Hey, welcome back to the Life coach Launchpad. My name’s BJ and I’m here every week talking to you about all the online business things that, as it turns out, need to happen in order to have a successful life coaching business. I’m a business coach. I love to help life coaches make more money, get more clients, have more fun, and to do what they love to do, what they’re meant to do. And that’s coaching. So let’s dive right in.

This episode is about how to set up your first social media ad. And really every ad after that. This is for the coaches who are setting up their first ad ever. And if you’ve done it before, if you’ve tried to do it or have done many of them, you’re going to hear something different than if you’re just starting. You’re going to hear something that you need. If you have created ads before, you’re probably looking at this episode and trying to find out, well, how many audiences, how many images and videos, or how many descriptions do I need and what goes into them. I’m going to get to that. That’s exactly what’s in this episode.

But it won’t make any sense if I jump right there. So hang with me. This episode is looking at, okay, there’s organic traffic and paid traffic, and I promote both based on all the questions I get regarding the cost of starting a coaching business. I think you all know that the paid ads are often a recommended strategy, and I’m no different. And yes, we all want more organic, aka free traffic, but it takes time and paid paid ads. Social media ads are a way to accelerate organic traffic and therefore revenue coming from new clients. It’s a faster way of getting feedback on a lead magnet on a new offer that you’re putting out there, messaging, branding, anything. It speeds up the process by getting more eyeballs onto your stuff.

The downside, of course, is that the quality of the leads coming in might not be as good, are not as good as the leads that are coming in. People who hear about you organically. Imagine someone hearing about you from Google Organic search results or your podcast or your video content versus someone who heard of you for the first time from a Facebook ad. And yeah, they gave you their email address. Maybe as they’re mindlessly scrolling through social media, or they’re multitasking and they didn’t really pay much attention. They didn’t really think through what you were talking about and offering them, they’re just not as likely to be your people, let alone even finish the double opt in process if that’s how you have it set up. Also, email list management best practices become much more important. On every email marketing software in some way or another, you pay for the number of subscribers that are there, whether they’re subscribed or if they’ve unsubscribed.

Yes, I found this out a long time ago. But the hard way is that you’re paying for people who have unsubscribed. You’re paying for them having been there, and you’re also paying for whether they’re actively engaging with your content or they’re not active or they’re very inactive. They’re not responding to anything. So a couple of points there is. Yeah, you’re going to want to delete inactive subscribers. Inactive meaning they’re not engaging with your stuff. And definitely on some frequency you’re going to want to delete people who have unsubscribed periodically reach out to inactive subscribers to ask if they still want to be on your list.

Delete those who don’t respond. These are just standard practices for how to clean up your email list so that it costs you less to run. So back to the plus side of paid ads. The Internet is a big place. There is a never ending supply of potential clients. There are some limits as your budget increases or for smaller audiences, but you can see that happening and you can make changes accordingly. You could either expand your audience or refresh your creative. Creative is the words, is the language that Facebook uses for the images and videos, what you first see in a social media ad.

So how do we go about creating a strategy for creating the social ad? What we’re doing is we’re reaching out to where your potential clients are in the world and where they spend their time. So picture them going through social, doing their thing, and your ad has shown it just pops up right in front of them. What should it look like and what should it say? The idea is that we’re creating a path like I pictured as like a dotted line from where they are now to where they want to be. And we’re crafting that path so that it goes through you. You can help them get to where they want to be. You know that you are a coach. That is what you do. Most likely their first step along that path is to sign up for your lead magnet or attend your masterclass or webinar.

You get to create this path. But first, the very first action is to click on the link in your ad. That is precisely and only the goal of that ad is to get them to click through to your landing page. There are other ways to set it up so that they don’t even have to leave Facebook, but I’m not going to get into that right now. This is the standard idea of having someone click on a link in a Facebook ad and sending them to a landing page. The goal of the ad is not to sell them on your signature offer, not to explain all the benefits of coaching, just to entice them just enough to click the link. Click the link. Then it’s the purpose of the landing page to provide enough incentive for them then to take the next step, providing their email in exchange for your lead magnet or masterclass or webinar.

All right, well, how do we do this? Well, here’s a few strategies. The first and most important, if you take away only one thing from this whole episode, is that you have to create an irresistible offer. I talk about irresistible offers when it comes to your actual paid offers, and I also talk about them with your free offers. It has to be something of value both to get them to go to the landing page and especially to stay with you long enough to buy from you. That means it has to be unique, intriguing, eye catching. They have to be left wanting more when they come across your ad. One way to do this is to use wording that they use to describe their problems. No jargon.

I’ve said this before, you’ll hear it again. But this is the number one trap that many coaches fall into. Words that are everyday common language for you may not be for those who you’re trying to connect with. A lot of times that you’re trying. Your potential clients are like you, but earlier in time, years earlier, and we can forget about how far we’ve come and how much we’ve learned. But you really need to think about the words that you hear in consultations or in emails that are sent to you from clients. What are the exact words that they use? Use those. Another form of this, another point.

Describe their pain points that will stop the scroll. You need to be able to describe their challenges almost better than they can. Also, using vibrant and unique visuals will also help them stop the scroll. There are a few configurations when setting up the ad that need to be made as you go through the setup process. There are six different campaign objectives. As a coach offering a lead magnet. There’s really one that stands out among the others and that’s the lead objective. Facebook will try to get you the most leads.

And what is a lead? You get to define that, but it’s generally clicking a button, like a submit button, or viewing the thank you page. Once you define what that is, Facebook then goes and runs their algorithm and they try to get as many people to do that action as possible and as for cheap as possible. So if you have created as before, this is the part potentially that you’re waiting for is, well, how many audiences, how many creatives, how many descriptions do I need to run a great Facebook experiment? It takes 18 variations, but it’s not that complicated. It’s three audiences, three creatives and two descriptions. It’s three by three by two. Three audiences, three creatives, and two descriptions. What you’re going to do is you’re going to put them all out there. It comes out to be the 18 variations.

You see what works and you turn off what doesn’t. Now, you don’t even really have to turn it off. That’s just my way of staying organized. Facebook will funnel all of your budget into the ads, into the variations that are performing the best. Now, this is an experiment, this is a science experiment. You’re going to have a winner come out of these 18 variations and eventually you’re going to want to go through this process again. That is really the process of running successful Facebook ads. Now, out of these 18 variations, you will have something be the winner, but eventually you’re going to want to either improve that result or you’re going to naturally make a change to your messaging or something will change and you’ll want to go through the process again when you do make a change.

Here’s my pro tip. Make one change at a time. Because if you make multiple changes, you just won’t know what was the primary cause of the change in results that you see. So make one change at a time. Another suggestion, a recommendation that if you’re looking for ideas like what your ad should look like, you can look at what other people are doing for ideas. You can dedicate a set amount of time to go look at the ads that are out there. I’m talking like ten minutes max, because chances are you’re going to get started to get sucked into the Facebook algorithm and you’re going to stay there. So you need to basically set a timer for yourself.

You’re going to be done in so many minutes. And when you do this, you also need to go in with a, with being battle ready, basically ready to avoid compare and despair that it’s so easy to look at what other people are doing and think there’s something wrong with what you’re doing. And just remember that the reason why you’re there is to learn so you can take what helps you from what other people are doing and leave what doesn’t. If you have competitors, you can see exactly what their ads are by. You can look up any ones Facebook ads at I always just Google Facebook ad library and the link pops up. So that’s a very powerful tool as well. That is it for Facebook ads for today. This does get a little specific in the sense that it tells you it gives you the three by three by two framework, but there’s also more there if you would like help with your Facebook ads, you can write me an email, let me know, set up a mini session on my website and I will talk to you next week.

Until then, happy creating ads.