The Art of Online Business

How to Run Facebook Ads to Fill Your Webinar or Challenge (So You Can Sell More of Your Course)

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie • Episode 967

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Thinking about running ads to fill your next webinar or challenge? I break down exactly how to set up Facebook and Instagram ads so you can bring in the right leads without wasting money. 

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I walk you through the ad copy framework I use, how to test the right visuals, and why targeting warm audiences first will save you frustration. 

I also show you what to click (and what not to) inside Ads Manager, so you can launch with confidence and actually sell more of your course.



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

Speaker 0:

Do you want to know how to run Facebook ads? Well, if you're an online course creator and you're going to have a webinar or a challenge or a bootcamp in order to sell your course and you're wanting to actually fill it up with good leads using Facebook and Instagram ads, then this episode is your ABC, your one, two, three, your launch map for ads. At least, I'll walk you through how to test first, how to structure your ads, and I'll even show you at the end how I do it inside of a real client account, so you can see some things that you should be clicking options inside of Meta Ad Manager and options that you should not be cooking, the ones you want to avoid if you want to have high-quality leads without blowing all of your ad budget. So the first thing you want to hone in on is starting with three versions of ad copy. And how do you know the content of the ad copy? Super straightforward is that your webinar or your other challenge kind of launch, but your webinar and your course, by the way, should solve a pain point ideally the same pain point or very similar pain point. Right Now that pain point will manifest, let's say, five frustrations from that pain point. Right Now that pain point will manifest, let's say, five frustrations from that pain point. Right? So your ad copy, your three versions of ad copy, want to speak to three of those frustrations that come from that pain point. And this is because not all frustrations will convert equally, as in all frustrations might be related to the pain point that your webinar solves, but some of those will just hit different and cause people to really want to come to the webinar more than the others, and that will reflect in a lower cost per lead. So this is why you're going to have three pieces of ad copy, right? So, now that you're communicating your three different pieces of ad copy different frustration that your audience actually feels here's the structure that each ad copy will follow.

Speaker 0:

If you've heard about copywriting strategies before, this is the PAS structure. It's called problem, agitate and solution. I like to add an H on the end, which is hope. So instead of the problem, we're going to call it frustration. There you go. Okay, then agitate a little bit, not trigger, but just go a little deeper into it, right? Maybe? Express the emotions around that frustration. Some show the solution or present your solution in a very concise way and then end with hope, like what life looks like after the solution is presented. And, of course, the solution is presented in your webinar and that's where you get people to show up. If this is your first rodeo, as far as your first webinar in order to sell your course, remember that you do not want to over-educate in the webinar. It should be like 45 minutes long and you want to, more than educate, empower somebody to take action and solve that problem. The action in solving the problem is actually your course or program that you're going to sell, right?

Speaker 0:

Okay, so keep this ad copy short and clear and directly tied to a one frustration per version. Again, short means anywhere from 75 words long, which is super short, to like 150 words long, which is medium length. I'm not a fan of 250 word ad copy. That's pretty long. But of course, if you long-winded in your ad copy or your copy in general or your emails in general, go ahead and try a link that's super long. You're just trying to find the angle that gets the click and of course, you'll test these ad copy versions systematically so you'll know which one runs the best and then you can just go ahead and use that one piece of ad copy that works the best with different kinds of visuals. Speaking of visuals, in this case, right now, there's two kinds of visuals Graphics and there are videos, right, yes, video is converting better, but if you're not super great at making a video, then make some graphics first and test through those graphics.

Speaker 0:

It's really up to you. I'm just going to talk about video, right? So keep your video under 45 seconds, okay, and use a clear structure in the video, a solid hook, and then you can teach one thing and then have a call to action to register, and then, on that video, you want to have, like your captions of what you're saying and then also have a text overlay that is a call to action to register for your webinar or your bootcamp or your challenge. What have you? Or you can use the myth format, right, which is that most, whatever kind of people think they need X, but actually they need to do Y, or actually Y works better, and I'll show you how inside of my free training. So then you wanna go ahead and record several, maybe five, different videos. I like five, actually, and each is super short and each would speak to one frustration or one myth.

Speaker 0:

And here's what you're going to do as far as how to test all this in a systematic way and I'm just giving you the overview here. If you want detail, like to see me go through testing each of those steps and to give you things that will work and things that you should avoid there is something called my ad testing cheat code. It's down in the show notes and what it does is it walks you through my Olympic Gold testing framework, the same one that I use for every client when I start their account. That way, you can get the highest quality lead for the lowest cost possible. Ok, so it's the ad testing cheat code, and here is the overview of it.

Speaker 0:

You're going to start out with three versions of ad copy paired with one video or one graphic, ok and you're going to run those for a handful of days until you can see the winner. And once you've seen the winner combination of ad copy plus video then you shut off the losers, those loser ads, and then you pair the winning ad copy with two more ad creative, you know, or three more ad creative. It really depends on how much you're spending in daily ad spend and then you keep going and then you shut off some losers and you keep the winners on and then you pair up more of your visuals until you've tested through using the winning ad copy and then all of your visuals and once you've done that, then you can go ahead and move on to some more headlines, adding those in. But the goal here is that you would have, say, three, maybe four ads that are all getting you a decent cost per lead and you just leave those ads running. Okay, and they're just doing the work and the algorithm is kind of going between the ads as it wishes to show it to the people who it sees fit to show those ads to. And that is a quick overview of the framework. Again, if you want to go into detail and be able to set it up and manage it and know when to pick winners and losers at each phase and how to identify some problems and avoid those, then that's in the ad testing sheet code which is down below.

Speaker 0:

Now, before I show you an actual client account where I can show you some things not to click and some things to click as you set up your ads, let me tell you about targeting. That works right now. This would be august 2025. You want to prioritize your warm audiences, unless you barely have any. Here's like an easy rule to follow, which is target like use 75 of your ad budget to target warm audiences and 30 75 of your ad budget to target warm audiences and 30 on cold audiences. I just want to say that I've been managing ads since 2019 and since 2020 for lots of different clients, but I am not your ad manager, even though I have tons of experience doing this.

Speaker 0:

Nothing I say is guaranteed to work for you. You must test. I'm not guaranteeing that you're going to be able to use an ad strategy to make yourself tons of money. In fact, it's almost guaranteed that you will lose money at one point, because that's the nature of testing. When you test ads, sometimes they work and sometimes you don't, and managing Facebook and Instagram ads is a skill that you must acquire, and you wouldn't expect to go to university and not pay anything, right? You're not going to have to go to university to learn how to run ads, but part of the cost, either if you're paying for a course or trying it yourself. Sometimes the cost is failed attempts and you learn from those attempts.

Speaker 0:

Okay, so if you don't have a lot of people in your warm audience, then go ahead and use cold audience targeting, but make sure that if you're gonna split your budget between cold and warm, that you target warm first, and after your warm audience cost per lead starts to float up above your cold audience cost per lead, then of course, shut off your warm audience ads because they've seen the ads too much. Or add in different creative for your warm audiences and it should be fresh and then they won't have seen it so they won't have that filter. Like I've seen this before, I'm not gonna click and maybe your ad costs will come down. Okay, warm is converting better way better than cold right now, in 2025, and you might get a lower cost per lead with your cold audiences, but your warm audiences will convert better into your program. And what does warm mean? It means people who have visited your website, people who follow you on Instagram or Facebook, people who have become leads in the past, as in joined your email list, and people who have watched your videos in the past, and all of these can be set up inside of the audience tool of Meta Ad Manager.

Speaker 0:

So I am showing you an actual client's campaign for their bootcamp. This is how they sell their course right now and this is again, we're actually getting positive ROAS. It's a paid launch. I don't recommend you do a paid launch unless you really know what you're doing. This is not my client's first launch with me. We've launched their program with ads. We've sold it maybe five times six times by now. So you're going to see a structure, an ad structure, that represents the fact that we really know what we're doing with this launch. It's rinse, wash and repeat. It is not the exact same ad structure you will use if this is your first time launching. Okay.

Speaker 0:

Notably, we are using something called campaign budget optimization. That just means that we've set the budget at the campaign level, but if you're starting, you should use ad set budget optimization. I won't go into detail, but this is what us ad managers do, so we have control over the budget at the ad set level, instead of letting the algorithm assign as it chooses budget to any different ad set on any different day. Okay, so, looking inside, here are their ad sets. Now, again, this reflects the fact that we really know what we're doing with this launch and we're also spending $200 a day, so there's multiple ads here. If you're only spending, say, $30 a day, so that you can have three ads inside of one ad set and you're used, then you're gonna use ad set budget level optimization, all right. So, coming in here to your ad set, here are some things that you'll want to click. So so, at the ad set level, you want to go ahead and set up, you know, lead objective campaign, and if you're sending somebody to a website and the conversion location is a website, otherwise you can use a lead form, which is also called instant form. That is fine. As far as your performance goal, you want to choose maximize conversions and then your pixel goes here and your conversion event, which would be lead if you're having a free registration or purchase, if you're having people pay to sign up.

Speaker 0:

Now, one thing that people usually get wrong is they just set their ad to go live at any time they want. Right? I want you to set your ads to go live as early in the week as possible. Beginning of the week would be the beginning of the work week. Monday, and it's early in the morning. I usually just do 2.30 am Pacific Standard Time or 5.30 am Eastern Time, and the reason we do this is because the algorithm wants to work on your behalf, but it needs as much data as possible and consistent data right, and so behavior on Facebook and Instagram vastly wildly changes from Monday through Friday and then the weekend. So we launch our ads as early as possible in the week so that the algorithm can learn off of as full of a week as possible of data right, and we launch them early in the morning so it has a full days of data with which to get started optimizing on right. I do not like to launch launch ads on Friday because then the algorithm hasn't had a week of data, a work week of data to optimize off of, and you know what? The next day, saturday, instagram and Facebook user behavior changes and the algorithm is like what is going on. So try to launch earlier in the week, like a Monday or Tuesday, and early in the morning. That would be when you launch your ads.

Speaker 0:

And then you want to do something else, which is if you're targeting your warm audiences which I said you should then you want to target these ones. I do it for the client and it's just like I told you, right, and go ahead and make sure that you are targeting these for your warm audience. Now, as far as age and gender, you pick the age and gender that you want to pick, based on who your ideal client is or has been, and I want you to make sure to choose the country where your clients come from. Many people have English-speaking clients, because at least many of my clients that I work with as a Facebook and Instagram ad manager have mostly English-speaking clients actually only English-speaking clients, because we work in English, in which case they're gonna target, you know, canada, the United Kingdom, new Zealand, australia, united States and maybe Ireland, but again, we only target for this client Canada and the UK and the United States, because that's where their customers come from.

Speaker 0:

Okay, and then you can go ahead and, the first time around, just have your ads show to all of the platforms and when I say all the platforms, I mean all the placements on all the platforms Instagram and Facebook feeds and stories and reels and I actually sometimes don't like ads to show here, but the algorithm is pretty good about not spending a bunch of ad money on these three placements. Now we're gonna look at an ad. One thing that you probably want to know to save a ton of your time is that name your campaign in a way that you know what it's about and name your ad sets in a way that you understand, look up here what this ad set is and then name your ad in this way where you put your ad copy name first and then the name of your visual second and then the headline h1 third and then some other optimizations or whatever settings after that. Okay, that way at a glance you know what ad is what and you don't spend a bunch of your valuable time getting all confused and trying to figure out what's working. Because when you do this naming scheme the right way, then you can very easily come through and test and shut off losers and keep the winners on and always look back at your work and know what was working and exactly what was not working.

Speaker 0:

Okay, there's a lot of stuff that you do not wanna click down at the ad level and there's some that you do. Let me show you quickly. So, first thing is you need to know that multi advertiser ads that tends to work better for paid things, paid launches and it tends to work better if you don't select it for free stuff. Okay, at this point, underneath the ad creative, you want to have site links off and you want to have catalog links off and you want to have catalog items off. Sometimes site links can work, but usually it doesn't work super well for my clients, so I wouldn't recommend that you have site links on. All that is is that if you have site links on, the algorithm can send people to different pages on your website instead of just to the opt-in page, and we don't want that. We want people to click on your ad and only go to the opt-in page.

Speaker 0:

Something else I do is I do not use advantage plus creative text generation as an AI generated text, because I like to test my ads and I don't want the algorithm coming up with a different ad creative than what I've had written with a copywriter. Same thing goes for headlines. I don't want that. Also, in the beginning, I do not use any advantage plus creative enhancements because I don't want the algorithm changing how my visuals are presented to different viewers. But if you want a quick bonus one, the ones that I do like to have on are relevant comments. That one works pretty well, and then visual touch-ups can work pretty well, but you should always test these individually before you decide what's working well for you and then, with tracking, you want to have your pixels selected.

Speaker 0:

Let me come back and tell you what Advantage Plus means. You've probably seen a DV plus. That just means that you can set up your targeting, but that meta knows that it can target within this audience and expand outside of your targeting if you want it to. This tactic works very well for warm audiences. If you, for some reason, specifically only want to target your warm audience, then go ahead and choose this. Further limit the reach of your ads, at least right now in August, when I'm recording this. This is there. If you're watching this from the future. You know, in two years maybe you won't see this option. You'll need to dive in to. You'll need to go into your meta ad manager and see what your current available options are. Now let me save you some money.

Speaker 0:

When you see suggestions, take them with a grain of salt, okay. Too many times I've coached folks on how to run their ads and then they come back to me in another session or they message me, because when you coach with me, you have unlimited access to me during our coaching time. They message me and say, quajo, my ads were working, but now they're not working and I'm like well, what happened? They're like oh, I saw this thing, this recommendation from Meta, and I clicked it. Look, meta does make recommendations. You couldn't take them, but test them as in. If I were to click this, I should do it in one ad set and then test it against an identical ad set where I didn't have this clicked right and see which one works better.

Speaker 0:

In general, though, when meta first comes out with recommendations, those recommendations can work sometimes maybe, but they're not proven and it learns how to better recommend things and better have those recommendations work by data, and guess what that data is? People's successes and failures. So in the beginning, it doesn't have as much data, even though they do do experiments with this stuff before they roll it out to the public. But I know from having many different ad accounts that I see different recommendations inside of different ad accounts. Don't be the guinea pig, okay, don't take these recommendations from meta. Just use tried and true ad campaign setup tactics from me so that you make fewer mistakes. Cool, all right.

Speaker 0:

Now let me give you a bonus, and that bonus is don't put in all the hard work on getting good ads only to not have a solid webinar registration, show up sequence, and all that means is, if some body signs up for your webinar, you want them to show up to your webinar, right, that means they need to hear from you consistently between when they sign up and your webinar starts, which means you need to have emails that go out on the automated fashion. And so here's what you're gonna do you're gonna have an email that goes out at least every three days following somebody's registration. Set that up however you want. Probably an automated email sequence will work the best. And if you can have an email go out every two days, adding value, teasing the value of the webinar or building your authority, so to speak, by linking to, like an authority, building podcast episode or even Instagram reel, go ahead and do that.

Speaker 0:

Or sharing your story or testimonials from clients who you've helped, do that, right, but have those going out on a regular basis, like I said. And then also, when it comes time for your webinar to almost start, have a good show up sequence, as in a reminder sequence that says, hey, the webinar will be beginning in two days, and here's why you don't want to miss out. Hey, the webinar will be beginning tomorrow at this time and in the morning of, have an email go out. Hey, the webinar will be later this morning and then, 30 minutes before the webinar, have an email go out and then, 10 minutes before the webinar, have another one saying, hey, we're going live in 10 minutes. Here's the link, if you lost it.

Speaker 0:

Doing these will increase your show up rate, and the more people that actually show up to your webinar means that more people, because it's all a percentages game. They will convert for you. If you want to know specifically how to set up and test your ads so that you end up with the ads that are getting you the highest quality leads at the lowest cost possible, that is the ad testing cheat code and I walk you through the exact way I set them up and the framework for testing those ads. It's called my Olympic gold medal framework and that one is below. Otherwise, when you hear from me, or until you hear from me or see from me next, take care, be blessed and I'll see you the next one. Bye.

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Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie

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