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Most course creators think the secret to great targeting is stacking interests and job titles, but that’s actually what drives ad costs up.
I walk you through the targeting strategies I use for established course creators that bring in higher-quality leads at lower costs.
I also share which audiences to build first, when to use lookalikes, and how to know if your email list is big enough to work with.
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If you’re asking yourself what is the best Facebook ads targeting strategy to get more leads and you’re a course creator, do not make this mistake because most course creators, you know, they’ll jump into Facebook Ad Manager and start looking at interest-based targeting, maybe stacking a few interests together that are related, job titles, demographics, you know, like age or interest, whatever. But actually, there’s a much better way to start off targeting if you want the best kind of leads. And as a Facebook and Instagram ads manager who primarily has served established online course creators for the better part of six-ish years, I’m gonna break down the best targeting strategies that I would use, that I do use when I start out managing ads for established course creators. And at the end, I’ll share some questions that I was asked regarding this content. You’ll be able to understand the best targeting that could work for you, depending on how far along your business is. So hi, my name’s Quayjo. Let’s get started. Now, here’s why interest-based targeting tends to fail. I wouldn’t start with this, but I’ll tell you more about that in a moment. It tends to fail because when you are inside of Meta Ad Manager looking at the detailed interests, and you just start clicking and or you type in one interest and meta starts suggesting other interests, what’s happening is meta is suggesting the most popular interests, and those are the most expensive ones to target because remember you’re bidding for space in somebody’s Instagram or Facebook feed or threads now. So we’re not really using threads placements quite yet because they aren’t converting so well. But since you’re bidding for space, the last thing you want to do is take meta suggestions because those are broad, general suggestions that it gives to about anyone who types in something related to what you typed in in the interest-based targeting, and then you’re competing, right? So your ads will be more expensive. Just honestly do not start with interest-based targeting. It’s the hardest one to do right. I’m gonna give you some better approaches that you can start with. I personally result to interest-based targeting as a last result if these first options do not work. And the first option, by the way, is to build a look-alike audience off of someone’s custom or I call them core audiences. Because the easiest way to inform the algorithm about who you want to target is to give it a valuable custom audience, right? And so here are the most valuable custom audiences. And then you understand, if you don’t already, what I mean by custom audiences. So inside of Meta, you can create custom audiences and think of it like this, because the way you think really will give you the strategy, no matter what changes happen to Meta Ad Manager. Right now, it’s fall of 2025. Okay, so your most valuable audience would be the people who have made the most or most committed decisions to get involved with you inside of your business ecosphere. So obviously, somebody who’s bought a product from you would be the most valuable person to your business because they paid you money. So if you have an email list of purchasers, then those are the most qualified leads in your business, right? And so if you upload that list to Meta and then build a look-alike of that list, that logically would be the best look-alike audience to test. Now, before I give you four more audiences that you can test, let me give you some criteria about the type of audience, if it’s big enough, if your custom audience is big enough to test, and break down look-alike audiences for you. So when I say a look-alike audience, that is just an audience of cold leads that or cold people who are not familiar with your business, you know, they haven’t followed you on social media, they are maybe haven’t been to your website, haven’t seen your videos yet. And you build a look-alike based off of a custom audience, people that are familiar with your business. And the concept here is that if I take a warm audience, let’s say an email list, I upload that to Meta and I say, hey Meta, go ahead and give me an audience of a million or two million more people who share similar attributes to this custom audience that I have given you, this audience that I own. Please don’t upload other people’s email lists that you don’t own. You don’t own those email lists, and that’s violating Meta’s policy. You will get yourself in trouble. So now you might be saying, Quavo, my business is new, and I’ve heard that you have to have a certain sized email list before you can upload it to Meta. And that is correct. I actually was asked this question, and I’m going to address it towards the end of this video in a moment, okay? So upload your purchaser email list to Meta. The next most valuable custom audience or email segment to test would be your entire email list. Now, this is the one that I usually start with because although my online course creator clients for Facebook and Instagram ads are established, if somebody is selling a high-ticket offer, you know,$1,000 or even a mid-tier offer around$500, they might not have tons and tons and tons and tons of purchasers of that offer in order for their business to be really profitable, right? So we tend to start out with an entire email list. Take that email list, upload it to Meta, and then build a look-alike audience off of that. Now, if you’re starting out and your email list isn’t super big, again, I’ll get to the size of the email list and what it should be minimum to build an audience later on in this video. You can always look at the other valuable audiences that you have. For example, do you have a lot of website visitors? That is a valuable custom audience that you can, or core audience that you can build your lookalike audience off of, and it’s an option inside of Meta. Hooray, right on, right? Well, what if you have a big ol’ Instagram following? Okay, well, if you’re already crushing it organically on Instagram, you know, especially if you’re seeing other signals like you have mini chat or similar tool hooked up to your Instagram reels, and leads are already coming in like that organically, then building a look-alike list off of your Instagram followers or even people who have engaged with your Instagram account recently could be a good option. Nothing is guaranteed here. Okay, here’s the disclaimer. But certainly do not just blindly trust a random Facebook and Instagram ads manager on the internet. All right, you’re not guaranteed to make money with Facebook and Instagram ads. I am certainly not saying this is gospel and it will absolutely work for you. In fact, I can almost guarantee at some time or another, you are going to lose money. That’s the nature of running Facebook and Instagram ads, is we test and by going through what doesn’t work, we find what does work and then we scale that up according to our business goals and profitability. Okay, so following this, I’m gonna talk about a couple of pitfalls to avoid, and then we’ll get into some questions that I have been asked. And remember, if you need help because you’re already running ads and you want to be able to bring in high-quality leads at the lowest cost possible, and do so testing your ads that have just launched, like I would, to get to that result even quicker or have a better result, there’s a course for you. It’s super affordable and it’s called the ad testing cheat code. And your business deserves well to have you or even someone in your business, if you already have somebody managing ads, to do this the right way. That link is in below. And the cool part, honestly, about this course is that you can test, like I would test, and be confident that you’re testing things in the right order as you launch your ads, right? And then also if you’ve peeked inside of Meta Ad Manager, you’re quite aware that nothing ever works exactly like you learn it should. There’s always surprises, and you actually inside of the ad testing cheat code get to see me real time. Well, it’s recorded, but in various client accounts, dealing with the randomness that is real life application of solid strategy. And so you see how I will respond to stuff that happened. Okay, so common pitfalls to avoid, you think that the high cost per lead is because of bad targeting when the real issue is super weak visuals or just a weak lead magnet opt-in offer. This is tough, but it’s true and it will save your business money if you heed this advice. Spend some time creating some good-looking visuals because those will stop the scroll, right? And then spend some time on the words. A lead magnet that solves a problem. Well, how are you going to decide if that’s the best lead magnet to use? You might have chosen the wrong lead magnet. Don’t hang out with the wrong lead magnet too long. Don’t be afraid to test new lead magnets and don’t make them super complicated to test. You know, it should take you a number of days. And look at it like this: if a lead magnet solves a problem, you’ll want to think, what are the frustrations of that problem? And I can speak to those frustrations in my ad copy to bring people or to motivate people to go get the lead magnet, right? But switching lead magnets, that’s essentially switching problems. How do you choose? Think about the problem that your main offer solves that you plan on selling later on down the line. And then think about problems that would need to be solved along the way to that main problem. Like if the main offer solves like 10 problems, maybe the lead magnet takes care of one of those problems. Call it a feeder problem. Either way, it could just be that there’s a misalignment between your audience that would love to work with you eventually and the lead magnet that you are placing in front of them. And of course, after you’re getting leads onto your email list, and this is I’m about to start talking funnel speak, but bad leads are not good, right? So you need to look and see are people actually opening your emails? What is your email open rate? Is it around 30%? That’s great. If all you’re paying for leads and thinking you’re getting cheap leads, and something well, especially when you look inside of your email CRM, you know, could be Kajabi, could be convert kit, could be active campaign, could be flow desk. Hopefully it’s not flow desk. Sorry, Flowdesk folks, and nobody’s opening your emails. That is an indication that, well, either your subject lines are need to be improved, or you just have the wrong kind of traffic. So look for these things. Okay. Now, some questions I’ve been asked. Here’s one. How big does my email list or buyer list need to be before it’s worth creating a look-alike audience? Yeah, 600 minimum. So if you don’t have 600 buyers, don’t do a purchaser list. If you don’t have 600 people on your entire email list, you might want to look at a different form of custom audience that you could build a look-alike audience off of. Now, why 600? Well, first of all, when I worked inside of a successful ad management agency, that was the rule. And that this was way back before I ran ads for myself. Now, why 600? You gotta understand that when you upload an email list to Meta, it’s not like all of those users are used to create a look-alike audience off of. Okay. What Meta does is it takes the email addresses and names, whatever other information you upload, but I usually do email addresses and first names, and it attempts to match those email addresses and first names, that data, with actual meta user accounts, Instagram accounts, Facebook accounts. Okay. So that match rate is not 100%. It’s more like 40% to 60%. So if you upload too small of an email list, then the actual users that Meta can pull data from to build a look-alike audience of cold folks who don’t know anything about your business and have never heard of you, that that core data set is small. And thus the quality of the big ol’ audience, you know, that’s two million people, will be lower. And you don’t want low quality, which is why I, as a best practice, do not upload email lists that are smaller than 600 folks. You know, if you want to stick with the rule of a thousand, then go ahead and upload your email list if it’s bigger than a thousand people. All right. Another question I’ve seen or heard is that if I don’t have enough buyers yet, should I still build a look-alike audience from my email opt-ins or just start with open targeting? Okay, don’t start with open targeting because, in brief, your business, the Facebook pixel, the meta pixel for your business needs to have tons of data before you can just do open targeting. And if you don’t know what open targeting is, that’s where you don’t specify any detailed interests and you don’t upload any email lists or look-alike audiences. You just choose age and country and just let Meta do its thing. But it needs a lot of data just to go and do its thing on your behalf and get good targeting for you. So I don’t recommend starting with open targeting. Okay. So if you don’t have enough buyers, just build an email list or just build a look-alike audience off of your entire email list or one of the other custom audiences that your business does indeed have. What if, here’s another question: what’s the order that I should actually test these audiences in, or do I run them all at the same time? You know, well, the order I just mentioned, but what I see this question as meaning is do I do them all at once or one at a time? Do them one at a time. Okay. If you did them all at once, you would have to have a big old daily ad spend budget. And you don’t want to spend that much money all at once when you’re testing. You want to find out what works and then scale up your ad spend. And also, that is a lot of ads management headache and problems if you’re running like seven audiences or five audiences all simultaneously on the same day at the same time. Okay, so I would test through these one at a time, and you’re probably like, Well, how long do I wait until I know it works? Well, that’s where I go into detail inside of my course, the add testing cheat code link below. But I would say, you know, for a handful of days for each audience, and you should know if it’s working well or not. Another question I get is how do I know if my leads from a look-alike audience are actually good quality? Not just cheap emails that never buy or cheap email subscribers that never buy. And it’s good that you’re concerned with the return on your investment, not just the cost per lead. Well, one, is your targeting good? Two, is the messaging in your ad copy good? Because if somebody you know is scrolling and then they stop because of your video or your graphics, they’re going to hopefully read your ad copy and thus find themselves inside of your ad copy. So here’s where doing research on your ideal customer and then your ideal lead and accurately communicating what this lead magnet is about and why you can help them, that’s worth your time. Write the words. People end up converting. The right people end up converting because of the words. And make sure that on your landing page, the same kind of good communication is also being applied. Here’s another question: if my social following is bigger than my email list, is it okay to build a look-alike off of that first? Or is it better to wait until my email list is bigger? I think what you’re asking is like which business asset do you use first, right? Even if you have a huge social media following, if your email list is big enough, I would build a look-alike off of the email list first. Because this is about which custom audience could be the most valuable to you. Test, yes, but if you’re limited on time, which we all are, go with your best bet. And my best bet would be folks who have already opted into your email list in some capacity because they either bought something from you before or they opted in for another lead magnet before. Maybe you did some sort of collaboration or you’ve already had previous webinars, da da da da da da da da da. But they’re on your email list, so they have made a decision to get on your email list, and you know how it is giving out your name and email. One does not easily give out their name and email, or without skepticism, right? So tons of people who are on your Instagram following, albeit engaged and maybe large, like you have 75,000 people on your Instagram following, you know, on your Instagram account. Yeah, okay, but how many of those people have actually decided to get on your email list and taken that next step? I’d stick with building a look-alike off of the email list first and see how that performs. You can learn more about Facebook and Instagram ads by listening to some of the interviews on this podcast where I’ve interviewed other online course creators who are running ads themselves. So you can learn from their funnels, their mistakes, and their successes. Until the next time that you hear from me or see me if you’re over on YouTube. Take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye.
