How to Get Cheap Leads as a Coach, Consultant, or Wellness Practitioner via Facebook Ads
*The advertising and content strategies outlined in this article will work for practically any business, but the article is written mostly to help coaches/consultants following a personal brand-type business strategy.*
Today we’re going to talk about what to do when you’re starting an ad account from scratch.
Clients usually come to me in two positions. The first is they have no account data. The second is that they have account data, but they never built their audiences or installed their Facebook Pixel correctly.
By the end of the article, you’ll know what and how to setup your Facebook Pixel, what kind of content to create to run ads to, how to set up your first campaign, and target metrics to watch for.
But First, Some Vocab
I believe one of the fastest way to learn things is to understand the industry jargon, and then to simply learn how it fits together. This is that section.
Facebook Pixel:
If you’re new to Facebook Ads, the Facebook Pixel is basically a tool that allows us to track what web pages our prospects have visited and show them ads accordingly. More simply put, based on the web pages they visit, we can add them to different “buckets”.
Audience
An audience refers to people who have fired an event on your pixel. Think of it like all of the people who have a tag on your email list. Audiences matter way more than likes on a page. You can have very few likes on a page, but you can have massive audiences that are invisible to people snooping out your page.
You can view your audiences here.
Campaign
A campaign is the top level of your ads in Facebook. There are 11 campaign objectives based on what you want Facebook Ads to accomplish for you.
NOTE: Facebook will show your ads to different people based on the campaign objective you pick even if you are showing it to the same audience. Facebook optimizes for what you want to have happen!
Ad Set
An ad set if the next level down in Facebook Ads. Think of ad sets as where you choose who you are showing a group of ads to.
Ad
An ad is the smallest unit in Facebook Ads. It’s a single advertisement with a headline, image/video, body text, and an optional link.
Ad 1 and Ad 1 are the same. The idea here is to test the same ad in front of different people.
Default Event
Within the Facebook Pixel, there are default events you can trigger when prospects take certain actions on your page. Some of these events are PageView, Lead, InitiateCheckout, Schedule, AddToCart, Purchase, etc.
Get 1000 conversions of any event, custom or default, and you can then optimize around it.
Custom Conversion
A custom conversion is a tool you can use to further segment people into your buckets based on the pages they visit. Personally, I like to use them in TANDEM with default conversions because then we can build conversion data around the default Lead event across multiple offers or funnels, but still have our prospects segmented by funnel and follow up accordingly.
Lookalike Audience
This is what I would call one of the pinnacles of Facebook advertising. A lookalike audience leverages Facebbok’s AI to go find a TON more people just like the ones who already converted on your event.
You can create lookalike audiences based on data from conversion events on your pixel, or from uploaded buyer or lead data like an email list of leads or purchasers.
If you’re starting an account from scratch, this is your first big milestone.
*I wouldn’t bother attempting to create a lookalike audience from less than 1,000 emails. It’s just not enough data for Facebook. Plus, the match rate has to be sufficient for it to work as well…
Match Rate
Match rate refers to the accuracy of uploaded data. In order for Facebook to match the people on your uploaded email list to a Facebook account, it must be the same email as they account they use on Facebook. Optionally, you can also provide address, phone, etc. But again, it must be the same info as that user’s Facebook account.
I have heard that match rate on email lists is typically just 40-50%.
Retargeting
Retargeting simply means delivering ads to people who have already interacted with your stuff in a certain way.
Watch a video but didn’t go to the website? Retarget them.
Go to the website but didn’t buy? Retarget them.
Campaign “Efficiency”
Efficiency refers to how effective your ad campaign is relative to the amount of money you are spending.
A campaign that is generating leads for $0.41 is more efficient than a campaign that is generating leads for $0.75. Leads and efficiency should be considered relative to the objective of your campaign. Applications for a call are far more expensive than email leads.
Big Mistakes Most People Make When Starting Their Account
Not installing their pixel
If you don’t install your pixel, even if you’re just running organic traffic, you’re missing a massive and FREE opportunity to build conversion event data.
If you haven’t set up your pixel yet, you can do so here.
Even if you install it wrong, having it on your page to collect SOME data will save you the approximate $1,000 I’ve usually seen that it takes to build audiences.
Installing their pixel on every page without understanding events
Lots of people install their pixel on their pages and think they’re good, but they don’t customize the installation.
Every time you put your pixel on a page, you should consider which event(s) you want to fire on that page.
For my clients, we always make a “link sheet” which gives them a handy way to find the pages we make for them and for the both of us (should they be interest) to know which pixel events are firing on what pages.
Firing repeat events or Firing the Wrong Events
When people your website, you should trigger the PageView event. When they visit your webinar, I recommend triggering the Lead event.
If you stick page view on every page of your funnel, then you have PageView firing as many times as there are pages in your funnel thus creating muddy data.
See where it says fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);? Either duplicate or modify this line based on what events you want to have fire. That’s all the “coding” you need to know."
Here’s Exactly Where to Start
Now that we’ve established the foundation, we can talk about where to actually start with your ads.
Here’s some more stuff you should know. According to the Ogily Agency, over 70% of customers prefer to learn about products through video. Naturally then, we should run some video ads.
Now this doesn’t mean you need to create a bunch of fancy videos, and in fact, professionally done videos actually perform WORSE than professionally shot video. Keep your camera stable and stand by a window and you’ll be good. Further, the majority of viewers these days are on mobile platforms so portrait (“tall-ways”) video performs better than landscape video.
So instead of fancy video, I recommend Facebook Lives. These Lives should be done on your business page because we will then use them for advertising.
If you aren’t comfortable on video, it’s definitely worthwhile. On the legendary Rich Scheffren’s Coalition to Save Internet Business, Rich was interviewing Molly Mahoney and Molly said, “When you got into business you actually signed up to be a model.”
And it’s true. If you are an entrepreneur going the personal branding route, you’re going to be on camera. A LOT.
And if you still really hate being on video, you can also implement this strategy with blog posts, but that’s a topic for another post.
”How Many Videos Should I Make?”
Ideally, you should be on Facebook Live every day. The big benefit to this is that you will get some traction organically! Yay free stuff! But if you are struggling with content topics, you can implement this strategy with as little as around five videos. The more the better.
*If you hate Facebook Live but are comfortable on video, you can alternatively pre-record videos on your phone and upload them to your business page. The advantage of Facebook Live is the organic reach that it gets. However, if you cannot create a Facebook Live every day, you won’t get organic traction so whether you pre-record or do them live no longer matters.
**The caveat to “fancy video”: When I say fancy video, I mean video that is shot on a DSLR camera. Friends of mine who create ads for the likes of Dean Graziosi, Frank Kern, and Russell Brunson tell me that some of their best performing video ads are the fancy ones. And what fancy means in THAT case is the hard hitting, bunch of transitions and text hype-y kind of ads specifically used in conversion campaigns. What we are accomplishing here is building a relationship with our audience, first and foremost, by providing value and being relatable.
Here’s What to Say
Think of your Facebook Live videos as infomercials. They should provide value to the audience about the topics they are struggling with AND also make a pitch. And you should make that pitch ever 4-6 minutes.
Minimum video length should be 10 minutes, max 15.
So what do people say in an infomerical?
Intro
Immediate pitch
Educate
Pitch
Educate
Pitch
REPEAT
When you teach, you should frequently be recapping where you’re at in the content. When people engage with Facebook Lives, they generally only tune in for a few minutes out of your entire broadcast. You want to make SURE they are both getting value and seeing a pitch whenever they tune in.
Now when I say pitch, I do not mean some ugly sales-y thing. I simply mean to say something like this:
“Hey, by the way, if you like what we’re talking about here and you want more, you can head over to EasyToRememberURL.com and get _______. There, you’ll see _____________ and you can (take the next steps) by __________. Okay, now back to (topic).”
Super light. Quick. Easy. Low pressure. FRIENDLY.
NOTE: Your call out should be to an easy to remember URL pointing to your FUNNEL. Not just your website. And it should be easy to remember and easy to type in. I can’t stress that enough. Buy a new domain. It’s just $11, and point it to your funnel. You will make more business off of this tactic than you will ever spend on an easy to remember domain name.
Here are some examples:
MattWrightCall.com
MattWrightBook.com
MattWrightInnerCircle.com
All of these domains point to their own funnels based on what I want to promote and they’re very easy to say, spell, and remember. And the more times you say them, the more your audience will remember them.
Now that you know what to say, how long to say it for, you’ve got at LEAST 5 videos, and you’ve got your pages properly “pixeled”, we’re ready to talk about advertising.
How to Setup Your First Campaign
It’s not sexy, but they easiest way to do this will be to use some numbered points.
Go to Facebook Ads
Create a new campaign
Select the Video Views objective - This will optimize for people watching your videos
Create your first ad set and select your target (we will talk about who to target in a second)
Load in all of your videos
Publish
Duplicate the ad set per audience you want to target
Minimum recommended budget per ad set is $3.00 and test for at LEAST 4 days before you determine if it’s not working.
Target metric you are looking for is that Video ThruPlay should be $0.06 or less. If it’s more than that after 4 days, turn that ad off in that audience.
Who To Target
When it comes to targeting, I recommend building a list of:
Influencers/authors
Books
Brands
People who are into health, are frequently into natural news websites, health blogs, Whole Foods, Lulu Lemon, etc.
We are working with on of my clients right now to generate leads for his cognitive decline functional medicine packages. His ad sets include:
Keto, Ketosis
Dave Asprey, Onnit, Aubrey Marcus, Bulletproof, Bulletproof Coffee
David Wolfe, Longevity
Andrew Weil, Dr. Mark Hyman, Ben Greenfield Fitness, Dr. Perlmutter
All of these INTERESTS represent groups of people who may be trying to solve the problem we are offering a solution to. We don’t know if they will work, but by testing a number of ads at a time, and a number of audiences at a time, we can quickly know which ones will and won’t work.
Notice how they are “grouped” a bit by those major categories of influences, brands, and books
NOTE: Target audience size per ad set should be around 2 million. 500k is the smallest I would go, and sometime I go up to 5 million. There’s no exact science to it.
The big bottom line is that no one knows if ANYTHING is going to work until you sufficiently test it. Yes, we know best practice, but there are no guarantees. You can build the perfect marketing “system”, but if your marketing angle is offer, it won’t work. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that Facebook Ads or webinars or whatever doesn’t work. There are many more variables than you could ever see or track.
I frequently remind clients that P90X, the famous workout program, failed 21 times before they got it right, and by 2009, they had earned over 700 million in sales.
WD-40, a staple in automotive stores, failed 39 times before on the 40th try they finally got it right.
Getting Fancy With Exclusions to Make Your Campaign More Efficient
What happens after someone watches your video? What happens if they go to that easy to remember URL? Do they just keep seeing your videos? Don’t you hate it when you actually purchase something but you keep seeing frickin’ ads for it!?
That’s because so few people set up their exclusions correctly!
Exclusions allow you to stop showing ads to people who have fired any event you specify on your pixel.
In campaigns we set up, we exclude people who have already visited our website, engaged with our page, and sometimes those who have watched certain percentages of our videos based on the minutiae of what we’re working to accomplish. You may also want to exclude purchasers, leads, etc.
General rule of thumb here, is exclude people taking the steps AFTER the step you are currently setting up.
Bringing new people into your audience? Exclude people who already engaged and purchasers.
What to get engagers to become purchasers? Target engagers and exclude purchasers.
You get the idea.
Conversion Time - FINALLY
Now that you’ve got a campaign that makes people who don’t know you really like you because you’re helping them for free, you can build a conversion campaign!
A conversion campaign is a campaign that optimizes for people to take the next step. Let’s say it’s for opting into a webinar.
Now that you’ve had a load of video views, created a lookalike audience, I typically start my conversion campaigns with around 3 ad sets.
10 second video views
25% video views
Lookalike created from 75% video views
This means our ads are only being shown to people who have spent a decent bit of time with us and probably like us (as far as 10 seconds on social media goes). I always like to give Facebook a few things to play with and let it use it’s super smart AI to help make the campaigns as best as they can be.
Just like with the video views, let it run for at least 4 days, and then simply turn off the stuff that doesn’t work!
Could be the ad that doesn’t work. Could be the audience/ad set.
RESULTS
One client who wanted to grow her email list that I implemented this for had particularly incredible results. The client provided me 5 videos that I fed her topics for and then we barely spent any time on the phone after that. She had already built an opt in page for a smoothie guide and it was converting pretty well from her organic social media following.
See how we turned off the audiences that had above a $0.06 ThruPlay and ran most of our budget to the best performing audiences? See how our total 75% video views accounts to a little over 1,000? THIS is what proper testing of audiences looks like.
After we created her lookalike audience, we created a traffic campaign, then a conversion campaign (see “Loose Ends” for why below). For now, I’m going to skip straight to the conversion campaign.
We had enough data such that we could leverage audience insights on this campaign and previous campaigns and identify that the vast majority of this clients leads were men and women in the ages of 35-44 and 45-54.
So when it came time to build our conversion campaign, I tested each segment individually and let Facebook decide who would opt in most.
I also dropped the 25-34 segment because I talked with my client who told me that the majority of their clients and their favorite clients were typically over 34. It’s not always about the data but also about correlating results with what the client actually wants to get.
The result? An average of a $0.45 cent lead and a 48% opt in rate.
This is VASTLY cheaper than the results most people get. Further, everyone who opted in is someone who has already spent time with us via our videos or “looks like” (lookalike audience) someone who would spend time watching a lot of our videos and be likely to share similar values.
What allowed for the 48% opt in rate is that we properly built out audiences and installed our pixel correctly so that Facebook could actually build data around our Lead event!
*Just because these audiences worked for her, doesn’t mean they will work for you or in your niche. Feel free to take inspiration from these but it doesn’t mean you will get the same results.
How Long Does This Take?
How long this takes is dependent on how fast you can tolerate spending your money. Now this doesn’t mean you should go dump $200 per ad set per day to test audiences because it costs a lot less than that.
Your target metric here is to get 1,000 people who have watched 75% of your videos across all of your ad sets in your video views campaign. Then you can make a lookalike audience and run conversions straight to that, or continue building video views.
Personally, I recommend that video views should be a constant investment. You should ALWAYS be exposing your brand to new people. And if you could pay money to constantly be exposed to new people and building a valuable relationship while you sleep, why wouldn’t you do that?
How Much Money Should I Spend?
Facebook Ads should be though of as a subscription and not an investment.
In my experience, to get to the point where you can build a lookalike audience, it typically costs around $1,000. You can shortcut this if you install your Facebook pixel on your organic pages properly and create a lookalike from that, but that’s only if your timeline to choosing to subscribe to Facebook Ads is long.
Otherwise, the more money you can spend the faster, the better.
Based on the assumption that it will cost you around $1,000 to build your lookalike audience, you’ll want more money after that to generate a “safe” number of leads for your sales process (I’ll talk about what I mean by safe in a second), and then you’ll also want budget for retargetting people who didn’t finish the checkout process.
Minimum recommended budget for a launch for ads alone should be at LEAST $3,000, whether you’re starting from scratch or not.
Here’s What I’d Recommend If You Don’t Have a Large Budget
First, consider what’s the worst that can happen? Let’s say you spend $3,000 in ads and get nothing for it. Okay, if you’ve followed this article you’ve at LEAST got data. Put it on your credit card and pay it down. People have made worse financial mistakes.
*I am not a financial advisor and this is not an article about financial advice and, should you choose to implement this advice, you release Matt Wright from any legal or financial liability.*
Second, I would commit time each week to organic marketing in groups and on your personal Facebook page. I would get the same funnel built as if I was running paid ads and still install my pixel events. I wouldn’t run front end ads to get people to opt in, rather, I would only run retargeting ads that show to people who have entered far into the sales process.
Paradox: Spending More Money is Actually SAFER
Spending more money is actually safer. Why?
Consider this…
If I spend $500, and my cost per lead is $5.00, I’ll get 100 leads. If my webinar (or other conversion mechanism) converts at just a paltry 2%, I’ll make $5,494 (ad spend accounted for). That’s just 2 sales. Not bad.
But if I go all the way up to $7,000, I’ll have 1400 new people on my email list, and if I only make 2 sales, I’ve lost $1,000. If I make 3 sales, I’ve profited around $2,000.
But the other CRAZY THING that happens when I spend $7,000 if that my potential earning, even at a bottom barrel 2% conversion rate goes all the way up to $76,916.
You don’t win with Facebook Ads by playing small.
Loose Ends
If you don’t have a lot to invest, it is not worthwhile to get fancy with the exclusions. Your audiences will be so small that stuff will barely run. This is a long term game and it’s a “big numbers” game. Less than 1,000 conversions on an event just isn’t a lot for Facebook to work with.
Many people who claim to generate many thousands of dollars in results for their clients on just hundreds of dollars of ad spend do not disclose the time or money that they spent building qualified audiences. Don’t be fooled by these people. Look very closely at who you choose to hire.
Yes, If you spend $1,000 to build an engaged audience THEN run a conversion campaign to get email leads, technically your cost per lead is higher. However, it’s only higher until the threshold overcomes what someone only running cold ads gets their leads for. In the long run, you win because your prospects will forever be pre-disposed to like your marketing because they like you because you actually helped them first instead of just asking for their info and money.
When testing a new opt in page, I typically run a traffic campaign first and not a conversion campaign, especially when the account doesn’t have a lot of data around the Lead conversion event. If you try to run a conversion campaign and “optimize” for Lead right out the gate, Facebook doesn’t have enough data to identify who is likely to actually opt in! So I usually spend $100-200 on a traffic campaign and then roll it over to a conversion campaign. Back at a private event in Australia I helped organize, guest speaker and 8-figure Facebook Ads agency owner Matt Orlic said, “We don’t touch a page until it’s had at least 400 page visits. So spent $100-200 or hit 400 page views… The roll it over to conversion.
BONUS: If you want to get super fancy, while you’re running everything through Facebook ads, install your Google Ads pixel on the same pages and fire similar events. Then, when you want to expand to YouTube or Google display ads, you already have a lot of data!
What To Do If You Want Help
If you liked what I went over in this article and want some help implementing it, you can always go to www.MattWrightCall.com and apply for a call. On the call, we will collaboratively develop a custom sales process for you, and if you like it and I genuinely think can help you, we can talk about working together to get that plan implemented for you. If it’s not a fit, no pressure.
If you’re not sure if you’re ready, go ahead and apply. I genuinely like getting to know my readers and am always grateful for the opportunity to contribute to their business and lives. :-)
Talk soon,
-Matt Wright