The Art of Online Business

How Early Should You Turn Your Ads On Before A Launch?

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie

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If you’re running Facebook or Instagram ads for a launch this fall, I’ll walk you through exactly when to turn them on for the best results, whether you’ve got a big warm audience or you’re just getting started. 

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I’ll explain why turning on Facebook and Instagram ads two weeks before is the standard, why some launches need three, plus the common mistake that hurts webinar attendance. I also break down a simple timeline you can follow to keep your ad performance strong and your stress levels low. 



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Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:

Speaker 0:

If you are planning on using Facebook and Instagram ads to drive traffic, to get registrations for your launch, especially if you're an online course creator. And you have the question, quajo, how early should I turn on my Facebook and Instagram ads before my launch? This episode is well made exactly for you, because I got clients at the time of the recording of this video, which is July 21st, just nine days before my birthday who are getting ready the clients to launch in the fall, and I know that you, if you're running your own ads, are also thinking about the same question what's the right timeline? When is it good to launch ads before the launch? That way you get the best possible performance. So that you can see me holding my hands, one at my forehead and one at my chest. The one at my forehead is the earnings per lead and the one at my chest is representing the cost per lead, and you want the gap between these two hands to be as big as possible, because that is your profit. So in this episode, I'm going to give you the easy answer and then I'll dive into a bit of nuance and finally, if you listen, then you'll have an exact timeline that you can follow more or less, so that your ads will have the best launch performance as possible. I think you'll like this one.

Speaker 0:

So, traditionally, the easy answer is you should turn on your Facebook and Instagram ads two weeks 14 days before your launch starts. Now why? Well, there's a couple of reasons. One is because you don't want your ads to turn on super early and then people sign up for your launch and then they forget about you, and then you have a workshop or a webinar or a boot camp or a challenge. What have you? And nobody is there. That is the worst feeling in the world. And so why don't you want to turn on ads later than two weeks before, as in just one week before? Well, also, if you do that, then with ads only running a week ahead of time, you either A won't have enough people to register for your launch or, b you'll need to crank up that ad budget to get enough people to register for your launch. But who wants to manage a way higher ad budget in half the time in one week? If you need, you know people to register for your launch.

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Let's say you need 500 registrants from ads. I'm just gonna run some quick numbers here and let's say you get an average cost per lead of six dollars per lead, then that's three thousand dollars of ad spend. But you're gonna do that in a week and hopefully not have to hustle over the weekend. So let's just divide that by seven days and that's like 428 of ad spend a day. And then you gotta watch your ads and check in and look and optimize and tweak, and that is a lot of pressure to put on yourself in addition to you. You know, getting your email sequences set up and doing the connecting of all things launch related, plus planning out your webinar slides, updating them it just is not a good setup, so you want to avoid that. Now, like I said, I'll talk about a little nuance and then at the end of this episode, I'm actually going to give you a timeline that you can follow. So stick around for that if you're itching to get your ads ready to go so that this fall they can run well for your launch.

Speaker 0:

Now something has changed and here is the warning and the reason you might want to try this nuanced approach. The approach is that you can run ads for your registration, for your launch, maybe three weeks ahead of time. Now, here's why. Maybe three weeks ahead of time. Now here's why you probably have heard of the fact that people on you know Facebook and Instagram can opt out of tracking, especially on iPhone I believe on iPhones, which, if you're listening from the United States of America, most people use iPhones, or at least that's Apple's biggest market. And so as more and more people opt out of tracking, that means that when they go to register, facebook might not, or meta might not, know as much data about them as it could, which means it can't optimize and make its ad to work better. And so for some ad accounts, what we are seeing in general as Facebook and Instagram ads managers, is that those accounts need to run ads a little longer in order for the ad performance to get as good as it possibly can get. Where there is less data, we need more time to collect more data with which we can optimize on right. That's the algorithm, meta's algorithm doing its thing optimizing, and it's you or me, or you I'll say you, because if you start running your ads, you're also a Facebook and Instagram ads manager. That's more time for us to do our job, which is to bring in high quality leads at the lowest cost possible. So sometimes, especially if you have a smaller social media following or a smaller email list, smaller warm audiences, you should turn on your ads earlier so you can get better performance out of them.

Speaker 0:

Now here's a timeline that you can follow, as in we're going to start from a launch date and then back up in time or earlier in time, so you know how early to do certain things. And you're going to get a tip that I see over and over again If you can avoid this mistake, your launch will go better and more people will show up to your launch event, the webinar, the bootcamp, the workshop, etc. Etc. All right, here we go. So let's say your launch date I'm pulling up my calendar right now. Your launch date. I'm pulling up my calendar right now. Let's say your launch date is September 8th, monday, september 8th, which this year is the week after Labor Day. Probably don't wanna launch on Labor Day, because people are out barbecuing and doing their thing and not worried about launching. Okay, cool.

Speaker 0:

So from the 8th of September, which is a Monday, you want to start six weeks out or six weeks ahead of time. So one week ahead would be September 1st. Two weeks ahead would be the 25th of August. Three weeks ahead would be the 18th of August. Four weeks is the 11th. Five weeks is the 4th. Six weeks is July 28th, which is next week. That's the week that you're hearing about this. If you follow the podcast and heard this episode drop, see how time flies. So don't wait to the last minute.

Speaker 0:

Now, 16 weeks out, you want to begin creating new ad copy and graphics based on what has worked before. If you've launched before, that way you got new stuff to test against the best performing old stuff. We like to do this for clients and I recommend you do it for yourself too. Now, if you're like Quajo, this is my first time running a launch. I haven't run ads before. Don't worry, don't panic.

Speaker 0:

What you'll want to do, friend, is look at the pain points that you understand your launch solves. So, if you have a webinar for your audience, what pain points is that webinar solving? Now, remember that not all pain points are created equal. Like, maybe there's let's just say it solves one pain point and there's five frustrations from that pain point that your ideal client would have, right. So those five frustrations, you could speak to three of those frustrations in your ad copy, one frustration per ad copy. Especially, you'll want to focus on the hook, which is the first two or one lines of that ad copy. Okay, cool, but not every frustration converts equally, which is why you want to write down a few and test them. If you had five frustrations, you'll probably find that one or two will get you way better leads and registrants than the other three to four. Three, because I can count. Two plus three is five, and this is why your business needs you to do this testing. Okay, same kind of thought.

Speaker 0:

Go into coming up with graphics for your ads. Yes, you can make video later, but I recommend starting with graphics. It's what I do for my clients, because graphics are easily consumable, almost instantly. We know what the thing is about, what pain, pain point it hits like, what kind of value it provides, and then you can measure that. Whereas if you make a video that could be a minute long, let's say, then you gotta make sure your hook is really good and you gotta make sure that you're talking in a good way towards the camera and you gotta caption that thing and you gotta make sure your call to action is correct and all this stuff. There's just so many variables that a video adds into the mix. So I like to start with graphics, and you should too. Okay, cool, four weeks out. So six weeks out would be the 28th Monday, july, and then four weeks out now would be August 11th, four weeks ahead of September 8th, right? So at four weeks out, you want to make sure? Okay, this is going to help you a lot.

Speaker 0:

The mistake here is I get questions a lot. Maybe you've asked me this question before too, but I see it with clients that I coach Facebook and Instagram ads. Not enough people show up to their webinar and then they panic and then I ask some key questions and this mistake comes up frequently. Four weeks out, make sure your launch registration emails are written and that you have enough of them so that, whenever you turn your ads on, the people that register hear from you at least every three days, if not every two days, because you decided to write more. That's what needs to happen. Too many times I see folks and they don't have enough registration emails. So let's say they run their ads, their registration ads, for two weeks and somebody signs up in the first two days, that person might not hear from the course creator, the person who's running the webinar, for like another week or maybe even a week and a half until, like, say, four days before the webinar starts.

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And that is bad because out of sight, is out of mind, and the other email marketers that are in their inbox are going to crowd out your emails from, or your webinar from your registrant's mind, and you don't want that. You do not want that to happen because then the money that you paid to get that registrant was pretty much wasted. Sure, they're going to see the emails that you send out for people who didn't show up to the webinar, or just your sales email sequence to sell the thing your course, your offer, your program that you introduced during the webinar. But they'll be like huh, who is this person? Why am I getting their emails? And you don't want that Because that's where people don't open your email, or they just hit unsubscribe and they send all the negative signals to your email service provider, which lowers your deliverability rates and also hurts your sales.

Speaker 0:

So please take the time to write enough emails and have those ready four weeks out, and then four weeks out too, you're gonna do all the connecting of things and make sure everything's running well Three weeks out. Here's where you wanna listen up. If you have a smaller email list or a smaller social media following. You can turn your ads on to begin testing three weeks before your webinar, because that will give you a week to mess things up or a week to get things super right. Okay, now, I'm not going to outline testing here, but basically you're gonna wanna test your ad copy and your graphics and your headlines and even your audience targeting to find the best combination of those four things that yields the right kind of leads. Now, if you want help testing the exact same way that I test for every client when I start out their account or we launch a new ads project, so that you can get the highest quality lead or registrant for your webinar at the lowest cost possible there is a link below and that is for the ad testing cheat code.

Speaker 0:

My course, that uses what I'll call my Olympic gold medal testing framework. And what is that framework, you might ask? Well, if you like the Olympics or have watched the Olympics, then there is a level of excitement that you probably remember, which is the finals. You can expect the best athletes to be in the finals, why? Because the Olympics has rules and they have qualifying heats where all the athletes compete with each other, and the good ones, the faster ones progress, or the more powerful ones, or the more athletic ones progress, and the losers? Well, they're patted on the back and they don't progress right. And so you expect, through the qualifying heats and the semi-finals up to the finals, the best will be in the finals.

Speaker 0:

Now, if you treat your ads that way, which is how I treat ads for my clients, then we end up with a batch of ads that does the best work for you, which translates into you having the highest quality registrant for the lowest cost possible. Do that right, and you can spend less to get the amount of registrants you need. Or you can spend more and get even more registrants, right, okay, cool. So that link is below. It's well, you deserve to have a successful launch and test right, and you can buy the course and then use the principles every time you launch or any time that you launch a new lead magnet. So go get that course, spend the money. It's a good investment in your business's future.

Speaker 0:

Now, two weeks out, you can either turn on your new ads. If you have a larger, warm audience, you know more people that visit your website, more people that follow you on Facebook and Instagram, more people on your email list, you can turn your ads on two weeks out, and if you already had your ads on three weeks out, two weeks out, it's time to start scaling up ad spend on those ads that were working the best because you implemented a tried-and-true, very repeatable ad testing framework that's easy to follow. And then, of course, your launch comes around and you can have a better launch. You can get the ad testing cheat code below and and if you need more help, like my eyeballs on your ad or even on your funnel to point out, because I speak fluent funnel I used to coach hiring online course creators in their funnels and on their ads too, so I can just see things that you won't see.

Speaker 0:

Not that I'm more special or anything, it's just I got a lot of experience going on six years of running ads and we all, including me, have blind spots in our business. Did you know that I hire other specialists to solve specific business issues for me so that I can grow, because I'm just too close to my business. They come in, take one, look at a problem that they are specialized in and boom, solution is right there. So if you need that, then I got coaching available for you. You can get coaching from me. That link is called Facebook Ads Setup to Success. It's in the description below. Until the next time, take care, be blessed, and you can see me or hear from me. We'll connect in the description below. Until the next time, take care, be blessed, and you can see me or hear from me. We'll connect in the next one. Bye.

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