now to that, I would skinny dip with thanks to, um, Taran Brom FITT from the Body image movement.
And I was like, you know what? I love my clients. I wanna be friends with them. So I think it'll always be word of mouth and I'm okay with that. But now more people know about me. So more people will have the opportunity to even just like direct people my way to kind of become aware that I even exist. So I'm really happy with it and I will like definitely run an awareness campaign once a year now, just as part of my marketing mix.
And it's kind of like, it's really fun. It's not a stressful, I mean, it's stressful to create and there was a lot of energy management required, but with conversions, campaigns, there's a lot of like pressure there and it's stressful. Whereas this was just fun.
Mia
Yeah, and it's really important to fall back in love with marketing your business.
Otherwise it just feels like a grind. So just to wrap us up, what would you do differently, Megan?
What have been some of your biggest lessons from this campaign and advice that you can share with others?
Megan
I think energy management would be the biggest thing that I would do differently. Next time I would carve out a solid recovery period.
I would carve out a period just as the campaign is actually launching to change and adapt and evolve. I didn't. Do that. I'd actually just launched the ROAS lab because I wanted, like, I wanted to launch my podcast. I wanted to launch the ROAS lab and I wanted to launch this and because I had to do, well, I didn't have to do it, but I wanted to do it on Valentine's Day.
I was like, oh, I just have to kind of cram them all in, which was really exhausting. I was just go, go, go. I mean, I ticked three massive goals off my list by the 14th [00:25:00] of Feb, so that was good. But energy management, time management, I just really under. De demanded that. And what I would say to other people who are maybe thinking that campaigns are, are too hard or expensive is just start with a really solid or maybe a little bit unhinged slash crazy idea, and get the team around you quickly.
Get a really good team around you, and if it feels scary, that is a good sign. And you just have to kind of jump in and do it. What's the worst that can happen?
Mia
I love that advice. It's so true. You've gotta swing for the fences because anything else is, is actually even riskier. It's guaranteed to be scrolled past, like there's just too many brands competing for attention. For you to be vanilla.
Megan
Yeah. Yep, for sure.
Mia
So how can people work with you if they need to break up with their agency? Yeah.
Megan
Well first of all, I'd say it's not you, it's them. So if they're not, uh, giving you what you need, it might be time to move on. People can work with me in the roas. Lab, which stands for return on ad spend, and [00:26:00] that is where people learn how to run their own ads.
So we say think like a marketer, experiment like a scientist, and run ads like a pro. And then Loom marketing, which is a done for you ads service where we become part of your team and we run your ads for you focusing on results. So that's the two. Main ways that Loom marketing can help.
Mia
Amazing. Thank you so much for your time today.
It turned out to be a sensational episode. Thank you once again, Megan. Thank you so much.
Mia
I've started a substack as the ideal companion to the podcast. It's packed with extra insights, visuals, and nuggets that did it, make it into the episodes. Plus you can revisit past editions anytime. If you want more or just prefer to read, you'll love it.
Plus, it's a place for us to connect. Want the backstage pass to Got Marketing? Subscribe [email protected]. Thank you. You [00:27:00] listened right up until the end, so why not hit that? Subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and they're also the best way to support a small business.
You can connect with me, Mia FileMan on Instagram or LinkedIn, and feel free to send me a message. I'm super friendly.
