Facebook Video Ads: Strategies for Course Creators

The biggest mistake advertisers make

Your video ads need to bring people on a journey. Think about the last time that you bought something cold from an ad. A product from a complete stranger. A product you had never considered. Something you hadn’t researched or identified the need for. Chances are, you had to go back a long time. I bet the product was low-cost.

You have to think of your ads as bringing people on a journey. To get the journey started we have to meet them in their world. The best way to do this is to help them solve a problem they have. The bigger the problem the better. Yes, we can create connections with opportunities. But in my experience, this is less powerful. People are less motivated to attain pleasure than they are to avoid pain.

The journey that you bring people on is your funnel.  Most people think of funnels as a specific sequence of pages. Opt-in, offer, upsell, down-sell. In this example, the funnel levels are different types of Facebook Ad campaigns.

Top of funnel video ads for course creators

Top Of Funnel campaigns are designed to build awareness

Awareness of the problem that exists and the future pain that will be experienced if the problem is not solved. Awareness of the solution to the problem. As well as awareness of you and your brand.

Video ads at this level are tricky. The audience is cold. They don’t know you. They may not be aware of the problem that exists. They are not invested in watching a video.

We need to build a relationship and connect with them. 90 seconds on social media is an eternity. It’s hard to say anything in 15 seconds.

When starting with video ads aim for 45-60 seconds. As you refine your scripting, editing, and production skills you can increase the duration of your video to 90 seconds.

No matter how good you get the stats to show that there is rarely any extra benefit to going longer than 90 seconds for your top-of-funnel ads.

The goal of your videos on this level is to educate and engage.

You have to build goodwill before you make an ask. Think of your goodwill as a bank account. Every “give” deposits in your goodwill bank account. Every “ask” withdraws from your goodwill bank account. But here’s the thing. Every ask withdraw is 5 times the deposit of your “give”.

Your top-of-funnel ads are making deposits in your goodwill bank account. Your business will grow in line with the goodwill you build. Playing the long game is the most important marketing mindset you need to develop.

Your Top Of Funnel ads won’t have a hard ask. There is no particular action that you are driving people to make. This may seem strange to a direct response marketer. You can include a soft ask, maybe for a like, a follow or keep an eye out for future videos

Your Top Of Funnel ads are going to be targeted to cold interest-based or lookalike audiences.

If you have an email list, list of customers, or website custom audiences I would recommend using these as the basis for lookalike audiences.

Keep your audiences large. The smaller your audience the higher the cost per action. I like Top Of Funnel audiences in the region of 5-10 million. This gives Facebook plenty of latitude to find your ideal prospects.

Set your ad objective to video view. The goal is to get as many people to view your video as possible

Middle of funnel video ads for course creators

And this is where we are going to unleash our super audience. Long before the cost of Facebook Ads started rising or video become so popular I was a huge fan of video ads because of the super hot audience that we are about to target.

When you launch your Top Of Funnel ads you can build audiences of the people who view your videos. Now there are a number of different metrics that we can use here.

When you are starting out with this campaign you might retarget people who have viewed 15 seconds of the video. This is just to make sure we have enough people in our audience to make it viable.

However, as we show our Top Of Funnel videos to more and more people we can become a little more selective with our audiences and move to people who have viewed 75% or even 95% of your videos.

If someone watches 95% of a 60, 45, or even 30-second video on Facebook they have put their hand up. They are interested in the topic. They are interested in what you have to say about it and they are aligned with your approach.

We have now converted a cold audience to a warm audience. As we have built a level of connection and trust with these people we can now move to make an ask. And that ask is to opt-in for our Lead Magnet.

The middle of funnel ads will drive people to our opt-in page.

It is always worth mixing in video and image ads at this level. You will get much quicker feedback on the hooks that you use in your text and image-based ads that you can then leverage in your video ads.

The videos at this level will be shorter in duration.

Remember we have to build a connection with these people so we don’t need to focus as much on who we are and why they should listen to us.

We can get straight to the problem the lead magnet solves and how the person’s life will be better once they have implemented the lead magnet.

The middle of funnel ads will drive people to our opt-in page.

Like all video ads, the first 2-3 seconds of the ad are absolutely essential. You have to hook their attention. The purpose of your initial hook is to convince people to invest another couple of seconds in viewing the video.

But your hooks can’t stop there. You need to introduce additional hooks throughout the video which carry the viewer along and ultimately convince them to click that “learn more” or download button and visit your opt-in page.

Despite the fact we are talking about video ads never underestimate the power or the necessity for your copy to be impactful too. A bad copy will kill a good video ad.

The objective for our ad will be conversion. We want to optimize for opt-ins but remember if you are just starting out Facebook doesn’t know exactly who the best candidates to opt-in are.

Sometimes when I am starting out a campaign like this I might invest a couple of days to a week in running traffic ads to the opt-in page. This will give Facebook an opportunity to learn who is likely to opt-in for your lead magnet.

Bottom of funnel video ads for course creators

Now if you are a membership site owner or course creator and you have anything other than a low ticket below $47 you probably will not be running any cold or even custom audience-based traffic to your offer page.

The copy and optimization required to get an offer for $497 or $997 to convert with cold traffic are immense.

As a result, we will focus exclusively on retargeting Middle of Funnel video views and Opt-in Thank you page visitors, for our bottom of funnel ads. These retargeting ads can be anywhere from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. Normally the shorter the better here.

Keep each video to one point and hit the pain and transformation possible hard. I would suggest creating a series of videos for each of the pain points and transformation possible for your bottom-of-funnel ads.

Over time you will see the videos that convert best and not alone will this help you optimize your ads but it will also help you optimize your offer.

Decision phase of your funnel

As people have reached the decision phase of the funnel you can be very direct with your explanation of the problem and your product will help them achieve

You can take it that they know who you are and how you help people but still look for quick ways to build your authority.

You still need to convince them that you are the person to help them solve their problem and that your product or membership has the step-by-step process that is going to get them the best possible outcome in the shortest possible time with the least amount of effort.

If you have not yet introduced videos into your Facebook ad campaigns there has never been a better time.

And if you are already up and running with video ads this is your call to double down and keep going.

Video is only going to become more ingrained into people’s everyday lives. The online businesses that understand and leverage this fact will be at a huge advantage.

Let’s recap what we have looked at today.

We talked about your Top Of Funnel Video ads. You are going to produce multiple videos between 45 to 60 seconds max 90 seconds and promote them to cold and custom audiences. We are optimizing for video views and the goal is to engage and interact with our audience.

Our Middle of Funnel video ads are going to retarget the people that have viewed 75-95% of the videos from our Top Of Funnel. The objective at this level is to get people to opt-in for our lead magnet.

Finally, we looked at our Bottom of Funnel ads. Here we are retargeting the people who viewed 75-95% of our middle-of-funnel videos and the people who opted in for our lead magnet. We optimize these ads for purchase conversion.

BONUS Tip

Produce your videos quickly, simply, and without all the headaches that go with complex video editors

So at this stage, you should be convinced that Video ads are the way forward.

For most people, the thought of producing lots of videos throws a spanner in the work. The learning curve alone can put people off.

That is why I love the app CapCut.

It is a simple but powerful video editing app that you can learn to use in less than 15 minutes and was built specifically for people who wanted to edit videos quickly easily and without all the fuss. You can find it on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

It lets you trim, cut, add captions, edit audio, add logos, modify to different dimensions, and export all from your phone.

I have it on my phone and my team uses it almost daily for video across all our social platforms. Give it a try, I think it will make your life so much easier.

So that wraps up this post but keep an eye out for my next one where I break down the content of your video ads. In the meantime make sure to check out my other posts on lead generation strategies for course creators and membership site owners.