Plan with Me 📝 Facebook Ads for Your Online Course Launch | 20

So you’re relaunching your course or membership and you’re ready to run ads… Knowing where to spend your ad budget and which types of ads to run is key to successfully amplifying your live launch. Listen to this episode of Market, Scale, Grow to learn more about how I help my clients plan their live launches.

HUGE DISCLAIMER: If you're thinking about running ads for an upcoming launch, it's important that you're running ads to a proven offer.  This means you've previously sold the course/membership at least a handful of times.

Once you're ready to use ads to amplify your launch, you'll want to be sure to plan out the Registration phase, the Launch Event, and the Open Cart phase. 

Registration Phase
Goal: get people excited for and registered to attend your event
Ad Type: conversion ads to warm and cold audiences --> get people to sign up for the event
Budget: 90% of the total launch budget... ideally at least $25/day

I like to run these ads for 7-10 days, which is a good amount of time to let the ads optimize and fill your event, but not so long that people will completely forget about it. Consider adding in a “Last Chance to Join Us” ad for the last 24-48 hours to capitalize on people’s FOMO.

Launch Event (Webinar, challenge, video series, etc.)
No ads are usually run during this phase.

The focus of this event is to provide an amazing event that leaves your audience wanting your paid program. It is highly recommended that this event gives your audience a concrete takeaway that they can implement immediately. Be careful that you meet your audience where they are… as the expert, it’s easy to skim over things because they come naturally to us, but sometimes our audiences need us to go into more detail and to dive deeper.

Open Cart Phase
Goal: to sell your program
Ad Type: retargeting ads (traffic or reach) that point people to the sales page
Budget: 10% of the total launch budget

The cart or doors to your program will likely be open for 3-7 days during which you’ll be at the height of your visibility campaign. It is absolutely essential that you stay top of mind during this time period without getting annoying, so having a few different ad images that you rotate through every few days is a good way to keep things fresh.

**Remember that ads will amplify what is happening already in your funnel, so be sure to optimize first before running ads and to follow the data to spot leaks in your funnel.  That way you can fix them quickly.

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Episode Transcript:

Hey there I'm Jenzaia and this is Market, Scale, Grow. A podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money with weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.

Okay, so before we jump into the episode, I am super excited to share a brand new freebie with you. It's my targeting ideas for Facebook ads. If you've dabbled in Facebook ads or you've done them and you've tried them, and you're just looking for some fresh inspiration for your audiences, this freebie is for you. I share my top Facebook ad targeting groups for you so that you can have inspiration and find those people that are perfect for what you have to offer. From warm audiences to cool lookalike audiences, to cold interest-based audiences. I cover all three in this freebie had to marketscalegrow.com/audiences to grab your copy today.

Hello and welcome back to Market, Scale, Grow my name's Jenzaia. And this is a Saturday Strategy Session. Today, we are going to be talking about planning the ads for your live launch. So if you have a course or membership launch coming up, then this is the episode for you.

Before we really dive into the ad strategy and the different moving pieces that you need for your launch. I just want to make it clear that you should not be running ads until your offer has been proven. And what it means to prove an offer is that you have people who have purchased it already, that you have launched it to your email list or on social media or to a waitlist. And that some people have purchased. Now, this can be a beta sale or beta launch. It can be a founding members launch, or it could be a gigantic huge put all of your time, energy and effort into organic launching 2, 3, 4 times. As long as you have some proof that this product is wanted by your audience and that you have zeroed in on your messaging and that you are on track with this offer before you start spending on ads.

There are, I like to say five phases to a live launch cycle. There is the pre-launch runway, the registration phases for the launch event, open cart and then post-launch. Today, we are not going to be talking about the pre-launch runway or the post-launch. We're really focusing on the registration period, the launch event, and then the open cart.

So quickly, I'm just going to dive into each of those different phases. First off is the registration period, which I recommend that you do about 7 to 10 days for which is an ideal time for your ads to optimize and for people to get excited about the event, but for them to not forget. In the internet world, people forget about events really quickly and so with the registration and the registration ad, you also want to make sure that you have an email sequence going out so that you stay top of mind to these people who have registered, and they don't forget about you and don't forget about the event. The registration ads are where about 90% of your budget is going to go. Even up to 100% of your budget should be going to registration ads. The most important thing that you can be doing in the entire launch is getting people into your launch event. Whether your launch event is a webinar or a challenge or a video series, doesn't matter. You want people excited about it, and you want people going to the event.

Now during the launch event, you're not gonna be running any ads. So I kind of talked a little bit about it, but the launch event is your webinar, masterclass, workshop, video series challenge, you could do an Instagram campaign or some sort of a secret podcast is getting more popular and I've seen a couple of summits popping up recently. So whatever event that you're actually posting is your launch event. It can range from a couple of hours. If it's a webinar to a few days, to even a week long. I wouldn't recommend doing anything longer than five to seven days, especially not for a challenge because the longer it goes on the fewer people that are actually going to be participating and you want to keep as many people engaged. So you need to find that sweet spot that is long enough for you to really get your content out there, but short enough that people stay engaged. And again, during this launch event, you probably aren't going to be running any ads.

This brings us to the open cart phase where the last 0% to 10% of your budget is going to go. If you don't have much of a budget to be running the ads, I really recommend that you put all of it into the registration ads and just getting people into your event, because then you're going to do all of that amazing hard work of getting people excited, hyping them up, and really getting them wanting to buy into your program. So initially, especially if you have a smaller budget, then I recommend you only run the registration ads and you don't start these retargeting sales ads. Once your budget has hit, I like to say a thousand dollars. I definitely have and do run retargeting ads with lower budgets, but I find that they are the most successful if you have at least a thousand dollars for the entire launch budget, then we start running retargeting ads. And there are a few that I really like to run.

So the first one is just straight-up sales ads, where we're really egging on the pain points and directing people who have shown an interest in the launch event. We're then retargeting them to the sales page and just getting them to go check out the sales page. The second one that I love and I run for pretty much, all of my clients is testimonial ads. The two that I like to run are video testimonials. So if you have video clips from your past students or your past members or current members even, then you can run those as ads. You want to keep it at about like the minute mark is a good target range. So you can pull different clips and put them together or if you just have one clip and using that, but video testimonials are great. And then the other one is carousels, where you have the texts that the people have written, whether it's a Facebook quote or they've emailed it to you, or that you have a feedback form. Pulling out their quotes and then having an image, like the carousel image that people can scroll through. So that's the second type of ad that I like to do in the open cart.

The last one, which is so powerful is the abandoned sales page or the abandoned cart ad. And this is where you're just a little bit creepy saying like, "Hey, I think you might've been interested in this program because you were on the sales page." You don't need to say that part, but like, "I think you're a little bit interested. You can do nothing and not change your life, or you can join my program and these things will happen. This is how it will get better. So join me and the hundreds of other people who are already inside the program and let's get started today." Whatever that is, making it a video, making you talking directly to the camera and really just highlighting how your ICA's life will be different if they join the program today. And then that is like I said, the abandoned sales page or abandoned cart ads. So that is only for people who land on your sales page or land on your checkout page, but then don't buy, you can retarget them, have them see that video, send them back to the sales page. And hopefully, that will be the little push that they need.

People who have landed on your sales page, but haven't bought are also perfect for those testimonial ads because that social proof just helps build up and build up and build up. And it is really powerful to have testimonials and that often helps push people over the edge. So those are, are my favourite retargeting ads.

Now, something I don't think I said is with the sales ads that were grabbing onto the pain point. And just basically anyone who has shown an interest in the launch event gets shown the sales ads... For those ones, what I like to do is refresh the images on them every day or two days so 24 to 48 hours, because we want to stay top of mind and we want people to see the ads again and again and again, but at the same time, we don't want them to be like, "oh, I've already seen this ad like 20,000 times!" Right? So if you switch out the image after 24, 48 hours, then it keeps showing up. And just like that slight variation allows people to see fresh content and not get annoyed by you and your brand, because that is definitely not our intention.

So I hope that this has helped you to kind of get an idea of some of the ads that you can run during a live launch. Don't forget that your ads are going to amplify what you're doing organically. Ads are just a traffic source. They are not going to make your page convert better. They're not going to help make your offer better. So making sure that all of your pages, your opt-in pages, your sales pages, your checkout page, that everything is optimized as much as you can. And making sure that again, like I said, at the beginning that you have a proven offer before you start running ads is going to help the ads be more successful. Then once you have the ads running and you've done a launch with the ads, you'll have even more data that you can look at and that you can make tweaks to the funnel that you had so that you know, where if anywhere, but where there are like holes, leaky holes in your funnel so that you can improve that sales page or improve the messaging that you're using, whatever the data is showing you to just follow those numbers. And over time that will allow you to fully optimize your funnel and ensure that you are making the best decisions for your business.

If you're looking for support for running ads for your next live launch, I would love to help you. So head to marketscalegrow.com/booknow so that you can book a call with me and we can chat through your needs and I can learn more about your business to find out if that's something that I can help you with. I will see you, or I guess, talk to you next week.

Thank you for listening to today's episode today was brought to you by Dubsado my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado for 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.