Tara Zirker combined her passion for writing and marketing and created Sunbeam Communications, a full-service, results-obsessed, forward-thinking digital marketing agency. Their goal is to create maximum impact for thriving brands and entrepreneurs by offering high-performance services such as Facebook Advertising, Google AdWords, and Funnel Analysis. She also is the creator of successful ads club to empower entrepreneurs and small business owner to successfully manage their facebook ads and lead generations. In this episode we talk about, the fundamental tools for lead generation, creating fb ads, the journey to 100K, being a boss mom and more.
What's your favorite food?
Tara eats a lot of bananas. She buys 5 -10 bunches of bananas a week. She had health problems that led her to eat a high carb low-fat diet. Her favorite raw dish is a raw lasagna.
When did you become an entrepreneur?
From a young age, she started businesses like car wash and greeting card routes, where she employees her neighborhood friends to work with her. She also had an online cosmetic company, which was featured in Cosmogirl magazine. The company took off for a little while before she left all her projects and went to college. She thought for sure that she would get a job, working from 9 to 5, before realizing that working for corporate isn’t her calling, and eventually building up her own agency later on.
What is your main goal and how do you help people with your agency?
Her company was a marketing generalist type agency, but now it focuses on Facebook Ads and Google AdWords. They recently launched a membership for business owners who aren’t quite ready to embrace an agency manage their ads, and support them through a curriculum. In short her business execute ad campaigns and manages memberships, teaching business owners how to do advertising on their own.
How did you get into this?
She took on a client which was outside of her normal space. Her job for her client was to strictly learn Facebook Ads, and it didn’t take more than six months for the client to outperform everyone else in the industry. Eventually, she started an ad side of her company, which in a couple of years started to outgrow the marketing side. Later the agency narrowed down the services to just ads, and the business is growing ever since.
What are the foundational tools for lead generation?
While training clients under Successful Ads Club, she starts from the very basic about what fundamentals you need to drive people in, such as landing pages and email. One another thing she says is that if you try to be of service to people along the way then it tends to take away a lot of the complexity. She says that sales funnel in an long experience. There is a free part and a paid part, and you want that free part to be a kind of an arc of what people will learn within your program. They should go on in a kind of emotional journey of what will it be like to actually be inside of your paid programs.
Do you think there is such a thing as giving away too much?
She doesn’t think so. She says that the thing the people pay for is experience and closed containers in which they feel safe to learn and be vulnerable. People don’t necessarily want information, they look for experience and personal guidance. She says that even when she gives away the entire ad strategy, what happens most is people come up to her and ask her to do it for them.
What are the basics of ad structure?
She says that the first phase to an advertisement is testing. She advises to test on a short, medium and a long copy, from a couple of sentences to as long as it takes you to tell your story. Then you want to test imaginary, including a couple of yours if you have a personal brand, both raw and designed images with text, and lastly, you want to test your headlines. Any good copywriter is going to spend fifty percent of their time or more on the headlines. Make sure it’s focused on the exciting parts of your program. She also says that testing with one audience, with a specific age, gender, interest, and other factors, will provide much better results.
How do you run a business as a mom?
As a mom, she was surprised to discover that instead of looking for more time to work, she is looking for more time to spend with her year old daughter. She thought that after becoming a mom she would still love to work and have that working mom schedule, and so she was surprised to find herself looking for pockets of time to be with her daughter. She says that being a parent and a working mom is a lot different than she thought it would be.
What’s been your biggest challenge?
She says that figuring out how to run a productive business and be the kind of mom she wants to be was the biggest challenge. It’s a lifelong journey, with each phase having its own challenges and victories.
Tell us about your 100K Journey?
When she was pregnant, she decided to coach entrepreneurs who were just getting started to reach the first 100k in revenue, which kind of validates what you are offering is worth continuing. She thinks that 100k is a good milestone to reach for, and is very easy to achieve if you think in terms of four clients paying you a little over 200 per month. During this journey, she discovered that she really loves about teaching lead generation, and thinking about lead generation is being the thing that she leads with most.
Do you have mentors?
She does have mentors and other strategists and consultants. She says why go through all the struggle figuring out things when somebody has done it quicker and better than you?
What’s the best advice you have ever been given?
It was a client and a dear friend of her, which was “treat everything you do like a mini marketing machine”. Don’t just post to a blog, share it organically, do a Facebook live on it and put it on your Instagram. If you are going to do a facebook live than announce it, tell people beforehand, plan it out, turn it into a mini marketing machine where people will share it and encourage others to share it.
Tell us how we can get in touch with you?
Her website is successfuladsclub.com. You can also find her on facebook (facebook.com/tara.m.zirker) and Instagram (nstagram.com/tarazirker).