Advertising is the backbone of any successful business. You need to find a way to get people’s attention if you want to make money. It’s not enough to simply have a good product or service, you need to promote it in some fashion. But there’s a wrong way and the right way to set up and run ads for your course business.

Now there are several platforms where you can run the ads. The key is to find a platform that is best for you and your audience.

Covered In this article:

• The best platform to run ads on
• Top mistakes that creators make when starting out
  • Mistake #1: Running A Direct Purchase Campaign
  • Mistake #2: Running Ads On Cold Audiences
  • Mistake #3: Not Using Lead Magnets
  • Mistake #4: Not Building A Funnel
• Tips on getting started for course creators
  • Marketing Strategy & Ads Analytics Integrations
  • Ad Accounts Setup
  • Identify Your Goals & Create Ad Content & Copies
  • Build a better strategy
  • Don’t Wait For A Better Tomorrow. Start Today

Recommended Read Article: How to sell courses with a high-converting Email marketing strategy?

The best platform to run ads on when you are just starting out

Now there are many platforms out there that can help you run ads. But the key is understanding where your audience is and which platform has the most engagement. For coaches, creators & knowledge-based businesses, Youtube, for example, is a great place to start because video content is consumed over minutes rather than seconds like other platforms.

But creating engaging content is not everyone’s forte. So the next best platform that creators can quickly start with is Facebook (now Meta). With billions of users online, Facebook is a goldmine of leads. And relatively as compared to other platforms, Facebook is an easier platform to run ads with. As you understand the process of running ads on Facebook, you can then gradually upgrade to Google and other ad platforms.

TOP MISTAKES THAT CREATORS MAKE WHEN STARTING OUT

Mistake #1: Running A Direct Purchase Campaign

When you are just starting, your brand is relatively unknown, and running conversion or a purchased campaign generally leads to low conversions.

What’s a conversion campaign?

Ask random strangers on the internet to come to your site and buy from you – your courses or paid programs.

This may work initially, and you may get some success, but over time it is only going to become more difficult and expensive. Because finding new customers who know absolutely nothing about you or your business, few ever make the purchase. You must build trust, generate awareness and share high-value content to nurture your prospective customers.

Mistake #2: Running Ads On Cold Audiences

What is a cold audience? People on the internet who are interested in your domain but don’t have any idea about your brand, business, products, and services. They have never interacted with your business before and will most likely refrain from doing so unless they feel they are getting the value for their money and probably get more in return than they would spend.

The Biggest Misconception About Ads Is That They Get You More Sales

Ads ≠ Sales

Ads = Traffic

The actual content on your landing pages or site convinces the ideal customer to make the purchase.

Traffic ads get you more traffic, awareness campaign goals get you more traffic, and even conversion ads get you more traffic but of the kind that is more likely to purchase from you. 

Would you buy something from a stranger?

So don’t force a purchase on a cold audience with purchase campaigns just after the traffic campaign objectives. It will be expensive and not get you many results.

To generate awareness, build trust, and then get to the purchase or conversion campaigns.

Mistake #3: Not Using Lead Magnets

Give, Give, Give, Give some more, and then Take. In this world of super noisy social media platforms where people are bombarded with buy-now ads, if you try and run the same ads, chances are that ads will be expensive because you will be competing with others in the same domain.

Webinars, ebooks, mini-courses, and blogs are just some of the high-value lead magnets you can use to get more leads quickly. The more high-value content you share, the better the lead magnet, the bigger your reach, and the ‘hotter’ the audience.

Mistake #4: Not Building A Funnel

Funnels are a great way to nurture that audience. Building on mistake number 3, these Free or low-priced ebooks, webinars, mini-courses, or blogs that share a lot of high-value content are all forms of content pieces that can be used to build an audience that knows you and your brand and, over time will start trusting your brand. Once you build that trust and awareness, your audience will be happy to learn more from you, even if that means paying for that knowledge.

Those who download or access the content pieces can then be retargeted for your paid courses and other digital products. Because once they have engaged with your brand and learned from you, this audience will be more than happy to pay to learn more.

TIPS ON GETTING STARTED FOR COURSE CREATORS

Statistics show that website traffic generated through ads yields 75% more conversions than organic traffic in the short term.

There are several important steps that you must take to get started with Ads in the right way. First things first, your site and its content need to be ready for running ads. Once that is done, follow the steps below:

1. Marketing & Ads Analytics Integrations

Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager are the primary three integrations needed to connect their website with the ad platforms. These pixels are codes that help transfer data to these ad platforms on the user behaviour, as in how many people landed on the page, for how long did they view the page, did they click on the CTA button, did they sign up, made the payment or not and other certain specific events like these.

Here’s how you can quickly connect the three platforms to your site on Knorish: Marketing Analytics Integrations Setup On Knorish

2. Ad Accounts Setup

Setting Up Ads accounts on Facebook and Google is pretty straightforward. However, you must spend some time learning and understanding how each of these ad platforms is managed. For example, a good ad account setup on Facebook includes setting up a Facebook page and a Facebook business manager first. Post that, create and add these to that account:

• Ad accounts
• Payment Methods
• All Requisite Facebook Pages
• Set Up Pixels and connect them to the ad accounts
• And then, finally, giving access to these above to people or partners who will manage your ads

You can learn more about how to set up these here: Create & Setup a Facebook business manager.

Similarly, google ads platforms have a structure that must be set up. Here’s a detailed checklist that will help: How To Set Up Google Ads: A Checklist

4. Identify Your Goals & Create Ad Content & Copies

Once the ads accounts are set up, the next step is to identify what you wish to achieve from the ads. Do you want to sell courses, get people to sign up for your webinars, download ebooks, or something else?

Remember, with Facebook, and other ad platforms, the steps and the flow may change on the platforms, but the objectives and goals remain the same. These are primarily broken down into three:

Awareness: To create awareness in your potential customers’ minds about they have that problem 

Consideration: To move those potential customers from awareness (I may have this problem) to Considering your solution (I need this solution, and your brand may be able to help)

Finally,

Conversion: To move from still considering your brand and product to buying your solution (take my money now and solve my problem)

For each of the stages, you would primarily need four types of assets:

• A Landing Page
• Lead Magnet
• Ad Copies
• Images
• Videos

One way to learn more about what kind of ads are running in your domain, niche, or specialisation is to check the Facebook Ads Library.

It’s a great tool offered for free by Facebook, where you can check what ads are being run by others. You can search basis keywords or enter specific brands to learn from.

However, note that this tool only gives you insights into the creatives being used, not the actual results you are getting. So get inspired but choose with caution.

5. Build a better strategy

Direct conversion ads are only so good. Research shows that people need to consume up to 7 hours of free content before they purchase anything. And this applies across industries. This has been expedited with social media and other platforms, but the concept remains the same.

So build those funnels. Because a sales funnel brings people to your website and makes them buy your content/services with a series of landing pages, emails, videos, offers, ebooks, webinars, or other assets.

You could build several funnels based on what you are comfortable with. You could build:

• Ebook funnels
• Webinar Funnels
• Mini-Course Funnels
• Membership Funnel
• Course Launch Funnel
• High Ticket Sales Funnel

There are thousands of funnels out there that you can create. The process more or less remains the same.

Offer free high-value content, and drive traffic to that opt-in page with social media, ads, emails, and messaging. Get the maximum number of people to engage with the lead magnet (ebook, webinar, mini-course). Those who agree to use their contact information to retarget with your upsell. Retargeting can again be done with social media, ads, emails, and messaging.

Learn more about funnels in detail with our quick webinar here: 

6. Don’t Wait For A Better Tomorrow. Start Today

80% Time Spent On Marketing – The success mantra or successful coaches

There’s no better time to get started with Ads than now. Now you could learn more about the intricacies of running and managing ads on your own or hire a digital marketing agency, but you need to get started immediately.

Learn, implement, experiment, fail, fail faster, learn, improve, implement. 

That is key to mastering ads and growing your business.