Facebook Ad Strategy: How To Plan, Launch, and Scale a Profitable Facebook Ad Campaign
The costs were piling up. She felt like she was going round and round in circles. And no matter what she did, she just couldn’t get her Facebook ads to work. She had a great membership and the results she got for her members were amazing, but she just couldn’t draw people into her world. She couldn’t bring enough people in to give her a sense that her business was working.
She was frustrated, she was angry. She was almost about to shut down her business. She felt like Facebook had defeated her. But when we applied this framework in her business, everything changed.
If you are an online course creator or a membership site owner who is either about to launch a Facebook ad campaign, has a Facebook ad campaign that’s underperforming, or you have a Facebook ad campaign that’s working well and now you want to scale it, then this post is for you.
I’m a huge believer in principles. The online world is full of hacks and tricks and sure they can work, for a while at least. But when you bring things back to a principle level, that is when you can have certainty that what you are about to do will have long-term success.
Table of Contents
The principles in this post are essential for the long-term success of your Facebook Ads and indeed your business. If you get this wrong, you will struggle with every campaign that you launch. You’ll constantly be fighting against Facebook and it will feel like an uphill battle. Your ads will cost more. Your leads will be more expensive. And what’s worse, when you make an offer to your leads, they might not even convert.
Ultimately, your ads will be unprofitable and you will struggle to scale your online business growth through PPC.
But if you get this right, you will have a process to follow that will enable you to produce high-quality, cost-effective, or cost-neutral leads that convert when you make an offer to them..
Ultimately, if you crack this, you will be enabling your business to have an unlimited lead generation budget, as your lead generation process will cover its costs.
Facebook Advertising is Dead…. Or is it??
Not a day goes by that I don’t see somebody complaining that they can’t get their Facebook ad campaigns to work.
“Facebook advertising is dead”
“Facebook ads only work for people in XXXXXX niche.”
“I can’t find my audience on Facebook”.
“Facebook is just out to screw people over.”
None of this is true! And I think that a lot of people misunderstand the game that they’re playing.
Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: “The universe is not under any obligation to make sense to you.” What he was trying to say is, a lot of people look at the universe and if they don’t understand something, they say, “No, that couldn’t be right.” Or, “Well, that’s not the way it works,” because it just doesn’t make sense to them.
They go against the facts just because it doesn’t make sense.
Now, if we were to adapt that saying for the online marketing world, it would be:
“Facebook is not under any obligation to build your business” or “Facebook is not under any obligation to give you cheap leads”.
You have to understand the game that you’re playing. You have to understand the rules. You have to be equipped to win. If you go into this half-baked, you will lose. And that’s a fact.
In the early days of Facebook advertising, things were simple, all you had to do was put $1 in and you got back $5. With very little in the way of strategy or deep tactics even the uninitiated could get amazing results.
But today it’s a different story. As more and more people see the potential of Facebook Ads and begin to advertise the more cash enters the ad market.
The real-estate available to Facebook to advertise on (as in the number of newsfeeds etc of their members) although continuing to increase is relatively fixed. As Facebook is an auction-based market, the greater the amount of cash bidding on a relatively fixed level of inventory, the higher the price will go.
This increase disproportionately impacts popular audiences and segments so if you are targeting people who have appeal to a large number of advertisers your Ad costs will increase even greater than other audiences. And, remember this is just your direct competitors but advertisers in other industries which may also want the attention of your audience.
#1 Mistake Infopreneurs Make When Getting Into Facebook Ads
One of the main mistakes I see people make with Facebook Ads is that they don’t start out with a specific Facebook ad strategy. The depth of many people’s strategy is to create a lead magnet (the one that is easiest and quickest to create) get their opt-in page built (as quickly as possible) and start running Facebook ads to “build their list”.
But they don’t have a clear plan to cover the cost of their leads. Everything in business and marketing should start with a strategy. And this is especially true for Facebook ads because there’s a lot at risk. It can get expensive. It can be time-consuming.
You need a plan to monetize the leads once they start coming in. I don’t agree with the term list-building. To me, this is an aimless, pointless task. Your campaign needs to bring people towards a very specific outcome. That could be an immediate promotion or a promotion in three weeks but there has to be a very specific outcome and a very specific plan to get a positive return on your lead generation investment.
Now here’s the funny thing. Facebook ads and launches don’t necessarily go perfectly hand in hand together. In a traditional PLF Launch, the condensed workshop registration period and open cart period mean that Facebook Ads are not the most suitable promotion methods..
It’s hard to test and scale Facebook ads in a short period of time. This is why it is essential that we use the correct Facebook Ad strategies to support our Launch strategies.
Before getting started with a lead generation strategy, it is beneficial to shift your mindset to thinking in terms of value optimization as opposed to building your list.
There are two main strategies we can adopt here. The stack ’em and rack ’em approach or the mini front-end liquidator
The first Facebook ad strategy, the stack ’em and rack ’em, is where we have Facebook ads going directly to an opt-in page. When somebody registers, they get sent out the lead magnet, and then they enter our email list. Hopefully, once they hit our list we have some sort of engagement sequence to keep them warm, and engaged.
And then at some stage in the future, we’re going to offer them something. That could be 3 months from now or 6 months from now but you sit and hope, as you watch the costs pile up, that when you do make them an offer they will convert and you make your money back.
In many ways, this was the traditional approach to Facebook ads. And when Facebook ads and leads were cheap, that strategy used to work, because it was purely a numbers game and there were big margins of error between the costs and potential returns.
However, now that Facebook ads are getting more costly and our audience’s level of awareness of the marketing strategies and tactics that marketers are using increases, we need to have a slightly more evolved approach.
And this is the second Facebook ad strategy which is the Mini-frontend Liquidator. This is where Facebook Ads drive people to an opt-in page. The opt-in page offers a strategically developed lead magnet that helps our Perfect-Fit Prospect take the first step on our Value Ascension Roadmap.
Once somebody registers for the lead magnet, they are offered a mini-product aligned with the lead magnet (and the next steps on their Value Ascension Roadmap at a low price point. The purpose of this mini-frontend offer is to liquidate the cost of the ads.
If you’re going with something like a $27, mini-frontend product, it’s an easy decision and thought process for somebody to take out their credit card. You don’t think about spending $27.
Now don’t interpret this as it is an easy sell. You still have to work really hard on your offer and you need to have a really compelling reason for them to make the purchase.
With a $27 mini-frontend offer, it’s going to be hard to cover the full cost of your ads so you might need to look at a $47 or a $97 offer. Depending on your audience and the strength of your offer these will be the starting point of generating an unlimited marketing budget.
If you want to go a step further and turn this into a profit-generating campaign you could add an upsell after that initial product to a secondary product. The initial product might contain tools, templates, or fill-in-the-blank sort of document at $27 or $47, and then you might have a secondary upsell for $197, which could contain a video series helping people implement the first product.
The business that can afford to pay the most to acquire a customer, will win. And this is what we are trying to achieve with this campaign We’re trying to create a situation where we can afford to pay more than our competitors to acquire a customer and still maintain profitability.
Map Your Perfect-Fit Clients’ Journey
I call this your Perfect-Fit Client Value Ascension Roadmap. You need to have a very specific sequence of steps that a Perfect-Fit Client needs to take to get them from where they are today to some stage in the future when they’ve ultimately achieved the transformation that you know is possible for them.
What I have found is that most online businesses can condense the core topics that make up their overall message into 5-7 key areas. The ideal case scenario (though be patient with how long it takes you to get here) is to have a lead magnet for each of your key areas.
This becomes really powerful because every piece of content you create within your 5-7 key areas will automatically link to a specific lead magnet.
When you strategically create your mini-frontend liquidator products you can cover one or a number of your key lead magnets which means that over time, every piece of content you produce becomes a revenue-generating opportunity.
The first step is to bring people from your ad to your lead magnet, then from your lead magnet to your mini front-end product. And then you’re going to map the journey from the mini front-end product to your signature product and beyond
This through-line is hugely important because it has to be logical, and sequential bringing people in the same direction. Every step that’s taken is bringing them one step closer to the overall transformation that you know is possible for them.
And when you’re mapping their journey the lead magnet and mini-product are providing them either with a small percentage of the overall transformation or the very next step towards the ultimate transformation. As people move higher up the Roadmap they are getting an ever-higher level of that transformation or they’re getting the same level of transformation only quicker.
And when you’re building your Facebook Ad strategy, you need to know where you want your Perfect-Fit Clients to end up. You need to know the through-line from your free front-end content all the way to your signature product and your coaching program or mastermind. It is so important to know the steps they need to take and to have pre-mapped and pre-built them into your Value Ascension Roadmap.
Alignment here is key and two of the big alignment mistakes I see people often make are:
- MISTAKE 1: Facebook ad copy not aligned with the lead magnet or the opt-in page. This sounds strange but often, especially if the ads and the landing page have been drafted by different people, the key offer and promise of the ad copy and the offer and promise of the opt-in page or the lead magnet are not fully aligned. Storytelling is massively important in drafting Ads that drive high-quality traffic but you need to be careful you don’t bury the lead and end up confusing a potential lead. (equally as bad is where the ad copy is an exact replica of the opt-in page copy)
- MISTAKE 2: The lead magnet is not aligned with the journey that you want to take a Perfect-Fit Client on. The lead magnet might be handy or easy for you to produce, but if it is not the best next step for a Perfect-Fit Client to take on their journey towards the transformation you can provide then it is not serving you, your business, or your Perfect-Fit Clients. The same is true of your mini-frontend products and other offers on your Value Ascension Roadmap. Everything has to be sequential and the logical next step for a Perfect-Fit Client to take.
- TIP: Be clear on what the roadmap is for your clients and make sure that you can give them that pathway.
Understand The Lifetime Value Of A Perfect-Fit Client
As more and more people enter the Facebook Ad market the amount of money being bid on a relatively finite amount of ad real estate (Facebook users newsfeeds and related advertising slots) increases. This will increase the costs of the impressions and the costs of link clicks.
And while the advertising world shakes its fists at the increases in ad costs I believe it is only an issue if you don’t have a specific Facebook ad strategy, to monetize your leads both in the short term with a self-liquidating offer and medium to long term with a Value Ascension Roadmap. It does, however, require a change in mindset from the “put a dollar in getting 5 back” to having a “play the long game” mentality.
With the increased costs of Facebook Ads, you have to be very strategic with the path you have for someone once they join your list or register for a mini-frontend product.
You also have to have a very firm grasp on your downstream conversion rate metrics because if you know with certainty the conversion levels and rates of your downstream metrics now you can be braver with your front end spend up to the point where you will deliberately go negative on the front end because you know you will make your profits on the back end.
Here are some of the metrics you should know and track:
- What are your lead magnet opt-in conversion rates?
- What are your upsell conversion rates?
- What are your conversion rates for your signature product launches?
- What are your conversion rates for other promotions?
- If you were to run a campaign for a webinar, how many people from your list would register?
- How many people would show up for the webinar?
- How many people then convert when you made an offer on your webinar?
- What are your conversion rates on your virtual events?
- How many people do you need to have to make the virtual event profitable?
- And when you make an offer, what percentage of those will convert into a mastermind or a group coaching program?
These are just some of the common conversion metrics that I track with my clients but every business will be slightly different.
You need to become a conversion rate nerd. Start building a database of your conversion rates for your backend offers. Because in reality, there’s no such thing as too high a lead cost. There’s no such thing as too expensive a lead. There’s only suboptimal optimization of the revenue that you produce from that lead once they come in.
And this is why I place such emphasis on the Value Ascension Roadmap. It provides you with a clear visual of the stepping stones and levels in your business and the stages through which you will move people from free content, lead magnet, mini-frontend product, signature product, membership, group coaching program, and mastermind program.
And when you know how many people convert from a lower level to an upper level, you can take a more strategic long-term view of your lead generation investment strategy. This is a key to your long-term success with Facebook ads. But unfortunately, it’s the one thing that most people don’t think about, nor pay attention to.
Uncover Your Facebook Ad Strategy to Launch, Plan, and Manage a Profitable Facebook Ad Campaign
We covered three things here in the Facebook ad strategy today. We compared two lead generation strategies: the stack ’em and rack ’em and the mini front-end liquidator. We looked at building your Value Ascension Roadmap for your Perfect-Fit Clients so that they always have the next step to step to and that you always have a higher value offer to put in front of them. And third, we looked at understanding the lifetime value of a Perfect-Fit Client.
If you take what we have covered here and formally applied it to your business (even if you don’t have all the hard data or numbers yet) you will be ahead of 90% of Facebook Advertisers. And, guess what. You don’t need to be the world’s best Facebook advertiser to get great results, you just need to be a couple of steps ahead of the pack in your niche.
I know Facebook ads can be a frustrating area, so let me know what your challenges are. What challenges do you face with Facebook ads? Whether you’re just getting started or whether you’re a seasoned pro looking to scale your campaign, drop me a comment below and I promise I’ll answer you.