Facebook & Instagram Ads for Coaches | The Ultimate Guide for 2024
This is how to use Facebook and Instagram ads to grow your coaching business.
Note: Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram. Both ads are set up through the same platform and can be done at the same time. I’ll use “Facebook” for the most part, but this article series applies to both Facebook ads and Instagram ads.
This is part 1 of our series, The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Coaches.
We’re talking about the FOUNDATIONS you need to have down if you’re going to create successful ads.
Facebook Ads for Coaches — The Ultimate Guide part 1: Foundations of a Successful Ad Campaign
In Part 1 of this guide, we’ll discuss…
Do Facebook Ads work for Coaches?
Should you spend money on Facebook ads?
A Foundational Strategy for Successful Facebook Ads
When to Run Facebook or Instagram Ads for Your Business
How to Use Ads in a Marketing Funnel
{Activity} do this to start making money from your ads today
Check out the rest of our series:
Click here for Part 2: How to Create High Converting Facebook & Instagram Ads
Click here for Part 3: How to Set Up Facebook Ads for Coaches
Click here for Part 4: 4 Ways to Use Facebook Ads During a Launch
Facebook Ads for Coaches: Do They Work?
Short answer: YES!
Facebook ads are key to growing your business, especially after you hit a certain point in revenue & you want to bring more people into your sphere.
Many of our clients first come to us feeling nervous about running ads. Even for 6- and 7- figure businesses, it can feel like a big risk to spend money on ads. What if you don’t see any return on your investment?
When you know how to do them right, Facebook ads are a great way to grow your audience, fill your programs, and sign new clients.
Over the course of this 4-part series, you’ll learn behind-the-scenes secrets that will demystify the ads process & teach you the same method we’ve used to get a 14X return on ad spend for our clients (aka when they put in $100, they get back $1400).
And Facebook ads allow you to bypass spending money advertising to people who would never buy from you. Because Facebook's algorithms are so smart and they have a ton of data on their users, you can reach your ideal clients fast.
Should You Spend Money on Ads?
If you’re nervous about spending money on ads, you’re exactly where you need to be right now: gathering information & learning from experts in the field before you make decisions about the best way to reach your clients & revenue goals.
By the end of this series, we hope you’ll have greater clarity around whether Facebook ads are right you at this time — and if they are, you’ll have a proven strategy to run them successfully.
And BTW, the kind of paid ads we’re talking about is NOT the same as boosting posts. Boosting can be a great way to grow your audience, but this series is about running ads through Ads Manager.
Using Ads Manager gives you a lot more flexibility around what you can do, who you can target, and what you can post.
How do Facebook Ads Work?
If you’re ready to get down into the nitty-gritty and learn how to set up your ads in Facebook Ads Manager, check out The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Coaches Part 4: How to Set Up Facebook Ads.
But first —
I highly recommend you read the full guide before you jump right into it, because there are a lot of ways Facebook ads can go wrong.
If you go into your ads before you really know what you’re doing, it’s easy to get soured on ads forever (I’ve worked with clients like this before, and it takes a lot of mindset work to move through the initial resistance that came from running ads without the full information. And that WILL hold your coaching business back).
So let’s get into the juicy, behind-the-scenes action.
How to Create Successful Facebook Ads for Coaches
There are 1,000,001 ways to run ads.
Today, we’re talking about a few different ad strategies and structures.
The best way to use ads for the highest ROI (return on investment) is to amplify what is already working with ads.
That means already knowing what works for you organically.
You are a unique snowflake and your people are unique. Your sales process is unique.
Depending on what medium you use to market – whether that is Instagram or Facebook or YouTube or SEO blog or podcasts – you need to know how your perfect person buys from you.
Then all we need to do is recreate that process with an ad funnel.
If you don't already have a marketing strategy that’s working, or things feel like they're changing and they've lost steam, we’ll address that later in this post.
But when you already know what works, you can look at what's already worked for your last amazing launch and use ads to make it even bigger next time.
#1 Distill Your Most Potent Medicine
If you look at coaches who do really, really well with ads (we think of our genius client Simone Seol), what they do is distill their most potent medicine and putting it forward.
The distillation process means taking something that is watered down and distilling it into its most potent form. That's what we're trying to do here.
This is the foundational work of you putting your weirdness forward, your edginess forward, and using language that is seductive and sexy.
Because all marketing is relationship building. With your ads, you’re trying to pull people in.
The first step in creating successful ads is asking yourself, “What is the most potent medicine I can share with people??
That's how we stop the scroll.
#2 Use an Alter Ego
Another tool that’s great for people who are less comfortable with visibility is to use an alter ego.
There's a great book called The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life by Todd Herman about how a lot of professional athletes, celebrity chefs, and people who have a large public presence use alter egos to allow themselves to grow more easily and access resource powerful energy within themselves.
You can do this with your marketing.
Have an alter ego version of yourself that you're putting forward in your ads.
That can help with some of the discomfort of making yourself more available to a cold audience or people who don't know you.
Because of the nature of ads, there will be negative comments on your ads because it's being shown to a large reach of people.
You having an alter ego that's kind of separate from yourself, even though it's a more powerful & magnetic version of yourself, can become a protective barrier.
Think about celebrity chefs who get bashed all the time. They can be like, “Oh, they're bashing my alter ego. They're not actually bashing my sensitive inner core being. That, I keep for myself.”
Same thing with ads.
#3 Being a Little Click-Baity
Yes, when you think about ads, you kinda want to be click-baity. (With integrity, of course)
For example: Here’s an ad similar to one written by a client…
“Calling all misfits and rule breakers. Want to build a six figure coaching business without having to fix yourself first? Here's my secret gift to my fellow weirdos. Download my free guide here.”
There's an element of clickbait and that is okay, that is a part of the scroll stopping.
You need to be exceptionally confident in what you're sharing. AND you need to do this with integrity — don’t make a promise you don’t deliver on. That will work against you. Obviously.
How to Use Organic Marketing for Successful Paid Ads
Experiment in your organic marketing before you start using the same tactics in your paid ads.
Go out and start posting a bunch with your alter ego.
Find out how you can push some edges to see what works for your audience.
Say things that will naturally turn off people you don’t want to work with & turn ON your ideal clients.
How can you share more personal vulnerable things?
What contrarian opinions do you have?
What's a truth or a trend that others around you believe, but you don't agree with?
How can you make someone say, “I can’t believe you said that”?
Try to write an edgy post every day for 30 days and see what people react to.
It’s all about finding out what your people naturally respond to.
Yes, you can start an ad campaign and put money behind new copy and new images or videos, but it's a WAY better use of money to try your new approach using organic marketing first.
If you feel like in your organic marketing you're not getting traction, or your people aren't reacting to you, figure out how to do organic marketing before you start running ads.
When to Run Facebook Ads & Instagram Ads for Your Coaching Business
Most people run ads for opt-in campaigns, to get more people onto their email list and build an audience.
Or they use ads for retargeting during a promotion.
Those are like the most common ways to use ads in this industry.
When you’re thinking about opt-in ads, it’s a good idea to ask yourself, “What do my people consciously want?
When we're talking with strangers and wanting to have our first interaction with them, you have to offer them what they consciously want or else they're not going to say yes to it.
When you put together a freebie or a lead magnet for an opt-in campaign, think about what your people consciously want. Not what they really need, but what they consciously want.
How to Use Facebook Ads in a Marketing Funnel
Let’s look at how these ads fit into a basic marketing funnel.
You can overlay ads on any part of a funnel, so it’s helpful to look at it piece by piece.
In a marketing funnel, you have traffic – that means a podcast, social media, SEO on your blog, however people find you.
That brings people to a lead magnet or entry-level offer, which is a low-price offer that is designed to be easy for people to purchase.
This is the attraction phase. It’s how strangers start to interact with you, and eventually come to know you and buy from you. Think of it like meeting someone and then going on a coffee date.
It’s all leading to your core offer, which then leads to ascension offers. More and more ways that people can work with you.
All the while, you’re re-engaging people through email, content marketing, retargeting, social media. You’re always trying to deepen the relationship, to follow up with people who are interested in working with you.
This is where consistency comes in. It’s WAY easier to get clients when you’re in continual communication with them. It’s about maintaining that relationship.
Think about it: you’re going to be way closer to a friend you meet for cocktails once a week than a friend who only shows up once a year for your holiday party.
Ads can help you stay in touch with your audience through every step of their journey through your funnel.
Ads can also automate the process of moving someone through your funnel.
Instead of posting on social media multiple times a day multiple times a week, ads can automate the traffic process. They can bring people into your funnel and automate the re-engagement in each step of the way.
Often, ad campaigns are essentially using ads to build your email list.
I come from a more traditional online marketing background where I have a fairly strong opinion that we should be building our email lists and not rely on social media as strongly as most people do. You can disagree with me, but I really think it is a smart idea to get people onto your email list versus having to constantly react to whatever algorithm changes there are on social media.
So, ads can be a way to actually use social media to get more people onto your email list and more quickly take strangers into the next step in your relationship with you.
The goal of ads and opt-in campaigns is to get people obsessed with you.
It makes it easier to sell and have a successful business if your audience is excited to buy your stuff simply because you’re YOU. That’s why you want your audience to be obsessed with you.
So many of my clients have used this approach successfully. They reveal the love they have for their audience, they tap into their idiosyncrasies and how they operate differently from other people, they channel all their uniqueness into their copy and their offers.
All of this makes their dream clients say, “YES, give me more!”
This also means some people will be repelled by you, but that’s how you know you’re creating content for the right people.
For example, let’s look at the ad I showed you above:
This ad leads to an opt-in page.
Once someone sign up for the offer, they’re automatically put on a 7-sequence email.
Each email features a different “weird” rule for making $100k.
The goal of that email campaign is to get people to either love & read every single email in the sequence…
… or to unsubscribe.
Because you don’t want people on your list if they don’t jive with your vibe.
Assignment: Play with what you’ve learned!
Activity 1: Content Review
Go through your last 12 months on whatever social media channel you use – or, if you don’t use social media, then look at your email list or podcast.
(It doesn’t have to be for 12 months, just do it for an amount of time that feels like you'll actually do it.)
Find the top posts. This is really easy to do on Instagram!
Click through your insights/analytics and start looking for patterns.
Look at stats for:
Reach: how many people actually got to see the post in general (that means the algorithm rewarded you for something you did)
Click through rate: how many people took ACTION from your post
Engagement rate: how many people actually interacted
Engagement number: engagement rate / number of reach. This means how many people engaged with your content versus how many people saw it
You can also do this for the last time you ran a launch, instead of the last 12 months. If you’re not selling all the time, you can look for patterns between the videos, images, and text you used.
What got the best results: Was it pictures of me? Quote cards? Long videos? Short videos? What colors did I use?
That's on the social media side.
On the content side, look at your headlines. The first line of the post is unquestionably the most important part because that is often the thing that'll make people keep reading or keep scrolling.
So look at the headline, look at the topic – were you really fired up about something? What was the energy behind it? Were you being more loving and peaceful, with hope for the world?
You can learn so much from doing this, not only for the ads that you should be doing, but for what people crave from your content or from your posts.
Activity 2: Self-Funding Growth Ads
Another fun thing to play around with is something called self-funding list growth ads. Some people call them pocket products, or entry level offers.
The concept behind this is having a low priced offer – something under a hundred dollars, could be $1, $99, $27 – and promoting that in your ads instead of like a free opt-in.
You go into it with the mentality that you won’t make any money from it. The purpose is to fund your ads, your email list growth.
So, if you put out ads to a $25 workshop and it costs you $10 a sale, you’re not actually losing any money.
This is a fun option if it feels risky to be putting a bunch of money into ads.
Click here to read part 2 of our series — The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Coaches: How to Create High Converting Ads
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