The Art of Online Business

How to Know If It’s Time to Scale (or Pause) Your Workshop Ads

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie

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Ever look at your workshop ads and wonder, “Should I scale this or shut it off before I waste more money?”

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I walk through real, simple numbers to show how to calculate what a workshop registrant is worth and how that changes once ads are involved. 

I also explain why warm audiences slow down, what happens when you move to cold traffic, and how to spot the difference between a workshop that’s working and one that needs fixing first.



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

SPEAKER_00:

So you are an online course creator who is running a paid low-ticket workshop. Low ticket means$47 for the workshop or below, maybe as high as$57. And you want to know if you're not running ads, is your workshop performing good enough in order to run meta ads? Or if you are running meta ads, is performance good enough for your workshop to scale those meta ads? Or should you just turn those meta ads off and go back to just doing the workshop organic style? That's what we're going to cover in this episode. Let's get started. So, in a moment, I will outline this scenario in a logical way with some real workshop numbers that could happen for you, or at least you'll be able to follow along and then apply the logic and math to your own workshop numbers, whether they're powered by ads or not. But I want to explain first why performance would change with your ads if you're running ads traffic to a workshop. And specifically, it's because a lot of folks, and it makes sense to do this by the way. So don't panic if you feel like you've been running ads to your workshop and performance has started to slow down. It's because lots of folks in the beginning target your warm audiences, right? And if you're doing that, great, that's what you should be doing in the beginning. But warm audiences are finite, and we tend to saturate those audiences rather quickly with our Facebook and Instagram ads. And we think that spending more ad money means that registrations would increase linearly, but they do not. Because as we increase the ad spend, people in our warm audiences see the ads more often. And that filter of, I've seen this before, I'm not going to respond to these ads, it goes higher, right? And then also workshop after workshop, more people in your warm audience have seen the ads. And so then it becomes a question of, well, what do we do then to continue to get positive performance profit, if you will, out of our workshop? Well, you're going to have to start using ads and targeting cold audiences. Just understand that the cold audiences usually come with a lower return on ad spend, ROAS, because the trust is lower, because somebody in a cold audience has not yet encountered your business social media, your videos, has not yet been to your website, is not yet on your email list and thus does not have much trust for you because they don't know you. However, if your workshop has been working organically already with organic traffic, organic warm traffic, if you will, or even organic traffic that let's say you've acquired because of recent collabs that you've done with other businesses that serve your same niche in a complementary, non-competitive way. So all I will say is that your warm and then your warm-ish audiences, they are limited. And cold audience return on ad spend will be lower than those warm audiences. But as long as your workshop was converting organically well, then using Facebook and Instagram ads should work, even if you're targeting a cold audience. Cool? Alright. So if you're feeling like Roas has dipped, or if your cost per acquisition, your cost per sale is going up, there's hope for you if you're running ads. And if you're not yet running ads to your paid workshop and you're just making money from your paid workshop because you're advertising to your email list, or I should say marketing to your email list, or people who follow you on social media, this is good. And you'll now see how to calculate whether or not you should run ads. So let's run through this scenario together. By the way, my name's Quayjo. Hello. I am a meta Facebook and Instagram ad manager. I have been doing so for since 2020 and a little bit before, serving tons of course creator clients since then and a few coaches here and there. I've managed over 3 million, probably closer to 4 million dollars of ad spend now. And so what I'm telling you is just comes from my experience doing that. Okay, let's look at how much a workshop registrant is actually worth. Because the concept here is that you need to know what is the value of a workshop registrant so that if you haven't run meta ads yet, then you know how much you can pay per registrant, right? Quick example. If I know my registrants for the workshop ultimately are worth$100 to me, then I know that I can pay, you know, up to$80 or so to acquire each one because I'm still making money. And that's the name of the Facebook ads game. Because you should be asking yourself, can you scale these ads if you're already running them? And should you be able to run the ads if you have not run them yet? And so this is the way we gotta think in a value per registrant way of thinking. So here's an example, and follow the numbers on track along with me, okay? Let's say you have a$47 workshop. Because first we need to calculate how much a registrant is worth, okay? So let's say that you have sold 50 of those paid workshops. So now you have made$2,350. Okay. All right. Now let's say you also have an order bump revenue or upsell revenue from the workshop, and that has generated$2,150 for you. So your total workshop revenue is$5,000. Now you might be like, Quijo, wait a second, how did you just throw in that order bump and upsell? Well, it's because you always should have a super aligned order bump and upsell when you are doing a paid workshop. And you can offer a myriad of things as an order bump and or upsell, but a lot of the profit is made with that order bump and upsell. About 15%, if you're doing it right, of your workshop registrants should purchase an order bump from you in addition to registering for the workshop. Obviously, this is paid workshop, by the way. And five to ten percent of those registrants, those paid registrants should also go on to purchase the upsell, provided you have a aligned upsell that's also priced right, isn't not too expensive. And you can do things from including recordings and replays. No, you do not have to give the replay away for free. You could even add a special VIP QA section, which means during the regular workshop, you keep the QA pretty limited, but the VIP upgrade folks get another additional 45 minutes, you know, or fifty or an hour. You have to figure out how many registrants you usually have so that you can provide enough time so that your VIP folks can actually everyone get a question answered during that VIP special upgrade only session. There's things you could offer. Think about it, figure it out. It's definitely leaving money on the table if you do not have an order bump and an upsell. Okay, I've said my piece. Now the total workshop revenue is$5,000. So we want to now, in order to figure out the workshop registrant value, there's two scenarios. If you are not running Facebook and Instagram ads, then the value from here is easy to figure out. You just take$5,000, as I'm doing on my calculator right here, and you divide$5,000 by the number of workshop registrants that you had, which was 50 registrants, and your registrants are worth$100 each. Okay. Remember that if you're doing it organically. If you're running ads, in this scenario, let's just say you spent$2,000 of ad spend in order to get those 50 registrants. So you would take your total revenue, which is$5,000, and subtract your ad spend, which was$2,000, and you would have$3,000 of profit left, right? So divide that$3,000 by the$50 registrants to find out that your registrants are now worth$60 per registrant. Now, if you're running ads, you're asking me, can I scale ads and still make money? Well, if your registrants are worth$60 just for the workshop, then you need to know what you were acquiring those registrants for. Okay, so up to this point, you've realized in this mythical workshop scenario that if that your registrants are worth$100 per, all right? And if you in this scenario spent$2,000 to acquire those registrants, then your cost per registrant was$40 per registrant because$2,000 of ad spend divided by 50 registrants equals$40 per registrant. So if you're running ads in this scenario, then the profit per registrant is$60, which is a healthy profit margin. And so that gap, each registrant's worth$100, I have to pay$40 per to acquire a registrant. That is good. If that profit gap is big enough, then yes, scale. Because as you scale, you remember your warm audience leads will get more expensive. And as soon as you start targeting cold audiences, then your cost per registrant is going to increase. So you want to know how much a registrant is worth and how much you have to pay for a registrant K. And then you can scale into that profit. Now, here's where it can get better for you because you might say, Quayjo, this isn't even worth it for me to make$60 per registrant. Actually, it is. Many people would love to turn on ads and bring in a hundred registrants and then make sixty dollars per registrant because sixty dollars per registrant times a hundred registrants equals six thousand dollars. And all you had to do was prepare for a workshop and deliver the workshop in a valuable way and then deliver, you know, the additional VIP things or whatever you had to deliver associated with what people purchased in an order bump and an upsell. But it gets better, okay? Usually, if somebody is doing a you know repeated launch for their main group program or course, what have you, 500 to 700 to 1,000 to$1,500 to$2,500 offer several times a year, and they're doing it off the back end of a paid workshop, meaning that they run the paid workshop, and then the people who bought the paid workshop also get pitched that program or course or offer, then those workshop, that$60 value per registrant for the workshop just went up. You got to take the total revenue from the course or your program that you sell and divide that into the number of workshop registrants. Specifically, the amount of course sell or program sale revenue that came from workshop registrants needs to be divided by the number of workshop registrants and then add that value on top of the per registrant value just from the workshop alone, and that number gets even sweeter. So these numbers tell you if scaling makes sense. Now, here's the next step. Before I give you that next step, if you want my eyes on your Facebook and Instagram ads so that within two business days, you can know from me, because I've looked at so many ad accounts and I run ads actively for clients. You can know from me what would be the next three steps that I would recommend so that you can reduce your cost per lead or reduce your cost per sale, i.e., waste less ad spend and sell more or get more leads for your business. Either way, it's fueling your business with the leads that it needs, then look down below and head over to my 48-hour ad audit and sign up, pay, and I will do an audit for your ads. Okay, now back to what I was going to say. The next step here is to consider your cold audience targeting if you are already targeting warm audiences to your workshop ads. And if you're not yet running ads to your workshop, then look at that earnings per lead or revenue per workshop registrant and decide if it's big enough. You know, let's say you're making more than$20 per workshop registrant, you probably should consider running ads. Now, I don't know your business, okay? So every business, depending on its quality of offer, its quality of messaging, could get a different cost per workshop registrant. Nothing I say in this video is guaranteed. The only thing that's guaranteed, actually, is that sooner or later you're going to lose some money on Facebook and Instagram ads because you're testing your ads and not all tests go well. Plus, I'm just a random person on the internet, not even your Facebook and or Instagram ad manager. And you should never blindly trust any random person on the internet, experienced or not. Take the numbers I'm saying, run them for your business and do what makes sense for your business. And that is the way to not guarantee but increase your chances of success. All right. So, some strategy here. Warm audiences will fatigue quickly from monthly workshops if you run workshops monthly or even three times a year. So once you establish, before you ever run ads to your workshop, once you establish how profitable your workshop is, then you need to think about growing your email list. You can do so in a number of organic ways, which I'm not here to cover, but a paid way is running Facebook and Instagram ads to your lead magnet, and that's worth paying for those leads because you've already figured out that your workshop and hopefully your launch are revenue positive and do make your business money. That means your business is nurturing your leads successfully, and you should start to pay for leads via running ads to your lead magnet. That way your email list can grow, and thus your revenue from your paid workshops and your launches would begin to consistently grow at whatever rate it will grow for your business. That growth rate depends on your numbers and your unique mix of offers and funnels. Okay, cold audiences will scale better than warm audiences, but they need better messaging. And you're only going to figure out how good your leads are from cold audiences and the percent of cold audience leads that convert. You're only going to figure that out if you start to run ads. So just be very, very intentional with those ads and cut down ad waste. Research your messaging, start with a conservative ad budget. You're already making money from your paid workshop, so be conservative in your estimates for what money you could make from a cold audience lead, understanding that cold leads convert at a lower rate than warm leads do. But get ultra clear on your positioning, make sure you're testing more ad creative and more ad copy, and that's kind of your roadmap to success, if you will. Now, I haven't forgotten about you, dear friend, who's listening, and maybe your workshop isn't doing so well. Like you realize that your earnings per lead for the workshop is like quite low. I can't specifically say how low is low, but maybe you got 100 workshop registrants, but you don't have an order bump or an upsell yet. And because your workshop pricing was off, you realize that your earnings per workshop lead was like$10. Okay. That's too low to run ads to. So you should focus on increasing your earnings per workshop lead, which probably means adding in the order bump or upsell that you don't have right now, or improving the messaging on the order bump and upsell that you do have right now that's not converting well for you, or just changing the order bump and upsell that you already have so that more people end up buying it. It's it's a combination of those things. And then also listen, if your workshop isn't making as much money as you hoped because not enough people are converting into the workshop, then maybe you need to work on the emails that you're using to pitch the workshop to your email list. Okay, clarify that messaging, clarify the value of the workshop. You know, if you have a workshop or anything else you're selling for that matter, it should solve one pain point, right? Don't have it solve six different things. Have it solve one pain point, but make sure that that pain point is a pain point that lots of people have, okay? And make sure that your messaging about the solution to that pain point that the workshop will solve hits on a frustration that converts. Okay. Let's say there is one pain point, but that pain point might have five different frustrations. I guarantee you that not every frustration will convert at the same rate. Some of those frustrations will move people to register for that workshop way more than other frustrations. And it's your job as the primary marketer for your business to figure out which frustration. And if you're like, what do I do to figure that out? Well, this is where you make content for Instagram, if you're posting on Instagram, organic content, and it speaks to that frustration, right? Because you're constantly teaching on Instagram or using messaging that positions you as the expert in your niche and moves people to take action with you. Okay. So then focus though that content around those different frustrations that are all stemming from one pain point, maybe two, but one is better that your paid offer could be a workshop, could be your program, solves, and see what the algorithm is putting, you know, it's giving you more views on those posts that are popping off because of the messaging, you know, or more than other posts with different messaging that provides keys, organic keys to what messaging should convert for you. I hope this has been valuable for you. If you need my help, there's links below to go and work with me in a paid manner. Thanks for listening up to this point. Take care, be blessed, and you'll hear from me in the next one, or you'll see me in the next one if you watch on the YouTube channel. Bye.

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