6 Things You MUST Know About Marketing Courses With Facebook Ads

Key Takeaways

after selling over $50 million worth of online courses and coaching programs using Facebook ads I've seen and made pretty much every mistake there is to make and I've also learned exactly what it is that differentiates those course creators that succeed and scale their business using Facebook ads from those that try and fail and so what I want to make sure is that you're able to succeed with Facebook ads for your course and that you can scale and grow profitably using Facebook ads so in this video I'm going to teach you the six things you need to know before you Market your online course using Facebook ads now I'm going to give it to you straight some of these things you might not want to hear but they are things that I think every course creator should hear if they are starting to use Facebook ads for their business so there's going to be six very honest truths about Facebook ads and online courses so the first thing you really need to know is that when you start your ads you are likely not going to be profitable despite what a lot of people out there will tell you you are not going to turn your ads on and have a Magic Fountain of money start pouring into your bank account that's just not how it works you likely won't be profitable out of the gate and that is especially true if it's a brand new offer brand new product and you're just starting out and you have no organic traffic meaning you haven't actually tested your product in your offer with existing organic or free traffic if you just created something and you're starting Facebook ads to get traffic to that thing and you were hoping that it would be straight away profit then I am sorry to tell you that it's likely going to be a lot of work work from here and you are just getting started the reason is because it takes time to optimize everything you are going to need to optimize your ads your leing pages your webinar if you're running a webinar your sales Pages your email follow-up sequence every piece of your sales funnel and your ads will need to be optimized to get you to the point where you're not only profitable but able to scale we'll talk more about that a bit later on in the video but what I really want to communicate to you here is that you need to have the right mindset and the mindset to take into this is that you need to focus pick a business model pick a sales funnel I don't care if it's a webinar if it's a lead magnet into a core booking doesn't really matter the point is that you pick a sales funnel and you stick with it and you focus you come in you start running traffic to that and you systematically start optimizing and improving that what I see so often is a course crator will come in they'll set up an automated webinar they'll get that running with a series of emails and a landing page and everything else they need and they'll start running some ads that webinar won't convert the ads won't be profitable and next thing they'll jump over to something different like a low ticket offer or they'll start running a call booking funel or try and use sales calls to sell their program or something else this doesn't work because it's essentially just starting back at square one where you've got a brand new thing and you're running some traffic to it with Facebook ads and it's going to take time to optimize everything but if you do that you test it it doesn't work you jump to something completely different then boom you're at step step one again you've got to optimize so the key here pick something pick a business model pick a funnel focus on it and just focus on optimizing understand that the traffic you are buying from Facebook ads is going to come in you're going to collect data and then you're going to use that to optimize now that leads me to the second point but before we get there if you're enjoying this video please all I ask that you do is tap that like button below it really does help the channel it helps get this video in front of more people that might also find it helpful and if you want to hear more from me hit that subscribe button hit that little bell you'll get notified whenever I release a new video which is every week on Facebook advertising and digital marketing for online course creators coaches and Consultants all right so number two thing you need to know is that you're probably going to suck at ads when you first get started the truth is if you've never done it before it's just like anything else you've never done before you're probably not going to be great at it and it takes time to build that skill and the thing I'm going to tell you about Facebook ads is it's not a skill it's a series of skills you need to understand marketing you need to understand copywriting you need to understand what makes a good creative meaning an image or a video on the platform and if you're doing everything yourself meaning you're creating your own sales funnels you need to apply those skills and you need to develop those skills for building a sales funnel and writing copy for learning pages and sales pages and emails and everything else as well and so the reality is you shouldn't feel bad about it but but when you do come in and you start running ads and you're not good at it have the mindset of a student realize that this is something you are new to don't beat yourself up but come in there with the mindset that hey this is new I'm learning this skill I'm going to develop this skill and actively study and improve now there are a few ways you can do this so if you want to put this into action what I recommend is start to study marketing read books a few books that I recommend you read right away if you're even thinking about running Facebook ads are breakthrough advertising cash advertising and The Wizard of ads start with those three start reading things online and just consuming and learning but then the most important thing to do is to actually put it into practice especially with copywriting the way to develop that skill is to practice start writing things write as many ads as you possibly can write emails write sales Pages write landing pages start to just practice practice practice that copywriting skill and it's going to help you across the board from your ads right through to your sales funnels and everything else that you write in your business another great way to do it is to take a course like take a course on Facebook ads I've got mine Amplified ads I'll pop a link in the below Shameless plug um but if that's something that you're interested in if you like taking online courses that's always an option as well same as if you want to learn specific skills like copywriting take a copywriting course take a course on Creative or marketing the key here though is to come in realizing that hey I'm new to Facebook ads and this is not something that just happens overnight I need to develop that skill and I need to develop the marketing skills if I'm going to succeed with Facebook ads longterm for my course business all right so the third thing you need to know is you need to approach it like a professional okay if you really want this to become a six or seven figure sales funnel generating ongoing revenue for your business and with Facebook ads that you can scale the way to do it is to approach it like a professional and we kind of touched on that in the first point where we talked about that process of continual optimization and realizing that when you get started it's a case of iterating optimizing improving until you get to that profitable stage and where you need to be but just to dive deeper into that now I think this is really important and deserves its own point in this video is that professionals approach things with structure professionals have systems and professionals collect data and do things in a very specific way so what I recommend to you is when you get started running ads for your course approach it like a professional so here are a few things that I do in running ads for businesses that I own and for different clients and things that make it a much more professional approach and that eliminates mistakes but more importantly it gives me everything I need to avoid wasting money to see what needs to be improved and then to actively take steps to improve those things so let's say we have a webinar funnel I'm I'm going to first be tracking every piece of data from my Facebook ads right through to the end of the funnel so I'm going to be tracking on my ads things like my cpms meaning cost per Impressions my click-through rate my link clickthrough rate I'm going to be tracking the ad quality I'm going to be tracking my cost per lead my cost per purchase I'm going to be tracking my landing page conversion rate my webinar attendance rate my replay view rates I'm going to be tracking how many people click the links in the webinar to see the offer and to buy the offer I'm going to be tracking how well the sales page converts okay so those metrics are just a few things that I'll be tracking I have it all in spreadsheets and I'm tracking that on a daily and weekly basis in spreadsheets because what gets measured gets improved you've probably heard that before um it's not a saying that I just made up but it's a common saying in the marketing space what gets measured gets improved meaning if you're not actively measuring and tracking these things then you're not going to know what you need to focus on and what you need to improve because if I'm tracking those numbers I can then look at it and go well my landing page converts at 10% meaning 10% of the people that actually click my ads and visit the landing page convert into a webinar sign up that allows me to then identify well that's a weak point and I know based on my benchmarks that a 30 to 40% conversion rate on my learning page is where I need to be so then I'm not just testing random things here I'm going well my ads are doing okay they're sending traffic to the landing page but the landing page which just isn't converting so then I know to focus my energy my efforts my time my money on improving that learning page bringing the learning page conversion rate up which then is going to bring my cost per lead down and take me one step closer to getting to that profitable funnel with Facebook ads okay then I can identify the next big thing that I need to focus on I can create tests around that I can optimize and improve it another thing that's really important to note here is as a professional I'm testing things with as few variables as possible now what I mean by that is my tests are not scattershot I don't test an ad and then say well that didn't work I'm just going to create a new ad meaning write some new copy and whip up a new image and test some new ads what I'm doing is I'm looking at that data and you need to be breaking it down and understanding what you should test next creating a hypothesis around that and then creating a test that has only one one variable so let's say I look at my ads and I notice that my click-through rate is very low if I've only tested one or two different creatives and nobody is even paying attention to my ad and clicking on it then I might say hey I need to test new creatives in this situation because my landing page conversion rates are okay my webinar attendance is great no one's actually clicking my ads I really need to test that and fix that part of my overall process so I would go and test a bunch of new cre creatives in this situation see if I can bring my clickthrough rate up now if then I noticed that my link click-through rate was low meaning my click-through rate all was good but my link clickthrough rate was low meaning people were clicking on my ad maybe the C more button but then they reading my copy and they weren't actually clicking the link well that tells me I need to now focus on testing and optimizing my copy I need to improve the ad copy to convince more of those people that are reading it to click the link and go to my landing page so at that point I'll create new copy run test optimize and improve that and then I'll look at what the next thing is that I need to improve I'm not just going in scattershot and testing this that and doing all these different things I'm taking a very structured approach now if you want to learn more about that testing process I'll pop a link up here for you now if you want to check that out the final thing I'll say about testing again is I'm testing one thing at a time let's go back to that landing page example and say that hey I want to improve my landing page I'm not just going to to create a new landing page and send all my traffic to the new page because that introduces a new variable which is time if last week I was running traffic to landing page a and then I just turn that off and this week run traffic to landing page B how do I know that the new ads that I'm testing this week or that some other variable maybe it's summer break now and it wasn't last week so people are responding differently so there could be some other variable that's been introduced this week that wasn't there last week that's affecting that test so what I'll do instead is I will create a second variation of the learning page and then I'll set up a split test and I will direct 50% of traffic to landing page a which is the existing one and 50% to landing page B which is the new one and software will automatically send half the traffic to each page and I can run those in tandem together over a week or two depending on how long it takes to achieve statistical significance and then I will determine which landing page converts best so you can see there what I've done is taking a professional approach I've run tests while removing as many variables as possible and having only ideally one variable all right we went a bit deep on that one now we're moving on to number four which is volume matters one of the biggest mistakes I see people make and it happens all the time is people will come to me and they say hey here's my new ad that I'm about to start for my webinar or for my uh online course funnel what do you think and I'm like that looks great but can I see the rest of them and they say well no we're just starting with this one huge mistake volume matters one of the biggest advantages Facebook gives us is it's not like a billboard we're not paying a few thousand to run a billboard ad so we have to design this beautiful one ad and get it just right with Facebook we can test a bunch of ads we get data and feedback very quickly on those ads and then we can pause Those ads start new ones run new tests and it's very cheap and easy to do that so you need to be taking advantage of that you need to be testing multiple creatives multiple pieces of copy and you need to be doing that on an ongoing basis because that is how you're actually going to get great results with your ads I recommend if you're just starting out start with four to five different creatives and three to four different sets of copy and then that's just a starting point run those tests get your results and then start the next wave of tests and the next wave of tests you need to be constantly testing new creatives and copy if you're going to succeed all right so number five is just remember this one thing ads only amplify what you already have now what I mean by that is if you have a product or a service or a funnel that isn't generating sales with your existing organic traffic so if you have some website visitors and you put the offer on your website or if you have a YouTube channel or whatever and you're driving traffic to your funnel and it's not getting sales then Facebook ads are not going to fix that for you Facebook ads are simply a traffic Source it's a way to buy traffic and get more people into your sales funnel to buy your product or program it is not a Magic Bullet so if you have organic traffic and is not selling take the time to optimize the funnel first make sure that you can actually generate sales with your existing traffic before you run Facebook ads because if you're not generating sales otherwise and you turn on Facebook ads it is simply going to amplify what you've got meaning you'll still get very few sales but now you'll be spending money to to do so and it's likely not going to have a good outcome so I highly recommend if you've got organic traffic or if you can get organic traffic use that because it's free to test your funnel to optimize the funnel when you get that working then start Facebook ads and they will amplify that for you and they'll bring in more sales but if you're not getting sales they're not going to turn things around for you now number six is unfortunately you probably don't want to hear this but this never ends there is no promised land that you finally when you get everything working just right and you can scale to the moon and suddenly you've got a seven fig course business with your Facebook ads running like clockwork it is constant work creatives will fatigue offers will fatigue you need to be refreshing things constantly Facebook make changes that dramatically affect the performance of your ads things happen that we just cannot predict so this is an ongoing process so that picture of a you know hands-off business where you get your Facebook ads up and running and everything is magical unfortunately it's just not the way things work and you do need to keep working at this and keep optimizing and keep improving forever the good news is you can scale and you can do very well with Facebook ads and online courses when you get it running if you follow these six things that I just mentioned so I would love to know which of these six things resonated most for you have you made any of the mistakes that I mentioned in this video let me know in the comments let's have a discussion about that and remember remember if you've enjoyed the video all I ask in return is that you tap that like button and if you want to hear more from me hit subscribe hit that little bell you'll get notified whenever I release a new video as always thank you so much for watching appreciate your time and I hope to see you in the next video bye [Music] [Music]