36: 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 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!

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.

In this podcast episode, we'll ask some questions to find out if your online course business is ready for Facebook ads.

TRANSCRIPT:

Today we're talking about is your online course business ready for Facebook and Instagram ads? The thing is social media is a pay to play market and even if you've been successful in the past selling your online course and growing your business, at some point you will need paid advertising to continue to grow.

The fact is, you need a predictable and reliable system for getting leads into your online business. Leads are just people who are perfect students and ones that you can help with your online course or membership.

And think about it this way. If people don't even know you exist, how would they know that you could help them? But for online course creators, there are four main reasons why you would want to run an ad campaign. The first is to grow your email list.

Secondly, to get signups for your webinar, your challenge or your video series or whatever kind of lead magnet you're doing for launch or evergreen sales funnel. Another one would be to promote your content, like your podcast episodes or your blog posts, just awareness type content to get your name out there.

And the fourth is to 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 yet. That is a surefire way to waste money to waste time and energy. So how do you know if your online course business is ready for Facebook ads?

I have a quiz for you in that quiz link is in the show notes and if you want to take that quiz and walk through those questions, I will definitely let you know if your business is ready for Facebook ads. But first let's walk through some simple questions that's will let you know if Facebook ads are right for your business today.

The first question is do you have a website or landing page with a lead magnet that converts. To run Facebook ads you are will need to send your prospect to some type of landing page or a website and on this landing page you're going to have your lead magnet.

This is also called an opt in, a free gift, a freebie that needs to be closely aligned to your online course and it needs to be something that will allow you to take your prospect on the buyer's journey.

For instance, let's assume that your online course helps single moms with budgeting and saving for retirement. A budgeting lead magnet that aligns with your online course and allows you to take them to the next step in the journey would be perfect for somebody like you.

A lead magnet that helps a single mom with parenting tips is not going to do the job for you. The other point I want to let you know is that your landing page should convert at around 30 to 40%. At a minimum I like to say 30% but for my clients we really do try to get the number much higher than this.

The higher the conversion rate on your landing page, the lower your cost per lead will be from your Facebook ads. So that is super, super important. You want to make sure that your landing page converts, and also keep in mind that if you don't have a lead magnet that converts organically, then it's definitely not going to convert with cold traffic from Facebook ads.

So make sure that your lead magnet converts before you pay for traffic. Okay. And the other question I have for you is, is your online course ready to sell? But you know, don't worry if you're not quite ready to sell it yet, months before your course launch, that is a great opportunity to list build.

But that being said, you do need a way to monetize your lead in the near future, whether it's selling your online course and getting it ready to market or a service that you offer your clients so you don't want to pay for all that traffic and just have them sit on your list and forever and ever. But with Facebook ads, most entrepreneurs do start with list building ads.

When you start with the list building ad, this allows you to build your email list and your audience for a future launch while at the same time it gives you a chance to establish yourself as an expert and build cross trust and credibility.

And if you've just started the course creation process, a list building campaign can be extremely beneficial to help you set up for future launch and have it be successful. If your online course is already ready to sell, I still recommend a list building campaign two to three months prior to your course launch. And then once you're ready to sell, you are going to launch a marketing campaign to sell your online course while that lead is warm.

The next question I have for you is do you have an online course sales funnel in place? So in addition to having your lead magnet on our landing page, you also need a welcome sequence to nurture your new subscriber. So what you don't want to do is to put all of your new subscribers in your email system, and then ignore them, that is a complete waste of time and hard earned money.

Now when you're ready to sell your online course, there are other things you're going to need. You're going to need a sales page, you're going to need a landing page for your webinar or your challenge or your video series or whatever you're doing.

And then you're also need some retargeting emails. So for instance, when somebody comes to your webinar, or maybe they don't attend, you'll need some email sequences set to remind them about the replay and also encourage them to visit your sales page and just walk them through that buying process. But the good news is you can start out simple and then rework these aspects of your sales funnel as needed and the as you get along further in the process.

The one thing I do want to mention is 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 haven't even gotten enough traffic or prospects through their online course sales funnel to know what's working and what didn't work.

It is almost impossible to know if a sales page is converting when only a handful or 52 people saw it. You need traffic coming into your online course sales funnel. The next question I have for you is do you have a budget to spend testing your Facebook ads?

And I do want to start by saying that you don't need a huge budget to run ads. It does help to invest upfront initially and test various audiences and figuring out what converts best. You know in terms of audiences and ad copy in images and figuring out what gets the most clicks. But even if you start with a daily budget of around $10 or 15 or 20 or whatever you can afford, you will start to get data that will help you in future campaigns.

It's one of the reasons but not the only reason why I like for people to do list building campaigns before they do their first launch because that allows you to do some of that testing up front. And do you want to know if your online business is ready for Facebook ads?

I want you to take the quiz, go to the link in the show notes and take the quiz and I will let you know if you are ready. And thanks so much for joining us today. Course Creators. If you have any questions about Facebook or Instagram ads or how to set up your online course sales funnel or troubleshoot it, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or DM me on Facebook or Instagram.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Would love for you to rate and review the podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.