Spending just $300 a month on ads feels safe, but it can actually hide bigger problems in your business.
- Get the 48-Hour Ad Fix Audit
I explain when low ad spend makes sense, when it doesn’t, and the three places profit needs to exist before ads can truly work. I also talk about how to tell if your funnel, messaging, or offer is the real bottleneck—and what to tweak first to improve results without simply spending more.
If you want responsible growth instead of expensive guesswork, this will help you see whether your ads are ready to scale or not.
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Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:
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SPEAKER_00
Spending$300 a month on Facebook and Instagram ads sounds safe, but it might actually be a big risk for your business. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: low ad spend doesn’t mean low risk. And if your ads aren’t profitable, scaling them means scaling the amount of money you’re losing. But if your ads are profitable and meet a few of the criteria, then you absolutely should scale those$300 ads higher so that your business can make more money. If you’re newer to this podcast, you might only know me as a Facebook and Instagram ad manager, but I actually can sit on the other side of the spectrum and be a business strategist too, since I spent three plus years coaching inside of a very high-level online mastermind group coaching program where the course creators we served were like grossing$600,000 a year and sometimes in upwards of like$1.2,$1.3 million per year. And I coached them on building teams, optimizing as in getting more money out of their funnels and, of course, Facebook ads. So let’s get into this episode. So where is that profit hiding in your business? Because Facebook and Instagram ads make sense when profit exists somewhere. And here are three places that you would want to look or think about. Facebook and Instagram ads only make sense when there’s profit existing somewhere in your online course business. By the way, that’s who I’m here serving online course creators with working businesses. So there are three places or things that you want to think about profit-wise in your business.$300 a month on meta ad spend can work, but in these specific situations, one, when you have immediate profit from those ads, i.e., you’re running ads to a self-liquidating offer or just a low-ticket offer funnel. And if you’re like, what’s the difference? I’d say that a self-liquidating offer would be a low-ticket main offer that has an order bump right there, and a post-purchase or post-sale upsell offer. But a low-ticket offer by itself might just be one standalone low-ticket offer. So the second kind of profit would be slightly delayed profit, as in you have an email sales sequence that follows up or is attached to the back end of a free lead magnet that somebody opts into. And that email sells sequence could be five, could be seven emails. And that email sales sequence does a good job of selling your offer to a portion of the people who download your free lead magnet. Maybe you have a tripwire offer on the back end of that lead magnet. And for the people who don’t buy that tripwire offer, they still get the sell sequence that tries to sell them that same tripwire offer and it converts. Okay. Another thing is if you are an online course creator that also is a service provider, for example, like me, I’m a service provider, I’m a Facebook and Instagram ads service provider, but I also have a course that teaches people how to better run their pre-existing, already running Facebook and Instagram ads, right? You could be a course creator who has a course educating folks on dog obedience, but then locally you also offer the service of dog training, if that makes sense. So your profit there might be delayed, as in you know that you’re getting a number of leads coming in, and a percentage of those leads, maybe within the next three months, are local and they end up booking your services. The third kind of profit would be a high lifetime value. For example, you might have a self-liquidating offer on the front end and you’re running ads to that, or you might get leads on the front end, but then you know that your overall lifetime value is pretty high because maybe you have one to two mid-tier offers that people end up taking and benefiting from. And then after that, maybe you have a back-end membership, and you know that that membership costs$29 a month, and people end up staying in that membership for an average of eight months. And then maybe on the back end of that, you have a even higher-end small group coaching program or mastermind that is catering people who you serve who are already operating at a higher level and just need ongoing support from you or maybe people from within your community, the type of support that you can’t provide in your mid-tier offering. And so looking at the average number or looking at the total number of leads that you bring through that whole lifetime journey, you know, that customer journey, and then how much those leads become worth as they travel through your different courses and program or membership and then coaching programs, those together help you calculate your lifetime value. So Facebook and Instagram ads do not have to pay back instantly, but they must pay your business back predictively. By the way, hi, my name is Quajo. I do responsible growth advertising for online course creators who hate risk, but do want growth in their business. For online course creators who hate risk, but do want growth in their business, especially online course creators with businesses that are already working and who are the primary provider for their family, like me. So if you made it to this point, you might be one of the many course creators who are running Facebook and Instagram ads that could be of the four things breaking even, slightly profitable, or inconsistent results, or just the ads are limited by poor funnel math. And hiring an ad manager like me might not make sense for your business just yet. But what you do have is an opportunity to correct your ads so that they make more money and profit for your business, which I’ll walk you through some steps of things you can tweak in a moment. But to understand when hiring an ad manager doesn’t make sense, uh, listen to this following part, and then we’ll go into tweaking your ads. So hiring a Facebook and Instagram ads manager makes a lot of sense when your ads are already profitable, and it’s clear that your business system, if you will, of converting leads into sales is already working quite profitably, and you just need to scale that. Andor where your time as the CEO of your business is a lot more valuable elsewhere. For example, today, actually, as I record this, I have a discovery call with a lady who has unfortunately been running her ads herself and understands that she’s clearly the bottleneck. Why? Because when she launches, she spends anywhere from like 15 to 26,000, I don’t know, 23,000, whatever she said on her intake form dollars on her launch. And her business profits a lot from that. But she recognizes that for her, running ads is quite hard and she could spend the time doing better for her business elsewhere in her launch. And she also has several three specifically self-liquidating offer funnels, of which only one is currently turned on and having ads run to it profitably. Why not the other two? Well, because that would require more time for her to manage those ads, and especially in a post-Meta Andromeda update era that we’re in now, she would have to be also continually, you know, creating different ad creative to make those ads work. So she wants to hand off operations to me so that she can spend her time and thus grow the business more quickly elsewhere. Because when you’re hiring a Facebook and Instagram ad manager, you should be getting or you should be hiring expertise, time freedom for you, faster growth for your business, and reduced decision fatigue. That’s a thing. Scientifically, we can only make so many decisions per day. How many more decisions could you be making to grow your business faster if you weren’t spending an hour or two a day managing your already profitable Facebook and Instagram ads? And I do want to discuss a bit high-level what you can tweak to improve the profitability of your ads. But wow, please don’t be someone who, as your business gets more profitable, you just go and hire an ad manager that can click buttons, you know, because you’ll have them clicking buttons and they don’t understand online course business. And that’s a recipe for disaster. It kind of hurt when somebody told me that, yeah, actually, a lot of Facebook and Instagram ad managers are rather a cavalier with budget and just spend more, more, and more, more, and more without paying attention to the context and really understanding where the profitability of those ads lies or or does not. And so don’t hire somebody like that. Okay, now the alternative to hiring an ad manager would be to improve the performance of your currently running ads first. And there are three ways that I would recommend you start applying yourself to improve that ad performance. We’ll talk about each one. The first one would be lowering your cost per lead or lowering your cost per sale and focusing on doing that by improving your ad copy and/or the messaging on your ad graphics or within your ad videos. The second place you can actually improve how well your ads are working is improving the funnel conversion rates that follow your ads. For example, that opt-in page conversion rate of your lead magnet or the sales page conversion rate of your low-ticket offer. And then if it is a lead magnet and backed up by a sales sequence, improving your email open rates and your email link click-through rates, and then eventually that sales page that those emails lead to, you’ll want to work on that sales page to improve its conversion rate. If you have a separate checkout page, you want to improve that checkout page conversion rate. And then lastly, increasing the profit per customer or building the lifetime value, ideally with profit per customer. And this is a more long-term goal, but it involves focusing on developing a chain of offers that continues to serve your ideal client or customer at higher and higher levels. This is where earlier I mentioned, oh, maybe we started off with a, you know, we’re going back to dog training, a low-ticket offer. Actually, let’s not do dog training. Let’s talk a piano course. Since I interviewed a guy with a piano course, his name is Jock Hopkins, by the way. And I will link that episode below. But let’s say you have a five-day piano success or basic piano course offer, right? But what does that teach? I’m not a pianist, but I’m guessing it teaches like, you know, the basics of music theory and some basic piano chords or things you can do to get started, right? And then maybe you have a full 21-day course after that. And then maybe, you know, there are a number of pianists or budding pianists, you know, who need help and accountability to have a regular practicing piano routine. And so maybe you do that within a membership for budding pianists who, you know, that membership provides easy-to-learn songs, like one new song every month, and that everyone in the membership learns those together. So the routine and the accountability is developed, and then it can also upload videos to that membership of each of them kind of achieving the goal of being able to play that piano song either by reading the sheet music or just having memorized it, right? And so they go from month to month together as a group, learning more and more, and because you provide that, your business makes more and more. And then maybe you have this high-level program after the membership for people who want to take it from just learning like basic songs to like, well, how do I go from here to, I don’t know, being those people who freestyle piano? Have you seen that? Where they’re like practicing inside of a train station in Paris, France, you know, and then as they’re like just playing a song, some famous person comes up next to them and sings, am I the only one who gets lost in these TikToks and starts singing and it’s like the best, most beautiful moment? Like, or maybe somebody who just wants to use their piano skills to, I don’t know, get booked at places, like weddings or something, but you have that support in a higher level mastermind or group coaching program. Who knows? Those are the kind of offers you end up developing as you serve more and more people and figure out what it is that they need help from you. Because see, selling is serving, and selling should not be or need to be sleazy. People need your stuff, and therefore you have a duty to sell it to them right. Okay. And as you figure that out, you help more people, more people are satisfied with your business, and thus your business profits from it. Okay, so I talked to you about lowering cost per lead for your ads. Here’s some basics. If your ad cost per lead is too high, it’s probably the messaging or the targeting that might need to change. Let’s assume that you have good targeting, but your ads are already working to some extent. Then improve that messaging, and I’ll say it simply like this. You might solve with your free lead magnet or low-ticket offer one problem, okay? That problem could have a number, let’s say five frustrations that stem from that problem. Now, maybe in your ads, you’re already speaking to one of those frustrations. You gotta think what those other four are and test some new ad copy and even graphics or videos that speak to those other four frustrations that stem from the pain point that your thing solves. When you do that, you’ll discover that one of those frustrations that you’re talking about and then giving a call to action to go get your free thing or download your paid thing, convert way better than the others. And that is the way you can optimize your ad through optimizing your messaging, that is your written word, or the words that show up in your video, or the words that are laid on top of an image, i.e. your graphics. Improving funnel conversion rates is way out of the scope, but if you look at the key conversion steps, your opt-in page conversion rate, what can you do on your opt-in page to increase those conversions? I’m talking about clarifying messaging in like the header of your opt-in page, making sure that the opt-in button is a clear color or a clearly identifiable color on that page, right? Making sure that the length of your opt-in page suits the type of opt-in you have. For example, it’s a free opt-in for crying out loud. We should be able to look at it in one page that shows up on our cell phone, by the way, because usually people that are opting in these days come from their mobile devices and tell who the lead magnet is for, how it helps them, what problem it solves. Okay, done, right? I’ve seen opt-in pages that take up like six or eight or ten screen lengths on a cell phone. These opt-in pages for a free lead magnet have like six opt-in buttons because you should have one opt-in button per page length of your cell phone, right? And so it’s just too long for something that’s free. Like, what are you trying to convince me of? If it’s free, there’s not much risk for me. Therefore, you should be able to very cleanly concisely convey that value. And then email open rates and link and email link click view rates. These ones aren’t hard, you know? Like if your open rates for cold traffic are around 30%, great. If they’re like 10%, you got a problem. Just look at the emails that you already have synced up in your automation and which ones have the highest open rates. Start to brainstorm what the commonalities in those subject lines are, and then redo your subject lines for the lowest open rate emails, and then wait a moment, like two weeks, three weeks, and then go back and see what those new open rates are. Same thing for the click-through rates inside of an email. I won’t go into this in detail, but each email is effectively like a sales page where people read it, and you want to sell them on taking the action from your email, clicking on that link and doing something, okay? So, like you could even here’s a ninja tactic. Like, you could go find a video on YouTube that specifically is about how to write a good email that gets people to click, okay? Take the transcript from that email or from that YouTube video, copy it into Chat GPT and tell or your favorite AI assistant and say, here is a video that teaches how to write better emails that get people to click. Here are, you know, my seven emails that are in my email sequence. You know, their click-through rates aren’t great. It’s da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. And the subject lines are da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. So give me now, because you’ve you know digest the transcript of that YouTube video, then look at my emails according to what you learn about, you know, email strategy from that YouTube video and give me some ideas on how to improve my emails, or just write the new emails for me. Like you can do that. I do that all the time with ChatGPT. It works beautifully. And by the way, if you thought that like AI sucked and it couldn’t really help you, you’re wrong. Or maybe, maybe, maybe you’re right. You were right. You just used Chat GPT or Claude, like, I don’t know, two years ago, or even six months ago. They are improving greatly at written task, at everything, but they’re improving so greatly. And also, it could be that you have a free model. Those free models are like a year behind the paid versions, and so maybe you just need to invest in your business and upgrade to the paid version. I do use a paid version of ChatGPT. I don’t even have an affiliate link, but who needs one? Just go to chatgpt.com, you know, bless yourself. So consider the real question: are your ads scalable? Ask yourself some questions to figure that out now. And before I tell you the questions to ask, you need to know if you are an online course creator who is already running ads, could be low-ticket offer ads, could be ads to your repeatable launch, and you just want them to work better, you can get your ads audited by me so that you have one clear plan for your Facebook and Instagram ads. Because I’ll tell you the three things that I would do to change your ads so that they get a lower cost per lead or make more money for you so that you can just go and do those things. You need your Facebook and Instagram ads audited so they work better. Head down to the podcast show notes below and click on the link. Important question, like I said, I would give you ask yourself if I doubled my ad budget right now, would it double my profit? Ask yourself, do you know how valuable a lead is to your business? It might have initial value. You might have to measure that value by the number of leads that go through your funnel and how much those that same number of leads ends up being worth after two or three months. Or if you’re a course creator who launches like two times a year, it’s really easy. You want to look at how many leads you bring in to register, let’s say for your free webinar. And then as you sell out of off the back end of that webinar, your program, what’s the value of sales or a total revenue that you bring in and divide that by the number of leads, and you can see how much those leads are worth. Do you know your conversion rates at each step through the funnel? And remember that ad strategy is very closely related to business strategy. I always say Jesus saves Facebook and Instagram ads do not, meaning more eyeballs on a poor offer does not a good business make. How strong is your offer? Having great ads can’t fix that. What about the effectiveness of your funnel? What about the clarity of your messaging and the economics of your business model? Ads don’t fix problems, they expose them, reduce the problems in your business, i.e., make your business function better for your customers and revenue wise for you, and then of course, run ads to your business offer. If your ads are already working and you want them to work better, get that ad audit from me. And until the next time you hear me or see me, take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye.
