Facebook Ads for Coaches | How to Build A Marketing Funnel
This is part 4 of our series The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Coaches.
Today, you’ll learn how to build a marketing funnel, and 4 ways you can use Facebook ads during a launch.
Facebook Ads for Coaches — The Ultimate Guide part 4: How to Build a Marketing Funnel
In Part 4 of this guide, we’ll discuss…
4 Ways to Run Ads During a Launch
Example Funnel & Ads for an Evergreen Course
Why You Should Build Your Funnel Backwards
Analyzing & Reworking Your Marketing Materials
A Facebook Ads Strategy for 1:1 Coaching
Check out the rest of our series on the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads
Click here for Part 1: A Foundational Strategy for Successful Facebook Ads
Click here for Part 2: How to Create High Converting Facebook Ads
Click here for Part 3: How to Set Up Facebook Ads for Coaches
Facebook Ads for Coaches: 4 Ways to Use Ads During a Launch
#1 Run Ads to Your Lead Magnet
Start with your lead magnet. This is a freebie that you’re giving away as part of your opt-in campaign, and you’re just running ads to that opt-in and that's building your audience and email list with people who would be interested in your launch.
One to three months BEFORE you open cart, start promoting your lead magnet.
The key here is, don't choose a random lead magnet.
Make sure it is a lead magnet that is directly related to your launch and directly related to the program that you're putting out.
Otherwise, it's not going to be the right audience.
#2 Run Ads to Your Webinar or Masterclass
The second area is for your launch events. That could be a challenge, a webinar, or something else.
The purpose of launch events is to have an opt-in campaign to get people to sign up for your webinar.
After the webinar, you can retarget the entire warm audience who registered with ads. You can also upload the replay to Facebook and use it as a video view campaign so more people can see the replay. Learn more about video campaign ads in Part 3 of the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Coachings: How to Set Up a Facebook Ad.
The side benefit of that is you're now making an audience of people for your ads, because Facebook will track who watched how much of the webinar.
#3 Run Ads to Your Sales Page
The third layer is your sales page.
During your open car period – whether it’s 5 days, 10 days, two months, however long your launch is – now is the time to retarget your warm audience.
That means your email list, Facebook following, Instagram followers, people who have watched your webinar or the replay.
There are 2 types of ads you want to make sure you include here:
Announcement-style post to let your warm audience knows your program is open RIGHT NOW
Objection posts that communicate to people before they ask the answers to possible objections they will have to sign up for your program
Do you have a payment plan?
I don’t know if I have the money for it.
Will I have time for this?
Whatever is going on in their head consciously or unconsciously, address it.
#4 Run Ads for Your Downsell Offer
After a launch, a great way to maximize energy & income from your launch is to do a downsell.
And this is through the lens of, “Why didn't people buy this program?” If I'm assuming that it's not because my program sucks and they're disinterested, it could be that they're too advanced for this topic, or they need a basic 101 version. Maybe they need a self-study.
What are some reasons why someone wouldn't have bought your program?
After the launch, you can promote the downsell to everyone who didn't buy.
So if you have a group coaching program on getting on finding your your perfect mate and X amount of people joined, the downsell after the launch could be something like “How to get amazing at Tinder” for more beginning-level things.
A down sell doesn't mean it's less expensive. It can actually be a more expensive program.
It's about addressing why people wouldn't have joined if they were the right fit for the program.
How to Build a Marketing Funnel for an Evergreen Course
Let’s talk about creating a funnel for if you have a course or a program or something open all the time.
In this case, I would think about my funnel in three different phases.
Phase 1: ACTIVATE
In this phase, we’re just trying to build an audience where people will raise their hand for you.
As you saw from when we were inside Facebook Ads Manager in Part 2 of this series, we start broad with our audience.
But we need a way to activate our funnel from that broad set of people, so we want to create a way for people to self-select to join.
I like to do that through an ad that has a video in it, for example using a video from Instagram as the ad.
For example: If I did creativity coaching and I have a program for helping artists get consistent with their practice, then I could target anyone who’s interested in visual arts as my larger audience. But then I would want a video on the “3 blocks to having a consistent art practice,” for example, and people who watch a certain percentage of that video are self-selecting that, “I'm not just interested in visual arts because I want to buy a painting, but, I have an art practice and I'm already a consistent art artist, but I have trouble procrastinating, or I have trouble being consistent with it.” So we want a video where people are like, I am identifying with whatever you do.
So what the activate phase is doing is creating that video audience. There’s a setting on Facebook where you can say, “I want everyone who watched >1 minute of this video or more than 25% of this video to receive my ads.”
That’s phase one.
Phase 2: COMMIT
The second phase is where we create a more standard opt-in campaign.
So, you have an opt-in page and you create an ad that goes to that opt-in page.
The only people I would show this ad to are people from this audience. That could mean anyone who has watched 25% of that video in the last 10 days.
I hear this question all the time: “How do you create ‘set it and forget it’ campaigns?”
First of all, that's never ever going to be a thing. You're always going to have to check in on ads.
Especially in the beginning, you should be checking once a day. After that, you should be checking on your ads at least once a week.
BUT this phase is where you are creating ads that can be going on in the background all the time.
It's always creating more and more people within this audience. Your audience is always growing, and you might have someone where they see this ad within two weeks of having watched this video.
Again, this audience is always changing. It's not like I'm bombarding the same person over and over again with this ad.
So these people would self-select to show this ad and if they see the ad, only a percentage of them will click through to the opt-in page and only a percentage of those people will actually opt in. These are all different points.
So, they opt in and then they get their email with their freebie.
For people who see the ad and click through for the opt-in page, you can then do a second ad for those people, where you're retargeting anyone who hit this page to ask, Why didn’t you opt in? Did you forget about this?
It’s easy to assume that if someone hit an opt-in page but didn’t opt in, they weren't interested. But in reality, people could have been distracted by someone at the door or maybe they didn't want to type out their email on their phone. So, this reminder ad is a secondary way to get your warm audience to opt-in.
Phase 3: CONVERT
The third layer is to convert. This is where you start actually talking about what you're selling.
Normally, after someone opts in for something and you have a program that's open all the time, they would start getting emails where they get to know you. And then you start promoting the course or program in sales emails.
What we get to do in the convert stage of this is use ads to boost this.
By this point in your funnel, the audience for your ads is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
We started out with this big, broad audience that self-selected by waiting the video. Then those people are shown this ad and they move through their little funnel, they start getting sales emails. So only the people who have actually opted in are getting the ads in this phase.
The convert ads would be live during a launch – like announcing that the program's available, addressing objections, sharing testimonials, etc. And these ads would only be going to the people who opted in and only for a certain period of time.
However long the sales email sequence is going, whether it’s 5 or 14 days after they opt in, is when they’re seeing these ads.
So this is a way to actually create something that is self-generating and not just bombarding the same people over and over again. It is creating the right new audience and it is showing them the right thing at the right time.
And when you start the funnel with those video ads we discussed above, it can be so cheap to run these conversion ads. For opt-in ads, I still see people getting like 50 cents in opt-in, but those are like unicorn situations. A lot of people are getting $5-10 for an opt-in.
But by the time we made it this far in the funnel, your conversions will be very, very cheap. Like cents on the dollar.
It really behooves you to have really great video and to have your content really relate to the program.
2 Keys to Marketing Funnels for Coaches
When we think about marketing and funnels, if we're just talking about building a bigger audience on the front end of this and not actually addressing anything on the back end of it, it's like we're putting water into a bucket with holes into it.
Really, we need to address the holes before ever putting water in the bucket.
That's why we build it backwards.
What does this look like for your program?
1.Start Looking at Google Analytics
See how many people are actually hitting your sales page for your program. Is it zero people? Is it dozens of people and they're not converting?
You need to start promoting your program and get more people to land on your page so you can see how your sales page is converting and what messaging to use.
2. Analyze and Re-Work Your Opt-In Page, Email Sequence & Video
Once you have this good and the sales page is converting and you know what messaging to use, then we go one step back and we start working on the opt-in. Create the opt-in that makes sense for the program.
Then you work on the email sequence that's leading up to the sales page.
Once you have a good conversion rate on your opt-in page and your ad is getting the right click through rate, then you move on to the video.
Beta test everything.
A good way to practice this is to have 30 days where you free-write as much as you can about the program.
You want every piece of copy, messaging, and marketing material for your funnel to be compelling enough that the people who already are already engaged with your work to either opt-in to your program or pass it on to people for whom it may be a better fit.
After you try a bunch of different stuff, look at the feedback loops in real time, and do a holistic postmortem analysis, this is going to help inform your next campaign.
How to Use Facebook Ads for 1:1 Coaching
This process is transferable to 1:1 coaching. It doesn’t need to only be used on courses, webinars, and downloadables.
One thing I should mention here is that, due to the privacy changes with Facebook, retargeting is a little less effective than before. Running ads can be more expensive.
Some people's work around for that is to use ads to sell more expensive things, like an application for a high-ticket program. So you're willing to spend $100 to get one person to apply to that program because it's a $10,000 program, so the return on ad spend is worth it.
So yes, this can absolutely work for, for one-on-one coaching.
What I would do instead of creating ads that send users to a freebie would be to create retargeting ads that promote applying to your program.
I know not everyone does sales pages for 1:1 offers, but I'm sure you're posting directly about your one-on-one offer on social media or your email list, and you can use those to promote getting on a call with you. You can also do webinars that promote a one-on-one offer.
Any normal launch funnel works with a one-on-one offer.
Missed the rest of The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Coaches series?
Click here for Part 1: A Foundational Strategy for Successful Facebook Ads
Click here for Part 2: How to Create High Converting Facebook Ads
Click here for Part 3: How to Set Up Facebook Ads for Coaches
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