Runnings Ads to Get Gigs

Jonah shares his journey and lessons learned from running Google ads in his magic business.

The post Runnings Ads to Get Gigs appeared first on Discourse in Magic.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hello my friends and welcome to a brandnew episode of Discourse in Magic.

(00:03):
My name is Jonah Babbins andtoday we are talking about running
ads in your magic business.
But this is not a tacticalepisode, this is a story.
actually a few different storiesabout what my experience was,
became and now is with respect torunning ads in the magic business.

(00:24):
And the reason why I think that this isso important and that I was compelled to
share this with you is because we know.
I'm sure you know, I know, I know now,but we know that the biggest things that
stop you from growing is not the tactical.
It's the mental game.
And it's not like you have to psychyourself up to go and do something.

(00:45):
But a lot of times we're notdoing the thing that we know
that we should be doing.
Or when we do it, we leaveor quit way too easily.
Or when it is working, we don'tknow When we should grow it and
these are not Technical questions.
These are actually mental andemotional questions that you only

(01:06):
learn from Trying and being anentrepreneur and being a magician
and testing and doing these things.
So I wanted to share with you notonly some stories, my stories about
running Google ads specificallyin my magic business to get gigs.
I've got a whole own version of thisstory, something totally different about
running Facebook ads to sell tickets.

(01:28):
But this is about running Googleads to get gigs in my business.
And I'm going to tell you some storiesand then after I'm going to unpack
some of the things that I think youreally need to understand about it.
So let's first rewind back in time,call it 10 years ago, plus or minus,

(01:49):
I don't know exactly what it was.
I was living in my parents house.
I was trying to get more gigs andtrying to figure out how to do it.
And someone somewhere, maybeon a podcast or something
told me that I should run ads.
So what did I do?
I made a Google ads account and I wentthrough the settings and I pointed

(02:09):
all the stuff to my website and myphone number and I turned the ads on.
And what happened?
Well, after three days I got a callfor a third birthday party directly
to my phone in the middle of the day.
Maybe two days later, I got a call aboutperforming for free at a kindergarten and
at that point I was like, I don't know.

(02:30):
This isn't really what I want to do.
This isn't really working.
I looked, it spent about 500and I just said, you know what?
Google ads is not for me.
And I shut it off.
And it was a, I don't know, seven,eight, nine day long experiment that
ended with me saying, you know what?
I don't think this works and Idon't think this works for me.

(02:54):
And maybe you've had a similar experiencewith maybe ads or maybe SEO or creating
content or sending cold emails orbeing on gig sites or any of these
things, or even creating a magic trick.
You know, you've had thisexperience where you go in.
You try the thing, it doesn't get youthe result that you want, there's a cost

(03:16):
to it, like it takes your time or yourmoney, and then you say, you know what?
I don't think that this is for me.
So then five years later,five whole whopping years
later of me, not running ads.
I had a differentopportunity at this point.
I had joined forces with Benfor the Toronto magic company.
This was the beginning of 2020.

(03:37):
We were doing lots of.
Public ticketed shows and everyonekept telling us, you know, you guys
should, you know, be like loud andopen about people hiring you for gigs.
And we had been, but just randomly talkingabout it, you know, wasn't bringing
people through Toronto Magic Company.
They were bringing people to usindividually, people that had seen
us individually in their own way.
So I thought, you know what?

(03:58):
Now that Toronto Magic Companyhas a beautiful website, I
am going to run ads to it.
By the way, for context, the TorontoMagic Company is a company that I
run with Ben Train which now booksmyself and books him out to do gigs.
And we don't even do thatmany public shows anymore.
Anyways, back to the story.
So this time I did something differentinstead of opening up the ads platform
and turning everything on, I spentprobably about two days just learning

(04:24):
how to actually run an ad, all thedifferent types of ads there are.
What's the difference between broadmatch and phrase match and exact match.
If I'm looking for a phone call ora form fill, how to get the basics
of tracking set up on the website,what on earth a negative keyword is.
And if you run lots of ads, maybeall the words I said make a ton of

(04:46):
sense to you and your magic business.
And if you've never run an ad,then maybe they don't, which
is what it was like for me.
Those words did not make any sense to me.
But after about 10, 20 hours oflearning, I had a somewhat picture about
what I thought it should look like.
And I set up the ads.
It took me a bit oftime and I turned it on.

(05:08):
And what happened within 48 hours, Igot an inquiry for the biggest Contract
of Ben and I's career at that point.
It was a multi magician,multi month long booking.
You can imagine how crazy that was fromgoing from like, Hey, no one is asking us

(05:31):
directly through the Toronto magic companyto hire like multiple magicians to like
just a few days into having an ad turnedon to have it actually bring in business.
So Let it keep running,kept running the ads.
Then as maybe the timeline is makingsense to you, that was in like
January of 2020 by the end of Marchof 2020, you know what happened.

(05:56):
We had the pandemic.
I turned off the ads, maybe a coupleother gigs or inquiries had come in here
or there, but I turned off the ads andwe were doing lots of different stuff.
We were doing our virtualconventions and things like that.
And then I thought.
we've been doing these virtualshows now for a little bit.
I should turn the ads on again, but itwas like a whole different thing, right?
Like people weren't hiring me for aprivate thing, but anyways, I turned

(06:18):
it back on, it started working again.
So I thought, what if I hiresomebody to run ads for me, someone
who actually spent more than 10to 20 hours learning how to do it.
So I did, I posted in a Facebookgroup that was just a group of
people that had been, you know,been in my fraternity worldwide.
This wasn't even a group of peoplethat run ads or anything like that.

(06:42):
Someone popped up and he said, yeah,you know, I'll, I'll, I'll give
you a hand and he got it set up.
I started paying him regularly andlo and behold, the ad started working
more and we met, you know, once aweek and I said, what about this?
Let's try this and startedworking more and more.
And at a certain point,I wanted to grow it more.
And he was, Kind of doingit as a side favor for me.

(07:06):
I mean, I was paying him,but that's not what he did.
I mean, he worked in ads in the past,but it just wasn't really what he did.
So he said, look, you obviously needmore and more help and you want to
scale and grow this more and more.
Why don't you hiresomebody else to do this?
I'm happy to communicate with them.
So I did, I went through a hiring process.
He had some recommendations.

(07:26):
I went out found somepeople and I failed someone.
And that guy who I then hired has nowbeen running my ads For years since
that moment, and he runs the ads ofeverybody who's in the mastermind.
We'll get back to that in asecond, but I just want to
highlight the moments of the story.
I just opened up Google ads, triedsetting it up and didn't do anything.

(07:50):
Then I spent some time working onit, set it up and it did something.
Then I hired somebody to help medo it and then it worked even more.
And then to grow it, I hiredthe right person to do it.
And then it grew and grew and grew.
And obviously Googleads is not the only way.
I bring in bookings from lots ofways from, past clients and from

(08:10):
cold emails and from gig sites andSEO and, lots of different ways.
But this was one of thestories of one of the ways.
So what's the lesson here?
Well, the first lessonis that hard things.
probably won't work thefirst time that you do it.
The number of magicians that Ispeak to about their magic business,
you know, asking about joining themastermind, I ask how they get leads.

(08:33):
Oftentimes I'll get some versionof a story of like, Hey, I tried
doing X and it didn't work for me.
And my immediate question isalways, How much did you try?
Like how hard did you try?
Magicians say, Hey, Itried running Google ads.
Just doesn't work for me.
I tried making contentjust didn't do anything.
I sent 20 cold emails.
Nothing happened.
And yeah, hard things don'tnecessarily work the first time.

(08:57):
So my first nudge to you is if youtried something in your magic business
that doesn't work, but other peopleare telling you that this kind of thing
works, then you may want To investsome more time and resources into doing
that thing and doing that thing betterSecond thing that I learned is that
these Efforts, no matter what they are,it could be getting better at magic.

(09:21):
It could be getting better at a trick.
It could be getting better at any partof your business from sales calls to
making your website look pretty torunning ads or sending cold emails.
They are not going to workwithout you learning about it.
We live in an awesometime where you can get.
The basic information aboutanything that you need.
Can you find online for free a personto tell you exactly how to run your

(09:45):
Google ads for a magic business?
Well, probably not, but can you learnfrom people who run Google ads for
other service based businesses online?
A hundred percent.
And you can get an idea for whatyou want, what you don't want to
get the basic lay of the land.
So my second lesson here is thatmost things are not going to work if

(10:07):
you do it before you learn about it.
I am a huge advocate of just trying shit.
You know, I'm a huge advocateof try the thing, do the thing.
But part of that is notjust blindly doing it.
Part of that is learning about it,spending some time, maybe buy a course,

(10:27):
maybe hire a consultant, maybe watch 20,30 hours of videos, like try the thing,
Not just by taking action and doing it,but also by learning about the thing.
Third thing I learned is this.
Here's the biggest lesson.
When something is working for you inyour business, hire someone to help

(10:49):
you do it more and better and faster.
Let me say this again.
If something is working for you andyour business, hire somebody to help
you do it more and better and faster.
The amount of times in my businessand my life that I have limited
my growth because I thought.
I'm pretty good at this, so I'lljust keep doing it is beyond.

(11:14):
It's why I spend so much of my dollarsand time investing in education.
I have multiple.
Coaches for different aspects of mybusiness every year Ben and I hire
different magicians as magic Consultantsto help us with our tricks and with our
acts why because if something is good Thenyou want to hire a professional to help

(11:35):
you do it in your business Even better,and I hope that one of the three parts of
those lessons resonates with you becauselike I said at the beginning, a lot of
the reasons why your magic business isn'tgrowing is partially tactical, but the
reason why you don't have the tactical ortechnical information is because of some

(11:56):
sort of mental or emotional block that'stelling you it didn't work the first time.
Maybe I'm not going to do it orit didn't work when I didn't learn
about it, so I'm not going to try or.
It kind of works right now.
That's good enough for me.
Or why hire someone?
Is it going to be too expensive?
These are emotional and mental blocksthat are stopping you from doing the thing

(12:17):
that is very possibly and very likely theunlock to the next level of your business.
Now, here's the bit about themastermind that I want to tell you
that ads guy who I've been workingwith now for like four years.
His name is Sam and he nowworks inside of the mastermind.
So every single member of the mastermindwho is getting All the things that we
do, coaching and support and communityand help, and really just holding your

(12:40):
hand and guaranteeing that you hit.
revenue benchmarks in your business.
We do a whole lot of things andI'll tell you a lot more about it.
We basically help you hit the sixfigure mark, or if you're there,
he'll be hit one 50, 200 or two 50.
We've done it many times before, butanyways, that guy, Sam, he now also works
for me inside of the mastermind consultingwith all of the members on their ads.

(13:02):
So they don't have to go into the worldand hire another ads person to help them.
run their ads.
They already have an expertthat is helping them do it
hands on in their business.
So that's my lessons for you for today.
I want you to, you know, stop beatingyourself up about you tried it once and

(13:24):
it didn't work or you're doing it rightnow and, and you don't need any help.
Or even you hired someone and youdon't need to hire someone different.
I want you to think about not onlythe, technical aspects of growing
your business, but also some of themental and emotional aspects that are
stopping you or getting in your way.
Hope you learned something.

(13:44):
Hope this episode was epic for you.
Got another great interviewcoming for you next week.
Thanks for being here andI'll see you next Thursday.
Ciao.