5 Biggest Mistakes When Running Ads (for coaches)
Coaches waste money on ads because they skip five critical steps: a clear message, a scripted ad with hooks, an optimized profile, metric tracking, and DM follow-up. One coach spent $1,384 and made $43,541 back. Most rely on organic reach and never build a real growth funnel.
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What is up, beautiful people? I decided to make this video for you on the 5 biggest mistakes that I see coaches make when running ads. And realistically, what is this video? It's pretty much a follow-up to the video I made. I think it was last week or something like that, but I'll walk you through sort of what that video was about. But really, my point in this particular video is to zoom in to one piece of this puzzle. Puzzle, puzzle, puzzle, which is running new follower ads which solve like the traffic growth, visibility problem. So basically, if you watched the last video that I had and there's a little bit of an update on here, my return on ad spend actually went up. But if you watch the last video that I had, I basically broke this whole thing down. Like I basically broke down the automatic growth funnel and like what I've been using that's been crushing for me and crushing for my clients and things like that. And essentially, like, so last month this allowed me to turn $1,384 in ad spend into $43,541 cash collected. Right. That was last month without relying on organic marketing, which I think is the most empowering thing because honestly, sometimes relying on organic marketing sucks. Like you're at the mercy of the algorithm. Like I sometimes describe this to people as like Imagine relying on winning the lottery to pay your rent, right? To pay your bills. You bought a lottery ticket and you're just like hoping for the best. Like, that's what the algorithm is like sometimes, you know, like there's a lot of like unpredictability with, you know, your source of leads being organic marketing. So it's just like it's unpredictable, like it's inconsistent. And a lot of times it's super slow, like super slow. And so anyways, that whole like last video that I filmed was sort of about this funnel and breaking everything down. We're not going to zoom into everything on this diagram today. What I really want to zoom into, if I can find a highlighter here, I'll use my favorite color, purple. What I really want to zoom into is this piece right here. Okay. Growth ads, because the biggest problem that a lot of coaches have is leads. Like you're already good at what you do, like you're getting clients, they're getting results. You kind of know how to market, you know how to sell. You're already showing up on social, right? You're already posting the content. But it's like, I just need more followers. Like, I just— I have a system that's working and it's just like I need more people in the system. I need more followers, I need more leads. And so the biggest thing that, that I'm doing with my clients right now to solve that problem is growth ads. Right? This really solves the traffic problem. Now, yes, don't get me wrong, there are other ways to do this. Some of my clients, I have them doing reachouts because honestly, they're not ready for this yet. It doesn't make as much sense for them to do this yet. But there's almost none of my clients— I don't really recommend anyone relies on organic marketing. And then once you get like, honestly, once you get reachouts, like things are working enough, like this is the cheat code. Like this buys you back your time and just like helps you automate basically getting the right people into your world, which is why I call it the automatic growth funnel, because you're like literally automating your growth. So anyways, that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about the mistakes that you can make with this particular piece of the system. And then just to show you a little bit of like, hey, why would you even trust me on this? Like, I'm like totally a proof girly. I'm like, I got to show you all proof this works. But just a couple of things here. I'll just run through this really quickly. So, you know, like, hey, why would you even bother to give me your time and your attention in this video? But like, So, and I guess I don't have a screenshot here of my ad spend. And the reason anyways, it doesn't matter. My, my Stripe is in USD and my ad spend is in Canadian because I am Canadian. So the currencies are different. But anyways, this is just from my Stripe, but you can see $43,541 cash collected. We spent basically $1,384 to make this happen last month. Okay. So you can literally see that March 1st to today when I took it, I think that was March 31st. And then you can see my followers as well, like Overall, like, not overall followers, but followers up 886, right? So not only did I get paid, like, I don't know what that $43,000 minus $1,300 is, but like $42,000 that month to run these ads. I also got like, like my follower count just keeps going up and it's friggin amazing. Like I'm not even posting content every day. Like I did the math last month and I think I posted on average 4 times a week, which honestly I should be doing more. Like I just like want to aggressively grow. Like I should be doing more, but I had my foot off the gas like, oh, I messed that up here, but oh, did I move that? There we go. Yeah, I had my foot off the gas. Like my parents were in town and so I just had a lot of time off with them. We were like going dancing every night and like all that stuff. And so I didn't— I wasn't really like even going for it, to be honest. Also, one of my team members was on vacation as well. She was in the Philippines. So we did this all like with half the energy in the tank, if that makes sense. So anyways, I just want to show you that this does work. We're going to zoom into this piece. I could I could show you a bunch of client results stuff, but maybe we'll leave that to the end. But I'll just like high level say like I've got anxiety coaches with a 59 to 1, you know, return on their ad spend, athletic performance coaches with 10 to 1, diabetes coaches with 8 to 1 return on their spend, subconscious reprogramming experts like got a 4 to 1 right now. We're going to scale things up and get her some more people so she can refine. But long story short, it works. My return on ad spend last month was 31 to 1, which is how we did this. But yeah, got a lot of my clients using this and they're just like automating their freaking lead gen. They're automating their followers just growing up and they're getting the right people in their world, which is so important because like, you know, if you're posting content— where's this freaking highlighter button? I'm not perfect with this software yet. If you're posting this content but you don't have the right people in your world, then like, what does it matter? You're literally just like talking to no one, right? Which is why you need this. This piece here. So that's what we're going to zoom in on. So, okay, let's talk about this. So let's talk about the 5 biggest mistakes that I see people making, that I see coaches making specifically with this. But basically, mistake number 1, in order to launch this, like in order to launch these growth ads, you— the first thing that you need to have is you need to have your marketing message dialed, right? Like, because what's going to happen is we're going to have to script these ads and there's a particular format to script the ads that, you know, like you get people's attention, you're speaking to the right person, proper hooks and headlines, you have really specific ideal client callouts, right? You have the right call to action that matches like the, the targeting or not the targeting, the objective of the ad, right? Like the right CTA in there. You're mixing in proof in the right way. Like there's a, there's a bunch of things that go into scripting these ads. But in order to do that, you need to have your messaging dialed in. Like the number one thing that's going to send your ads to the right people and get the right people to follow you is like how you script them. But in order to script them, like you need to have your messaging dialed in. So I'm talking like really knowing like clarity on like who you're talking to and what their problems are and like even down to the level of like their character traits and like, and like how they think and how they operate. Like not even just like, like for me, like not even just targeting like online coaches. Like online coaches who are at a certain level in their business, right? Who have certain character traits, you know, like just different things like that. Like you want that in your ads because you want to repel the people that are not right for you and you want to attract the people that are right for you, right? So another huge thing I can say too, like into your messaging, and I should tell a little bit of a story about this, but knowing like what the frig makes you different from everyone. Like, honestly, especially in the business coaching space. Like, for me, there's so much noise. There's so much noise. And if I don't have something that makes me different in the ad, then like, I just blend in with everyone. And almost— I would take a guess and say like 99% of people don't have their messaging as dialed in as they should. Even people that are crushing it. Like, I just took on a client the other day. She's already at, I think, like $30K or $40K per month. Like she's already done $100K in Q1, right, of, of 2024. And she's got a system that's working. Like she totally has a system that's working. She's crushing it with organic content. She just needs more leads, right? Which is why we started working together to do, to do this, right? But even her, we did some work on her messaging and we really had to get her clear on like, yo, what's your like vehicle? What's your like unique mechanism? You know, like what separates you from everyone else? And we had to do a little bit of work to dial that in. But now she's super clear. And what's that going to affect? It's going to affect her, you know, not maybe necessarily— well, it'll affect her story content too. It'll affect her organic content, right? Her feed and her story. And like, literally, it affects everything. Like, messaging affects every step of the system or the funnel or whatever you want to call it. And so, like, that's number one is like you have to have your messaging dialed in. So mistake number one is that coaches don't have their friggin messaging dialed in and then they go to launch this stuff and it flops because it's like, you're not so crystal clear on who you want to bring in and like where they are in their life and their character traits and what makes you different and like, you know, the, like the transformation that you're, you know, providing and all that jazz, right? So there's a bunch of things that go into that. But that's number one. Number two is using that. Another big mistake people make is they don't script the friggin ads properly, right? Like people— like there's just so many things that go into this, but like people are always asking like, why should I trust you? Like, why you? Like, why are you different? Like, why should I trust you? Like, what are your results and client results? And like, where's the proof of this, right? You also don't want to be attracting the wrong people. Like, you— there's— yeah, it's just, for example, like, let's say one of the coaches in the fitness coaching space, right? Like, if you script your ads wrong, you start calling in people that don't have the funds to pay you. And that sucks because what happens down here is like when you get people on a call with you, you get people on a sales call with you, they're like, yeah, I don't have the money. I don't have the funds to pay you. And that's because you did it wrong up here. You called in the wrong person up here and you took the wrong person through the system and got them down to here. Right. And so it's like sometimes it's not that you're so bad with calls, it's that you put the wrong person into the system to begin with, which is why you're getting this. I don't have the funds, right? And so if you've ever had that, it's like, it's almost like, you know, if you have like some sort of medical problem and then like sometimes the doctor tries to like give you a prescription for like the symptom, but they didn't solve the root cause, right? And a lot of times the root cause, if this will like back up and delete some of this stuff, the root cause is like you didn't have your messaging dialed in and then you didn't use it to script these ads properly. So anyways, that's number 2 is like you got to make sure that like you're scripting your ads, right? Okay. What else I want to scroll down to here. So messaging not dialed, ads not scripted, right? Oh, another one. Profile not optimized. So long story short, what you're going to be doing, like when you are running these ads, the reason these friggin work so well is because they only have one objective. And the objective is to get people to look at your profile. And you, when you like, when you launch the ads, you'll choose that as the objective for the ad, right? Like the only goal of these is visibility. It's literally this is my terrible drawing. It's eyeballs. It's a terrible eye. But anyways, it's eyeballs. Okay. Like that's the reason that you're doing this. And so what's going to happen is you're going to run this ad and then people are going to look at your Instagram profile. And if your profile doesn't look like a profile worth following, you know what's going to happen? They're going to go back the other way and you're going to— you're going to waste your money. You're going to set money on fire. Right. And so, like, your profile has to be optimized. Like, if you go to my profile, like, good photo handle, my bio, go check out my bio. It's super dialed in, right? Go look below my bio and like you'll see results highlights till the cows come home. Go below those and you'll see specific pinned posts that align with my messaging and show proof and show whatever, right? And then you see like good content that when people land, they're like, yeah, I would follow this chick. And so that's mistake number 3 is like— and I'll just say like one thing too. One way that you'll know this is when you look at the numbers for the ad, if you see that you're getting a ton of profile views but you're not getting a ton of followers from the ad, then you know there's something wrong here, which is why, like, I think I just put out a Or maybe I didn't put this piece of content out yet, but I put a piece of content on like, like 5 metrics to track for your ads. But yeah, that's one of them because you can see like, well, if there's a bunch of people clicking your profile but they're just like not converting into followers, then like you probably have a problem with your profile, right? So that's number, number 3 is like you don't look like you don't look like a profile worth following, which means like dial in your profile, optimize your profile and get better at content, like upgrade your content because yeah, people aren't wanting to follow you. Okay, what else do I have in this video? Let's see. So, okay. Yeah, not tracking metrics. I mean, that's a huge one, right? Like just for everything. So let's see. So like not tracking metrics, a couple metrics that I like to see people track. Yeah, it's just like with these ads, you got to be tracking metrics, right? Like 3 of the biggest ones. There's more than this, but I'll just give you 3 of the biggest ones. Cost per profile view, because that's the entire point of the frickin ad, right? Like you have to know, like, if it's working and that's like one of the biggest ways that you judge the ads. Another one's like cost per follower because like That's what these ads are for, is to grow your following. Like, that's kind of what we're optimizing for is profile views that convert into followers. And then the other thing is ROAS. Like, if you're not tracking your return on ad spend, like, how do you know if this is profitable? Right? That's when you start making emotional decisions and you're like, I'm going to shut these ads down because I don't think they're working. It's like, well, how do you know? Like, do you have data for this? And so So that's kind of the fourth mistake I see is people just making emotional decisions and there's like no data because they're not tracking anything. Right. And then the fifth thing that I will say, and there's honestly more mistakes than these, but I just think these are like 5 of the biggest ones, is this piece here is the DMs. You could call this conversations, chats. Some people call it DM appointment setting, whatever you want to call it. But like every single person, like if you script these ads right, every person that's following you has shown some form of intent on like what you offer. And so you should absolutely like I'm telling you right now, if you're not starting conversations with every single person who follows you, if you're not taking every single new follower, which was the whole point of that ad, and you're not starting chats with them, You're missing the entire plot. Like, I don't know how else to say it. You're missing the entire point. If you do this and you do not have this dialed, you will set money on fire and you'll know. Like, it's like if you're not getting a return, it's honestly, it's probably this. But I mean, there are a number of things it could be. But you saw what I basically said is like, hey, you got to track the data to find out what it is. But I'll just say that there's a lot that goes into this, to be honest. Like, it's— there's entire jobs for this, like DM appointment setters. And there actually is a lot of skill. Like, you kind of need to know some, like, like I would say, like marketing, sales psychology, a little bit of stuff like that. It's also very intuitive in some ways, but like, you need to have a plan for every single follower. Like, what's your chat flow? Do you have this scripted? Like, do you know what your openers are? Do you know what openers are working? Like, do you know how to get it from an opener to talking about something that you could help this person with? Do you know what are your main things that you need to cover in that conversation to know if this is an ideal client? Do you know how to properly pitch the call? Because the entire point of these chats is to book calls, right? Which is to get to this point. People on a discovery call with you or possible to sell in the DMs. I do that with some of my clients. It depends. There's a chat that needs to go into that. But let's just say that you're doing calls. It's like, okay, like if you don't have that dialed in, like this is the whole point. Like the whole point of the growth ads in a lot of ways is to start chats that hopefully lead to calls that hopefully lead to clients. Right. And so yeah, you should have it. You should have it so that one, like a good number to shoot for, not like really, really good, but like you know, reasonable is like 1 in 30 chats should be turning into a booked call. And so, yeah, that's just like one really big thing that I want to touch on. But those are like— I would just say there's honestly more mistakes than this, but those are the 5 biggest mistakes is just like not having your messaging dialed in, which I will say that even if you're crushing it, like honestly, most people— there's almost no one I've talked to that I'm like, yeah, your messaging was 100% like There's always something that can make it better. So that's number 1. Number 2, just to recap on this, is using that messaging to script the ads. Because what's the point of having the messaging if you don't put it in the ad properly? Right. And then once that's working, you've scripted the ad, you've launched the ad, you got to make sure that you're a profile worth following. Like your stuff has to be dialed because if it's not, people are like, they're going to view your profile like the ad worked, but your profile didn't and you still lost the follower, right? Number 4. What did I say number 4 was? I got to scroll down. Oh, number 4 is probably not tracking the data. Yeah, not tracking the metrics, not tracking the data. It's somewhat rare that I see coaches that are actually tracking all their data, right? Like cost per profile view. Like, I almost should make a video on this of like the stuff that you should be tracking. But like, timer just stopped working. I like time my work so that I have breaks. But anyways, oh, I lost my train of thought. Uno momento. Oh yeah, I should almost make a video on this, like tracking the data. But like, yeah, cost per profile view, cost per follower, ROAS, like how many pieces of feed content are you posting? How many call to actions are you putting on your stories? How many, you know, YouTube pieces of content like this one or VSLs are you doing? How much are you spending per day on retargeting ads? What's the numbers for that? How many new follower chats are you starting every single day? How many follow-up chats are you starting every day? How many invites are you sending out? How many calls are getting booked? How many closes are you doing? Like, you need this data, right? And almost no one's doing it. So anyways, and then the last thing is chats. So those are what I would say are the biggest 5 mistakes that coaches are making when running this. But when you do this right, like, honestly, it can be crazy profitable. Like you saw, you saw my results just last month, right? Like literally a 31 to 1 return on your ad spend. Where are you going to get that? Where on God's green earth are you going to spend $1 and turn it into $31 in the same freaking month? Let me just put this into freaking context. Even if you were putting your money in the stock market and it was making you like reasonable returns, like average of the S&P 500 in the last, what, 10, 20, 30 years or something, it's probably like 10%, something around there, 10%. That means if you spent a dollar, it would take it 12 months to turn into $1.10. $1.10, right? In 12 months, this turned into $31 in the same month. What would you rather? Turn something into— have another $0.10, right, on your dollar in, you know, 12 months, or have another $30 on the dollar, right, in the same month? Obviously this one, which is why I'm like so convinced that the best investment is yourself if you're an entrepreneur, right? It's not actually the stock market or real estate or any of that stuff. So anyways, but yeah, what else I want to say about this? I will just say that, yeah, like you've seen some of my results. I do want to break a belief. I have this screenshot in here because I just want to break this belief for you. Like if you think that you need a lot of money to start this, start running ads, no, you don't. Like I had people spend, like, here's an example of someone who spent £78 and turned it into £4,600, right? 59:1 return on his first like £78 that he spent on this, right? Because he did things right. And so, yeah, I just want you to know that like you shouldn't be— there are mistakes that you can make for sure. And I'll talk about that in a second. We'll dive back on that in a second. But like when you do this right, it actually should be insanely profitable. You should not be spending money on ads. You should be getting paid to run the ads, period. You should be getting paid like this screenshot to run the ads. You should be getting paid like this screenshot to grow your freaking following and put the right people into your world. So I just want to make that super clear. If you're doing this wrong, yeah, you might set money on fire. But if you're doing this right, this should be stupid profitable, insanely profitable. And I will just say one more thing too. I used to hire— had like an agency before, like not I had an agency, but I hired an agency to help me run like proper ads, like campaigns and whatever, we had a webinar funnel and show up emails and all that jazz. It was— we were like aiming for a 2 to 1, like 2 to 1 would have been great. Like amazing would have been 3 to 1. This is 31 to 1 for me last month, right? Which is like just dumb. Like it's just crazy. So even like 2 to 1 would be like, okay, scale that to the moon. Like scale it to the moon. But 31 to 1. So anyways, What else I want to say? I do want to say like, hey, if you want some help with this, book in a call with me below this video, click the link below this video, book in a call with me. I'd love to see if I can help you out and grow your business. The one thing that I want to talk about is like, this is really simple, but I will say that simple and easy usually aren't the same thing. And you probably already know that by now, right? There are— there's just like a lot of stuff I can almost guarantee that you're going to need help with when you go through this. I'll walk you through it because I literally do this with my clients all the time. It's like, number one, dialing in your messaging. It's just really hard to do by yourself, right? It's just hard because you're— you can't see the picture when you're in the frame. Number 2, scripting the ads. Super helpful to have some eyes on this and make sure that you script them properly. So like one thing I give my clients is like, here's the scripts, here's how to do it, do that and send it to me and I'll review it so that you go launch it and you're not wondering if this is right. You're just like, I know this is good. She's already reviewed it, right? It just takes away the fear of doing it wrong because the reality is you could do it wrong, right? Number 2, once you launch the ads, you're going to like— there's actually even problems with launching the ads. You're going to be like, well, how much do I spend? How long do I, you know, put this on for? How do I test them? How do I know which ones to scale? How much money can I spend per ad? I will tell you that there's mistakes you can make when scaling these ads. Like you can spend too much and the ad breaks, right? And a lot of this stuff is dependent on your niche, on the business that you're in. Right? Um, like some of the scripting and things like that. And, or like, how much should your cost per profile view be? I can't tell you watching this video because it depends on what niche you're in. Like, B2B for me is higher. If you're an anxiety niche, it's going to be different. If you're doing diabetes, it's going to be different, right? Um, so like, you're going to, you're going to be like looking, you're going to have to be tracking data, and you're like, well, how's like, what data is right? And that's where it's helpful to like have someone who's just done this with some people, right? So yeah, that's another thing. A big thing that like my clients and I are always working on is like the chat stuff. Like this is the number one thing that moves the needle, you know? And so, or like maybe you want to hire a team member and put them in your DMs, right? Which is like what I've recently done, which helps a ton. So you can get your time back. It's just like there's going to be all these questions as you go through this and there are actually mistakes that you can make when you do this. Like just being super honest with you. I wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have a business if I could just like make course videos and everyone didn't need me, right? Like, that's why I have coaching with my course, right? With my program. So anyways, I'll just say, if you want to skip all those mistakes and you don't want to be like, oh my God, is my messaging good? Oh my God, is this ad good? Oh my God, is this the right data for me? Like, oh, how do I hire a team member to put up like all that stuff? Maybe it's worth it to just book in a call and like save all the mistakes because ultimately, like, this is totally an Alex Hormozi quote, but like you're going to buy the lessons either way. You're just going to buy them with time or you're going to buy them with money. Right. And what he meant by that was like, you can just pay someone who's already like figured all this stuff out and already wasted a bunch of their money or wasted a bunch of their time or like made all these mistakes. Or you can just find someone who's already figured it out and ideally figured it out for themselves and a bunch of other people. And you can just fast-track the process and not make the mistakes and save your time. And in this case, because you're spending money on ads, you'll also save your money because when you make mistakes with ads like you, you do set money on fire, right? So anyways, hopefully this video was helpful, but I just wanted to explain like deeper into the last video on a couple of the mistakes that you could be making with growth ads so that you can frickin avoid them. And I will also say like if you seriously, if you want some help with this and you just want the fast track and you don't want to have to figure all this, for lack of better— yeah, you don't have to figure all this stuff out on your own and you'd rather just like invest a little bit of money to save you some time and also probably some money. Then just book in a call with me, right? So the link is below this video. What else I want to cover here? I don't think I need to cover anything else crazy. Just like, yeah, I've helped a lot of coaches so far. Like, obviously I don't have only my own results here, like help people hit $10K months, $20K months, you know what I mean? Stuff like that. So probably worked with over 200 online coaches at this point. And yeah, when you do that, you realize a lot of the pitfalls, a lot of the mistakes, and I would just love to help you avoid some of those. So that sounds like a plan. Book in a call. And if not, I hope this video was at the very least super helpful. Okay, lots of love. Bye.
