In this informal, profanity‑laden coaching session, Jeff Miller walks a client through a practical framework for creating and running Instagram ads. He begins by defining the "conversion mechanism" – the final step that turns a viewer into a lead – and recommends IG DMs and the Instagram profile as the most suitable for the client’s niche. He then outlines three core ad formats that consistently perform: (1) retargeting ads aimed at existing followers, (2) follower ads that attract brand‑new prospects, and (3) direct‑offer ads that solicit immediate action from a narrow, qualified audience. For each format he describes a simple talking‑head video script, audience window settings (30‑90‑365 days), and budgeting expectations (e.g., $100 spend should yield ~5 calls, with a target cost‑per‑call of $100 or lower). Jeff stresses that most performance issues stem from messaging, not creative, and introduces a systematic opener‑rotation system: write 10 different follow‑up openers, rotate one per day, track response rates in a Google Sheet, and keep the best. He advocates a low‑emotional‑investment approach – run one ad per day for 3‑4 days, treat each ad like a gym session, and kill under‑performing ads quickly. Beyond direct response ads, Jeff explains three "authority‑building" asset types that boost brand perception: (a) Steps – visual walkthroughs or process charts that position the creator as knowledgeable; (b) Stories – personal or client narratives that humanize the brand; (c) Proof – testimonials, green‑screen clips, and dedicated proof‑only Instagram accounts. He differentiates true brand/authority (the audience’s perception of competence) from superficial visual branding. He also covers advanced funnel options such as application pages and 20‑minute VSLs, noting higher costs ($400‑$800 per qualified call) and the need for extensive testing before scaling. Finally, Jeff answers client questions about running the three core campaigns together, audience targeting (avoiding irrelevant followers), and how to integrate the authority assets with the direct‑response ads, emphasizing iterative testing, budget control, and clear call‑to‑actions.
Chapters
Is what ads should I run? Is that right?
Yeah, basically that's it.
And when we say ad, we mean pretty pictures on the internet or fun videos on the internet, right?
Yep.
All right, cool. So we got to make a choice, right? We can do pretty pictures on the internet, pretty videos on the internet, whatever it is. The choice is the conversion mechanism, the thing that does the work. Right. That could be an IG DM. That could be an application page. That could be a full fucking 20-minute VSL, right? Yeah. For you, based upon the program that you're in and all that, sounds like IG DMs and your profile on Instagram is probably the best fit.
Okay, cool. All
right, cool. So now that we've gone over that, there's a few, I guess you could say formats that I found that work pretty well, right?
Yeah.
The first format, we'll call this retargeting. Retargeting is like, hey, you've been following me for a while, you've seen my stuff. I think you should book a call because we could do some good work together. Right? The conversation is almost always what about visuals? What about video or imagery? But I'll tell you what, Retargeting a video that is just your head talking works just as well as all the advanced mumbo jumbo, TikTok zoom in and out bullshittery. Right?
Okay. So
I'll give you an example right here. If we go to this style, this is called the talking head.
Yeah.
Right? All you got to do is say, hey, my name is Jeff, you've been following me for a while. These are the type of customers that I serve. And if you are that person and you wanna turn from this, and this is like a green screen of before to an after, you should go ahead and schedule a meeting with me. Click the button below and let's chat over IG. That's it, right? So that's called retargeting. Very easy to do.
Okay.
Some people, let me grab my daughter right quick.
Yeah, cool.
Here we go. So that's called retargeting. The conversation about retargeting is how many days in my retargeting audience, right? 30, 60, 90, 365. For me, it doesn't fucking matter. But for a lot of people, you gotta like they need an answer. So everybody says ninety, fucking ninety. That's fine.
All right.
No big deal, right?
Yeah.
The next best ad is called a follower ad. A follower ad is meant for somebody who doesn't know you, and you say, "Hey, you should follow me," right? And that style is also a talking head that says, "Hey, my name is Jeff. You don't know me." But for the past 10 years, I've been helping thousands of postmenopausal women do a lot of great work about losing weight, rebuilding bone density, and taking control of their life forever. Here's a bunch of examples of before, a bunch of examples after. I have a bunch of qualifications including XYZ, 1, 2, and 3. And if this is interesting to you, I invite you to follow my Instagram account. By the way, if you do and you DM me this keyword, I'm going to give you a bonus. So that's it, right? The follower ad settings, right, is just everybody in the United States. Easy. Right. The next style is called a direct offer, and that is when you say, hey, I'm looking for 5 postmenopausal women over the age of 55 that want to rebuild bone density, get their husband chasing them around the house again, and prove to their mother-in-law that they can lose weight once and for all, even though they've given birth to 3 kids. If that's you, I want you to DM me below and we're gonna talk, right? So that's called the direct offer, right? Yes. These all work if you make them work. Most people— thank you so much, Susie. Most people will have a freakout about how do I know if it's working, right?
Yeah.
So those are called KPIs, right? Typically, the king KPI is $100 cost per call.
All right, cool. So that's what I'm aiming for.
Correct, right? So if you spend, let's just say, $500 in follower ads, You should get like 5 calls. If you don't, there's 2 things that need adjustment. One, and it's almost always this one, it's what you're saying after the follow. They'll say, thanks for following me. You wanna pay me money? Thanks for following me. What brings you here, bro? Thanks for following. And it's like, that isn't really going to move the needle most times. Yeah. What you could do is you could say, all right, cool. Hey setters, uh, we got some followers coming in. Um, I want you to change, or I want you to rotate, uh, through these 10 openers every 10 days. So it's one new opener day every day, right?
Yeah.
Put them on a Google Sheet and you'll be able to see the response rates. So if you're doing, again, postmenopausal women, You say, hey, thanks. What brings you here? Well, obviously it's the ad about you doing post-fucking-menopausal work, right? Yeah. Versus saying, hey, thanks for the follow. Did you grab my postmenopausal food guide to keep your energy up? No? All right, cool. I'll send it to you right now. Different opener.
Yeah.
Right? Another one that is fun is, hey, thanks for the follow. If you wouldn't mind, tell me a bit about yourself or go find a client testimony of somebody just like you. Fantastic openers, right?
Yeah.
Whether it's retargeting, follower, or direct offer, they're all kind of the same. You just change it. Thanks for the follow. Thanks for the message. Hey, you've been following me for a while. It's all the same. You just change that, that opener part, right? Rotate once a day, every day for 10 days. After 2 weeks, you'll know which ones are your best ones, right? Again, the vast majority of time when you don't hit KPI, it's a problem with your messaging. Like literally you're IG-ing, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Assuming that's kosher, we go, there's something wrong with the ad, right? So what'll happen is people put a lot of time, effort, energy, and like emotional weight into the ad that they create. There should be none. It should be like going to the gym. Had a good gym session or bad gym session? Doesn't fucking matter. You're going again tomorrow, right? So what I found is that when people Like the failure uniform, right, is they'll do one follower ad, put their heart and soul into it, it doesn't fucking work, and then they're sad for like 3 or 4 days.
Yeah.
My philosophy is like, just do one ad a day every day for like 3 or 4 days. That way it doesn't matter, right?
Yeah.
You run it all for $100. If you hit KPI, keep going. If it doesn't, kill it. That's it.
Yeah.
After 3 or 4 rotations, you'll find a follower ad that works, direct offer ad that works, and a retargeting ad that works. Right. So these are like, by far, I would say the top 3 because it's doing 3 things. The first is you're talking to total fucking strangers, and that's the follower. You're talking to pseudo friends, that's retargeting, and you're making an offer to both or strangers.
Yeah,
that kind of stuff, right? There are another batch of ads that do a lot of authority building, right?
Mm-hmm.
Um, another word for that is brand. So it's like, oh, you've got a great brand. Well, that lifts everything. That lifts retargeting rates, follower rates, direct offer rates, show rates, close rates, all that stuff. So when You know, Apple calls you, fucking pick up the phone, right?
Yeah.
Great brand, right? If the debt collector calls you and you ain't fucking picking up, it's a bad brand, right? Yeah. That's it, right? So these are a type of ads that you can run, but underneath this are ads you can run to build your brand, or I'm gonna say your authority. ads that build authority. The reason why I don't like saying brand is people mistake brand for like pretty pictures, like it looks cool and all that. Brand is really the interaction people have with you, how they view you and how you think. So that's why I say authority, right? Another word for authority is intention, right? So I don't care if I get a million views or one view, I care about the intention of those views. Right. So I'll go over the 3 types of these authority building ads now and we'll take it from there.
Cool.
Yeah. So the first is called steps. So I don't mean walking, right? But I mean like squares on a screen. So I'm taking you through steps, right? You go, oh, Jeff knows what the fuck he's doing. He's fucking smart. I'm not. I'm just drawing in a way that makes you think I'm smart. Yeah. So these steps, right, are just squares, charts, graphs, all this kind of stuff. So if you think of like, um, Andrew Huberman, right, his entire YouTube channel is him doing what? What is he
doing? He's just talking on a podcast.
He's just reading from the fucking paper.
Yeah.
Okay. And then talking about it, right? Yeah. That's another way of saying steps. So like, hey, I just read this medical journal. They took 86 people through a creatine test. Here are the steps that they took 'em through for the results of their increase. Creatine was 18% across the board. You're just talking about the steps that take them through.
Yeah.
If you go to my YouTube channel, I'll show you another way of saying or showing steps. We switch to it right here. Hold on, switch account. Here we go. So you can see right here, what do I have on the screen?
Oh yeah.
Little thing like a blackboard, right?
Yeah.
So I'm like, I'm drawing stuff out. Everybody goes, damn, Jeff's fucking smart. No, I'm just really communicating like a professor would, right?
Yeah.
So I'm drawing and, you know, everything was cool, right? Here's another example. I'm drawing and everything is cool, right? So when you do this, this steps or this process or this walkthrough, people go, damn, that guy's fucking smart, right? Typically, if you're doing it on short form, it's going to be difficult to like do those steps, right? Yeah. You can do it. You can just say, my client turned $500,000, $7,500. Here's the 5 steps I took them through. You could do that, right?
Yeah.
But I prefer long form when I'm doing my steps. You feel like a professor, right? And when you do one of these like big videos, you can DM everybody, you can text message everybody, you can email everybody. Like, hey, I'm going live at 4 PM to share the exact steps I took my client through to drop 350 pounds and turn into George Clooney.
Oh my
God. Fuck yes. Right? So that builds a lot of authority. The other is story, right? So Russell Brunson talks about a story a million fucking times, hasn't changed in 15 years, right? It's really just a talking head where you communicate your story. It doesn't have to be like a huge song and a huge dance. And like, hey, what's going on? My name is Jeff. What you didn't know about me is about 10 years ago, I got fired 3 times from the only real job I ever had and moved back home to my parents at the age of 30 and started my own company, right? Yeah. That's one story in my story cabinet, right? Another story in my story cabinet is, did you know I had to pitch 10 clients before I realized nobody really wants Facebook ads, but what they really want are customers? Oh, that's another story, right? So these stories can be long form, short form, whatever it is. The conversation is where do I put those stories? I found the best place to put your story is right here on your IG. Yeah, the story right here, right? So this has a lot of like clips and all that stuff and you had to put real effort into it. But it's a great story, right? Um, and I'm convinced she was thinking about this 5 years before she did it because she has all this footage, but whatever, right?
Yeah,
that's totally fine, totally cool, not a problem. And you've seen people make a boatload of money telling their story because what is it? Stories tell— stories sell, facts tell, something like that, right?
I've got a great fuck story, so yeah,
amazing. Right. So story, and this can be an IG, which I would really recommend because it's just easier to keep your professor stuff in your YouTube and your social stuff in your IG.
Yeah.
So most people, by the way, believe they only have one story. That is incorrect, right? Most people have to go digging for a story. For example, I did a story email sequence for a client who was selling bikes. He's like, I got no fucking story. And I'm like, Yeah, you do, you know, fucking tell me. And we had to, I had asked him like 12 times and then it turns out he fled Venezuela, snuck into an MBA program in Spain and moved back to Miami to build a business that his parents would be proud of. That's a fucking story, bro.
Yeah.
You know what I mean? So again, story, most people don't know that they have one story, much less multiple stories. You can change it, right? And then finally, the last thing is proof, right? This is just proof that like, hey, People have worked with me. They say good things about me. I know what the fuck I'm doing, right?
Yeah.
Proof can be on IG, right? And on YouTube, if you do, let's just say interviews, that's amazing proof. You can make them into an event if you want, right?
Yeah.
Emails, text message promos. You can put it on IG and I'll show you examples. So I've got green screen proof right here. Testimonials right here, long-form testimonial right here. Like, this is all examples of proof, right? Through the— like, there's a lot, right? And then what I've also found is that it's a whole other experience scrolling through this and going, goddamn, Jeff has got some fucking proof, right? So you put your, in my experience, like I enjoy putting my testimonials or proof in multiple places. I will have a dedicated Instagram account just for proof.
Oh, wow.
Right. And it's really not that hard to do this. Like I have my admin go find some proof, post it, everybody's fucking happy. Right. But I mean, look, you can keep scrolling. Wow. See what I mean?
Yeah.
So that kind of stuff. So this is more like, Ads that build authority. And I say ads, but it's really marketing messaging, right? Yeah. So again, number one, what ads should I run? These are your top 3 ads that build authority. These are the top 3. And then there isn't really like a KPI to these, right? But it really should be, let's just say the KPI is goddamn, that shit looks good. Like that kind of thing.
And what, what would those kind of ads lead to? Does that go to a certain page or do you ask them to follow or is that just—
Good question, right? So the steps, let's just say it's a long-form YouTube video.
Yeah.
There isn't this like super hard call to action, like, hey, you need to pay me money today. Really what happens is people will see your stuff, then say, who the fuck is that guy? They're not, I'm not gonna get caught again.
Okay.
I'm gonna look you up, especially if I'm paying you 15 grand.
Right.
So where are they going to look you up? On Instagram or YouTube. And if your YouTube makes you look fucking good, they're going to go, okay, he's fucking good. And I prefer to put a call to action in the description of the video, but it doesn't do anything. It's just there for like, damn, this guy teaches at fucking Stanford. He knows what he's doing. Right.
Yeah.
For the story, I haven't seen one necessarily do better than the other. Some people will do a story and then they will do, I'll show you right here. I'll have like a comment thing, right?
Yeah.
I don't know if it does much, right? Like I'll go through this and I'm like, I don't really see like a lot of sales commentary, right? People are not doing it real. So again, it doesn't really aim for and optimize for a call to action. This is just, I'm going to look you up and I better fucking see something. Okay, fine. And the same thing with this. So there isn't really like a call to action or measurable KPI, but when you do this well, all of a sudden your cost per call goes down to $75. You're like, oh, how did that happen? Right? Yeah. Because you got a good story because you got proof and you got like the steps you would take somebody through. So these are like, these are the ads that you should run. These are the ads that build authority. I should just say assets. Instead of ads, but that's the gameplay.
Cool.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah, dude. What questions you got for me?
No real questions in terms of actually with the retargeting follower and direct offer ads. Would you run those together? Like yeah, just yeah. Yeah.
So there's nothing wrong with. running these 3 campaigns. And I'll see people do that. They will run a follower campaign and they'll say, all right, I'm gonna spend $100 in the follower campaign. They're like, what's my cost per follow? I'm like, anywhere between $1 and $100. I don't fucking know.
Right.
Just make sure that these followers are like on point kosher. They're not like 18-year-old rappers. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah.
If they are, got permission to like kill this shit early and then retool or rework. Maybe something on the interests, maybe there's something in the ad, maybe there's something in the age, right? You're gonna have to futz around with it. So they'll run that, right? At the same time, they will also run a retargeting ad to everybody who's been following them for 90 days. Cool. And also direct offer, right? So you can do 1, 2, or all 3 of these. It depends upon how fast you wanna win, right? Yeah. But all those are acceptable. Yeah.
All right, cool. All right. And then you did mention that, um, best one for me would be to tag, take them to Instagram and DMs.
Correct. Like that is, that's like the 80, 90%. Most people are like a best fit for that. Um, unless there's like another reason why you believe otherwise.
Yeah, it's just I don't want to be in the DMs. I know I can get some setters in of VAs, whatever. I was just thinking my thought process was ad takes them to a qualification page like where they kind of learn a bit about me and then they answer a little question there, see if they qualify. If they qualify, go to a VSL.
Yeah. So one of the subsets or the rarities, right, would be, say, an application or a VSL kind of thing, right?
Yeah.
Here's what I've experienced. To do an application or VSL, it costs money, no different than everything else, right? And if you want those right questions to be asked, you're gonna be asking 5 to 7 questions, right? You're gonna have to build that front page of the VSL. The thank you page. There's a lot of fucking variables, especially when you start from zero. Right. I've got a client right now doing VSL or application VSL, whatever the fuck you want to call it. It's a talking head. Right. And then a button that's big and red. You click it, survey pops up. Right. Answer that. If they are qualified, it goes to the calendar. If they're not, they get rejected.
Yeah.
They go to the calendar, they book, then there's a thank you page with a video on it. Right. Yeah. He's paying like $400 per qualified call. Right.
Okay.
Half those people are qualified. So it means he's paying $800 per qualified sales call, which is fine when you're selling an $8K.
Yeah.
But you got to spend the $800 first without any positive interaction. You're like, damn, it's been $495. I'm gonna fucking kill it. And then I gotta tell you, no, dude, it's $800. Step the fuck up. Right. So this is very much like in that expert bucket. And I would really only recommend you do that after you've had like a lot of rotations with this. Okay. So for example, when Will and I were putting this program together 2 years ago, we originally were doing app to VSL. We're getting like $50 appointments. We're like, we're fucking king of the world, bro. Fuck off. Right? Turns out we would spend, let's just say, $600 a day to get like 10 applications. Half of them were fake. Half of the other half were just unqualified. We got one close for $8,000. So, okay, those numbers worked, right? But what if we didn't get the close?
Yeah. Yeah.
Right. So that is the pros and cons. You could do that if you want, but my recommendation would be to do that like after.
Yeah.
We go through this, we know the direct offer that's working, right? We know what communications and marketing messages we got proof. We got all this shit built. You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So that's, that's what really I would recommend. After a couple of rotations with this, you'd build the application VSL.
Okay.
Yeah.
Oh, I could just have the application VSL just hanging in my bio anyway. And then these people come through retargeting, follow with direct offer. They might just, after going through my page, they They might just click that VSL and we might get someone from that.
Correct. There's no harm in doing it.
Yeah.
Some people like, they really wanna do this. I'm like, okay, fine. Fucking great. The lessons you get from creating the VSL will actually make the rest of this stuff easier, right?
Yeah.
But I also have to be conscious of skill sets.
Yeah.
Right. And it's like, hey, Sian, like maybe you're a fucking baller. Okay. Maybe you got like 3 grand a day of ad spend.
Yeah,
you don't. Yeah, that's just how it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, cool. All right. Yeah, so I guess I need to go and do these retargeting follower direct often, actually create the ads myself. And you say talking head is the best one?
Correct. And if you go to the school, you'll see 4 or 5 different formats. A lot of them are images, right? Um, but I have found that If I do a video, it's just so much faster than doing an image. I'll go for a walk and I'll be like, oh, I just talked to 3 happy clients. I got a fucking idea, right? Yeah. And I'll look at my roster of happy clients that I like and I'll go, hey, my name is Jeff and I work with people like this. If you are like Jeff Scott, who has an engineering background and wants to create ads so he can buy a house in less than 2 years, well, guess what? He fucking bought a house in 2 years. Here's a picture of his house. Right. So if you would like that, you should definitely DM me. Perfect, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
So that's totally acceptable.
All right, cool. All right, I'm happy with that. So like, let's get doing these ads.
Yeah, dude. Cool. Um, what other— is everything clear? You know, you're
