Transcript: Ep #081 The $5-a-Day Strategy for Course Creators: Facebook Ads that Convert

[00:00:00] Oscar Garcia: Welcome to The OMG! Show, the podcast that helps course creators grow their business with profitable paid traffic funnels. My name is Oscar Garcia and it’s my mission to help you, the course creator, drive more traffic and convert more customers so that you can have a thriving and sustainable business. In today’s episode, we’re gonna try to find out if there’s a preferred go-to strategy for using Facebook ads, to build an audience, grow our list, and generate sales.

And by answering this question, we’re gonna try and avoid breaking the bank when it comes to running ads or spending countless hours creating content in order to get results faster. And we’re gonna try to figure out if there’s a more efficient way when it comes to getting in front of the right people.

We’re also gonna be taking a look at what this actual Facebook strategy is, what kind of assets we need to create, and the setup that we actually need to use. Now. Make sure to stay until the end of the podcast to discover how you can join a support group, of course, creators that will give you the encouragement, accountability, and resources you need to succeed with your course from anywhere.

So as business owners, we need sales, right? We need cash flow in order to generate that cash flow, we need an audience and we need a way to get our message in front of the right people. On top of that, we need to also make sure that we have an offer that people are willing to pay for, but how do we get in front of the right people, right?

How do we get our message out there? And to be honest, there’s kind of a lot of many different options we can go down. We can launch a webinar, we can do memberships, and we can have a Facebook group. Of course, we can run ads, we can create a content calendar. But then it’s like, what kind of content

Should I create, and on top of that, how do I even get more eyeballs to my content? Is it just hashtags and, making sure I post at the right time or is there more to it? . and it’s honestly just a lot of whirlwind thoughts and frustrations and it’s, it’s kind of hard to kind of figure out exactly what that first step should be or what the best course of action is.

The thing is that we live in a pay-to-play world, right? So the idea of only relying on free content or free strategies, to grow our list and to generate business and generate cash flow, it, it’s kind of leaving us at a mercy. The mercy is that we are constantly trying to chase an algorithm. Even when it comes to Facebook ads, right, or even advertising in general.

We have to rely on an algorithm a little bit. And at the end of the day, we know that your market is out there and if you can only get in front of them, you could provide them with utility and they’ll be excited to actually work with you, right? Now, just like you, I’m constantly looking for ways to build my list, and generate sales, not only for example, with my beta group Marketing & Mojitos, but with my main business Renegade Soccer Training.

And there are two paths, right? There’s the organic and there’s the paid. And I’ll be the first one to tell you that I’ve actually never been able to grow a business organically. even though I used to do SEO back in the day, it never actually really worked for me. this is just not my area of expertise and I’m sure it works for others there are definitely experts out there,

but for me, what has worked is using paid ads, right? That’s how I was able to build a six-figure business in about eight months. So for me, paid ads is the way to go, however, And I’ve talked about this before, the ads world is a little bit different now because of all the privacy, and policies that are going into place, making it harder for the pixel to track.

And I’m sure you’ve heard others talking about how ad expenses have gone up and that’s, it’s not as great as it used to be. And for sure, ads are not as great as they used to be, but that’s because the platform has changed. The strategies have changed. Now, what’s interesting is that back in like 2017-2018, I actually came up with this idea called the engagement inception strategy.

I think at the time I was watching inception way too many times because of my roommate at the time, And that’s kind of why it ended up flowing. and I totally forgot about this campaign structure, but it’s now becoming essentially my favorite and my go-to strategy. So let’s go ahead and break down what the engagement inception strategy is and why it’s so powerful for today’s, advertising atmosphere, so that way you can build your list faster and generate some more sales.

So, . First off, it’s a different world right now. We need to move, from an off-platform strategy to an on-platform strategy. So what I mean by that is that rather than setting up an ad and sending people to a landing page, for example on your website, we need to create our funnel essentially on the Facebook platform.

The reason for this is that Facebook and other ad platforms can’t track a hundred percent of what is happening, on your site, unless you have server-to-server integration or, or first-party data, which you might have to hire a developer or just purchase some really expensive software for, for most people, it’s just gonna be a little bit out of our reach to do so.

So, What that means is that, let’s say you generated a hundred leads and it’s costing you 50 cents, that means okay, you’re, you’re getting a cost, you spent $50, you got a hundred leads, right? The thing is that Facebook is, right now, based on my testing, only getting about 50 to 60% of the conversions that are coming through on a good day.

Meaning that if I generate. 10 leads, or let’s say even a hundred leads, Facebook is only tracking, anywhere from 40, 50, or maybe 60 of those leads that are coming through. Now, that might be fine and dandy if you are, spending big bucks on ads. But if you’re working with a limited budget, let’s say something that’s less than a hundred dollars a day, less than $50 a day, then that might be a bit of a struggle for you because Facebook needs 50 conversions within a seven-day window.

Essentially you need to double your budget in order to get the right amount of conversions within that seven-day window for that ad to optimize. Otherwise, it’s gonna get, it’s gonna get stuck in that learning phase, and goodnight. like that’s it. Your ad is pretty much dead. You gotta restart and go about it a different way.

So here’s where the engagement inception strategy kind comes into play. Pretty much what happens is that it has a content-first approach in order to warm up an audience. The reason for that is because, of course, warm audiences convert a whole lot better than cold. Okay. And when it comes to creating content, the best content out there is video.

It’s the one that’s consumed the most. It’s the one that people engage with the most. So the engagement inception strategy uses a video-first content framework where we are creating a high-utility piece of content for your target market. So this could be a video that is three to five minutes in length, and it’s targeted to specific interests.

In your market and what’s happening is that as people watch this video, Facebook is building your invisible list. Facebook keeps track of anyone who’s, commented on the video, watched the video, et cetera, et cetera. So behind the scenes, you are building your invisible list and you can create what’s called custom audiences.

pretty much the segment that has engaged with your content. So you can have an audience of people who have seen 25, 50, 75, and 95% of your video. These are your warm audiences. So you have this content-first strategy where you’re warming up the audience and Facebook is actively tracking. And then what ends up happening is once you, I would say once you reach somewhere between 500 to a thousand actual views of that video, you would want to go ahead and create.

[00:07:10] Oscar Garcia: A retargeting audience based on the people that have watched your video say 50%. And what you could do is create, a Facebook lead ad, meaning that rather than sending people off the platform, you create a lead ad where Facebook accepts their information right there on the platform. So what this means is that Facebook isn’t relying on pixel data.

Facebook has its own data of users that are actively using it on the platform right then and there, and it’s tracking optimizing a whole lot faster and a lot more accurately, so that way you can have greater results with your ads. So the whole strategy is about, okay, let’s create some content, right?

Let’s promote this content. Let’s try to get 500 to a thousand views at 50% on this content. Once we’ve got that, let’s go ahead, create a retargeting audience, and then send them to our lead magnet. Send them to our offer. But the point is, is that we are warming up our audience. The really cool thing is that the reach is significantly lower for videos.

So for example, inside of the Marketing & Mojitos, beta group, I’m doing an experiment right now where I was running ads directly to an offer from cold traffic and we were getting about $27 to reach a thousand people. With a video the current way, I have set up within the campaign.

I have it structured and optimized for, engagement, and it’s getting around a $7 cost per thousand. So to reach a thousand people, it’s almost a third of what it is to send people directly to my offer, and I’m warming these individuals up, which then I could then of course retarget to you and send them to an offer.

The really cool thing about this is that I’m only spending $5 a day on ads in order to do this. So, imagine that with $150 a month, you can have a piece of content that is out and about warming up your audience. People are consuming it, they’re engaging with it. Your Know, Like, and Trust factors are increasing with these specific people.

And Facebook is tracking that on the platform. You can then create a retargeting audience of those exact people, create another ad for them on the platform, and optimize faster. Do you see what’s happening here? Now your dollar is going a whole lot farther and you don’t have to rely on the pixel data any longer.

That’s the beauty of this engagement inception strategy, which is that we lead with utility first, right? We lead with value first, and then we only engage with those people who have consumed our content rather than trying to do it traditionally,. I have used as well setting up an ad and sending them directly to our landing page or directly to our offer.

Now. Instead, we are building and warming up our own audience to then build our invisible list, which then we can later reuse to retarget them and send ’em to our offers. And of course, because they are a warm audience, they’re gonna convert at a much higher rate, at a lower cost per acquisition. . So that’s the strategy, right?

That’s the strategy for you to kind of forget about the pixel. Get some success running it for as low as $5 a day, and it avoids you having to break the bank or creating endless content that no one sees and ends up essentially wasting your time. Right? Because even though it’s free, you still have to worry about getting people to see your content and you can follow trends, you can dance, you can do, any kind of hashtag strategy you want, but just understand that free is definitely a long-term play until you kind of have some substance and you can analyze the numbers and make adjustments.

Or you can use a $ 5-day ads strategy and start getting results by the end of the month. So there you have it. That is my preferred Facebook ad strategy that will allow you to get in front of the right people and allow the ability to list and generate sales on autopilot without having to break the bank or go hard on content creation.

Now, as you spend the next week or so mapping out the videos that you’re gonna want to use for your ads, if you want me or my community, of course, creators to give you feedback on your content, join us over at Marketing & Mojitos. It’s free for the moment. And once you’re in, go ahead, and share your idea and we’ll let you know what we think of it, and if you’re on the right track or if there are some other things that you should tweak.

So if you’re interested in that, head on over to www.oscarmgarcia.com/beta and sign up or click the link available on the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the OMG Show. Enjoy the rest of your day and make sure to tune in for the next one.