3 Facebook Ads Secrets I Wish I'd Known Earlier (Course Creators)

There is some serious gatekeeping going on when it comes to how people are really growing their online businesses right now, in particular when it comes to those that are running ads. And honestly, if I had known these three secrets back when I first started my business, it would have saved me so much money and so much frustration. So today, I'm going to share all three with you, and they're going to completely change not just how you think about Facebook ads, but how you think about growing your online course business in general. Hi. For those who haven't met me before, I'm Kate from hello Funnels, and I've made over $6 million in online course sales, mostly on autopilot. And best of all, I've helped thousands of course creators to make more sales while selling less using my crazy simple and wildly effective funnels. Now, today, I want to pull back the curtain and share three Facebook ad secrets that I wish I had known earlier. And hopefully they will help you save a ton of time and a ton of money too. So let's dive right on in foreign.

Guys. Let's kick things off with secret number one, and that is that Facebook ads are actually the number one way that most big accounts are actually growing their social media right now. Okay? So I'm not going to throw shade on anyone. I'm not going to name names, but there are definitely people out there right now who, who are teaching organic social media. But in reality, the way that they're really growing is probably this much from organic and this much from their paid ads. And I'm not talking about them running ads direct to their account or any of that silliness. Like, no one does this anymore. That it's not 2018. Rather that the fact that they run paid ads to other parts of their business means that just naturally, as a byproduct, they are probably getting a whole, whole ton of new people coming across and following them on the different platforms. And the reason for that is, if you think about it, it's just plain old human psychology, because just imagine for a second sitting there on your phone, you're like mid you deep in a doom scroll, right? And an ad pops up and it catches your attention and you're like, oh, interesting. Who is this person? You know, I kind of want to know more before I do anything. It hasn't hooked you enough to click and go through and buy or click and go through and put your email address in to get some kind of cool freebie, but it has got your attention and you want to know more. And humans are curious. And now so much information is at our fingertips. So you do the next most natural thing and you press on their little avatar or the name of their business and you go through to their social media account. So obviously it depends on where you're seeing this ad, but for most of you, you're going to be landing on their Instagram feed or their Facebook profile. And what are you going to do from there? Well, you're going to jump into their content, binge a whole batch of it, and if you like what you see, then more than likely you're probably going to end up following them on that account. Now, we see this happen all the time. And when you are running a strategy like we do, where you are using something like manychat as a way of sharing your really valuable freebies and making it easy for people to put their hand up and say, oh, yes, I want that, by just commenting a trigger word on your post. Then you'll start to see what we see all the time, which is like in your notifications, it will say, you know, Sarah has started following you from your ad. And then below that, you'll see Sarah has commented. Banana. Sarah has commented. Yes, Sarah has commented this. And you'll just see like, this, like four or five, sometimes more of them going through. And you can see they're working their way through your content and opting in for everything. That sounds juicy, but now they're doing it directly on Instagram. Now, I don't have the size of budget that some of the bigger gurus have out there. I tend to spend a couple of thousand dollars a week on my Facebook ads, which I know to some is a lot, but to others, it's like a drop in the bucket. But from that, we get a few extra hundred followers coming across. So could you imagine those big accounts who are spending like $50,000, hundreds of thousands of dollars? Can you imagine just how many new followers they're getting? And it's not because they shared the latest trending reel. I'm sorry, it's from their Facebook ads. So that's secret number one. Secret number two is there is a number that you need to know and most people don't know it. And the fact that you don't know it is costing you so much money, it's making you turn off perfectly good ads before they've actually had a chance to do what they're supposed to do. And that number is the average number of days it takes for someone to go from clicking on your ad through to purchasing whatever it is that you're selling, you know, whether it's in a funnel, whether it's in. You've got a launch coming up, whether you do regular promotions, whatever it is. You need to know what is that average number of days? And the thing about this number is that it is really, really unique to you as a business owner. So it's going to require a little bit of, you know, kind of boring analysis you have to go through and look at some things, but it is going to make such a difference, and I'll tell you why. So recently I started using a tool called Hiros, and that is it's a basically a Facebook ads attribution tool. We've used it in the past. It was a bit buggy. Come back using it again now. But anyway, with that, I was training someone on my team about how to jump in and to look at the ads and to tell which ads are working and which ones are turn off and which ones aren't. And we went in there and we pulled up a report that showed our results for the last six, seven days. And so we are running funnels all the time, guys, and, you know, they fluctuate from week to week. But on that particular week, it was showing that our main funnel, our cold traffic funnel, the roas, which stands for return on ad spend, which basically means how much money we got back for how much we've spent was in the negative. It was 0.4, I think, enough to be read in the little line, right? And now my team member was like, oh, we should turn these off. And I was like, wait, wait, wait. Because our average number of days to a sale is not seven days, okay? We are in the type of market where people, they don't trust you that easily. They need a bit more time. They need a bit more warming up before they purchase. And the way that our ecosystem is structured for us, it's more like 25 to 30 days is the average number of days to a sale. So we increased that window that we're looking at. Rather than looking at the ad results today or the ad results the last seven days, we made it the ad results with the last 30 days. And you know what? Our ROAS was nearly six times. So that means that for every dollar we put in, we got almost $6 back. Now, if we had turned those ads off, you know, after the first seven days, when the roas was only small, without realizing how the bigger pieces all kind of come together, we would never have got there. We would just be sitting there testing ads for a Few days, turning them off, testing and ads for a few days, turning them off and going, man, ads just don't work. But the thing is they do. They work really well when combined with the right follow up strategy and then when combined with the right numbers and tracking. So that's number. If you don't know it yet and you are running ads, I really recommend you go and figure it out because this could be a game changer. You could be shooting yourself in the foot right now and turning off ads. That could be some of your best performance. Okay, now speaking of ads, I have to also quickly jump in and make sure I cover my bases and say I never recommend that anyone is running ads without something that is proven to run them to. Okay. We don't just go turn on ads and point them to our sales page or our homepage or even to a lead magnet if there's nothing happening behind it. So if you don't currently have your own search simple high converting funnel, we can fix that right now. Go and grab my AI template. The seven day payday. I'll pop the link below, you can jump in. It takes minutes to write this thing. It's so simple. It's an awesome AI prompt. It's going to ask you a few questions about you, about your product, how it all works and then it's going to give you this amazing high converting email funnel which you just pop into whichever email system you have. So links below, go grab that. If you don't have a funnel or don't have a funnel that's working yet. Something I see a lot of people get wrong when they're running ads. So usually just again, think about it, you've kindly gotten around to setting up your funnel, right? You're excited, you've got a great lead magnet or a great low ticket offer or whatever it is, a webinar, whatever you know your particular strategy is and you want to go out, get more people in it. So you're going to go run some ads and you start running ads and normally people spend those first couple of weeks they've created, you know, a whole pile of different creatives and they're testing them and they're analyzing them. They're like great. These couple work really well, will turn off the rest and now we're just going to focus on scaling those ones that work. Wonderful. Nothing wrong with that. However, what happens is in a couple of weeks or maybe even a couple of months because all ad creatives do have a different lifecycle length is you're going to Start to see those ads start to decline. And usually what happens then is people do two things. They jump in and they try and fix it. Like they maybe try and tweak the targeting or they try and change the budget so see if they can fix it. Or that's when they haven't been able to fix it. Then they go, oh, quick, we better go and create some new ads. But the problem with that is that you are now starting from zero with those ads. Those ads, usually. And again, if you've never run ads before, you won't know this, but if you have run ads before, you'll know that over time. The Facebook algorithm, it's so smart, is that these ads tend to work better and better with time. Once Facebook's kind of learned what it is that it needs to do, who it is it needs to put you in front of. And it takes a little while to get there. So that just the initial testing, the creation, all that stuff takes time. So what ends up happening is your ads end up going like, you know, they start, they go, well, and then they come down and then they come back up, and then they come back down and they go. And that just sucks. Like, that's really. That is not what the autopilot life is all about. We like consistency, stability, and preferably a fairly steady trend of upward growth. So if you want that for your ads, what you need to do is stop waiting for your ads to stop working before you jump in and try and fix it. You're going to be proactive. And the easiest way to do that, because I'm sure you're going, oh, not more stuff that I have to be creating. But the easiest way to do that is usually to go and make it part of your content strategy that you are creating the kind of content and just sharing it on your social media every week anyway, that can then be taken and turn into ads. The added bonus of that is usually it's a great way of pre testing your different content, your angles, your images, whatever. And so then you can take a couple of those, the ones that work best every week or two, and pop them into your ads manager and, you know, start testing them and start building them up so that as your other ads start to come down, you have new ones already on the way up. And that's just going to keep everything way, way, way more simple, make more steady and reliable, which is what we want, right? Okay, so if that all sounds good, if that's got you excited and you're ready to start running profitable ads, Remember, like I said, you need a funnel first. So don't go throwing money, you know, at Mark Zuckerberg. He's got plenty. We don't want to ever be running ads and then sending people to nowhere, just to your regular email list. You want to make sure you've actually got a strategy behind those ads that converts. And as I mentioned, my seven day template is the simplest way to get a high converting funnel set up super fast like today and the links below jump in. It's just $27 right now, the price probably going up pretty soon. It's AI powered, it's so easy to use. It works with every single type of email software. Just grab the link in the description, get it set back up and then come back and implement these three secrets. And you're now going to have Facebook ads and a funnel that just work together like Chef's Kiss. So I hope this was helpful guys. Even if you found just one little gold nugget in here, it would mean the world to me if you could drop me a like a subscribe if you could share it depends on where you're listening or watching us. But you know, any of those little actions tells the algorithm is this content is good and it should be showed to other people and that is how our small businesses get out there and get our message out and able to help as many people as possible. So I appreciate you, thank you for spending time with me and I'll see you all same time next week for more nerdy goodness. All righty guys, see you then.