Is Your Online Course Business Ready for Facebook and Instagram Ads?
Social media is a pay to play market.
Even if you’ve been successful in the past selling your online course and growing your business, at some point, you’ll need paid advertising or another marketing strategy (like collaborations) to drive leads into your business to grow.
The fact is you need a predictable and reliable system for getting leads for your online business.
Leads are people who are your perfect students and ones that you can help with your online course or membership program.
Think about it this way….if people don’t even know you exist, how would they know that you can help them!
For online course creators, there are four main reasons why you would want to run an ad campaign:
Grow your email list.
Get sign ups for your webinar, challenge, or video series lead magnet for a launch or an evergreen sales funnel.
Promote your content like your podcast episodes or blog posts.
Sell your online course to a warm audience.
But, you don’t want to jump into ads if your online course business is not ready. This is a sure-fire way to waste money, time, and energy.
How do you know if your online course business is ready for Facebook ads?
Simple questions to let you know if Facebook ads are right for your business:
Do you have a website or landing page with a lead magnet (that converts)?
To run Facebook ads, you’ll need to send your prospect to a landing page.
Your lead magnet (aka opt-in, free gift, freebie) needs to be closely aligned to your online course and should take your prospect on the buyer’s journey.
For instance, let’s say that your online course helps single moms with budgeting and saving for retirement.
A budgeting lead magnet aligns with your online course and allows you to take them on the next step in the buyer’s journey.
A lead magnet that helps the single mom with parenting skills would not.
Your landing page should convert at around 30-40%. At a minimum, I like to see 30%, but for my clients, we try to get the number much higher than this.
The higher conversion rate on your landing page, the lower your cost per lead will be from Facebook ads so this is super important!
Keep in mind that if you don’t have a lead magnet that converts organically, then it won’t convert with cold traffic from Facebook ads. Make sure your lead magnet converts before you pay for traffic.
Is your online course ready to sell?
Don’t worry if your online course isn’t ready to sell. Months before your course launch is a great opportunity to list build. But you need a way to monetize your lead in the near future, whether it is selling your online course or a service that you offer your clients.
With Facebook ads, most entrepreneurs start with list building ads. This allows you to build your email list and audience for a future launch while at the same time, establish yourself as an expert and build trust and credibility.
If you’ve just started the course creation process a list building campaign can be extremely beneficial to set up a future launch for success.
If your online course is ready to sell, then I recommend a list building campaign 2-3 months prior to your course launch.
This will give you a warm audience when you’re ready to launch.
Do you have an online course sales funnel in place?
In addition to having your lead magnet on a landing page, you also need a welcome sequence to nurture your new subscriber.
What you don’t want to do, is put your new subscribers in your email system and then ignore them. What a waste of time and hard-earned money!
When you’re ready to sell your online course, you’ll need a sales page, a landing page for your webinar, challenge or video series.
The good news is, you can start simple and rework these aspects of your sales funnel as needed.
A mistake that I see many online course creators making is that they think the reason why their online course didn’t sell was because of their sales page.
The reality is, most of the time, they didn’t get enough traffic or prospects through their funnel to know what’s working or what didn’t work. It’s almost impossible to know if a sales page is converting when only 52 people saw it.
You need traffic to optimize your sales funnel! The data will tell you what you need to focus on.
Do you have a budget to spend testing your Facebook ads?
I want to start by saying you don’t need to have a huge budget to run ads. It does help to invest upfront initially in testing various audiences convert best, which ad copy and images get the most clicks.
Even if you start with a daily budget of around $10-$20, you’ll start to get data that will help you in future campaigns.
There you go! Is your business ready?
Is Your Online Course Business Ready for Facebook and Instagram Ads?