You are probably reading this because you want to know how to sell out your online courses using Facebook ads

Let me congratulate you on the completion of your online course. 

Facebook ad is one of the trusted ways to generate more sales for your online courses because it allows you to acquire new audiences that are totally different from your existing audience.

With more than a billion monthly active users and a very robust platform for advertisers, running ads on Facebook is an effective way to reach your target audience, and ultimately, start generating consistent leads and sales for your online courses.

However, when it comes to running ads for your products, there are a lot of things to put into consideration about the kind of ads to put out there and also the type of audience.

Facebook is a very robust and always changing platform hence if you are not tactful, you can spend a whole lot of money on ads and not get any return on your investment.

In this post, we have highlighted 3 effective Facebook ads tips to sell out your online course but before then, let’s look at something you shouldn’t do when you are running Facebook ads as an online course creator.

What You Shouldn’t Do When Running Facebook Ads To Sell Out Your Online Course.

1. Never launch a purchase ad campaign as your first Ad

Many creators make the mistake of running purchase ads directly to their online course as their first ad. But first, what is a purchase ad?

A purchase campaign is an ad campaign that is run directly to your online course. 

Purchase campaigns should not be your first Facebook ad campaign because starting by launching a purchased campaign first is most likely going to lead to failure because you don’t know what to observe, you need to have a foundation for your Facebook ads to work on.

The foundation is called a traffic campaign. Traffic Ads campaign is an ad campaign that is run to help you gain more traffic to your sales funnel.

When people run a purchase campaign for their products, they tend to target a cold audience. 

The cold audience is those who haven’t seen or engaged with your content. While the warm audience is those who have engaged with your content, visited your page or watched more than three seconds of your video or posts. For a cold audience to take up your sales offer, it requires extra time and effort.

The best way to go is to warm your audience up first by nurturing them, then you can run retargeting ads to the warm audience with your online course.

2. Avoid having no structure in your Facebook ads strategy

Another mistake people make when launching Facebook campaigns is they have zero structure in their strategy.

Here’s a 3-step process to create the perfect structure for your Facebook ads strategy to sell out your online course.

Define your end goal

What’s your ad’s objective? What do you want your ads to achieve for you? Is your goal to generate brand awareness or sell courses? The more specific you are in defining your campaign goal, the better.

Observe your customers’ “buying journey”

The buyer’s journey refers to the sequence of steps that a buyer goes through leading up to making a purchase decision.

This journey begins with the buyer becoming aware of a problem they want to solve (or a result they want to achieve), followed by considering various solutions that can help them, and lastly, choosing one specific solution and making a purchase.

For instance, for an online course creator, your customer’s journey might look like this.

• They saw your post, found it helpful, and followed you on your social media pages and blogs
• They read your blog post, and social media posts and they sign up to your email list.
• They read your emails and they loved it so they bought your low ticket offer which can be an ebook.
• They loved the ebook then they went ahead to sign up for your online course.

Implement your buyer’s journey in your Facebook ads campaign

With the buyer’s journey, you know when and where to run your traffic campaign ads and retargeting ads.

Your Facebook ad campaigns should be based on each of those steps. It should retarget the previous step, and each campaign should correlate with a step in your funnel.

Types of Facebook Ad Campaigns to Sell Out Your Online Course

Now that you’ve understood what you should not do when it comes to creating your Facebook ads, let’s move to the three specific types of Facebook ad campaigns you should create to sell out your online course.

1. Brand awareness/traffic ad campaign

This should be your first campaign if you are just starting out to run Facebook ads.

A brand awareness campaign is an audience-building campaign that is created specifically to build an audience of potential customers (aka prospects) for your online courses

This is your top-of-funnel campaign, which means targeting cold traffic. As mentioned earlier, this is the only time you should target cold traffic.

The objective of this campaign is to identify specific segments of those users that are your target audience.

The goal of a brand awareness campaign is not to generate leads or sales, it’s to generate awareness for your business. 

This is accomplished by running ads for your free content, such as social media posts, blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, etc.

As you increase traffic to your website or social media pages by running ads for your free content, you build up an audience of people who have expressed interest in your course topic and who now, at least to some degree, know you and trust you. As this is happening, you’re building up an audience that you will target in other types of campaigns.

To be able to run this top-of-the-funnel campaign very well you need to learn about your audience so that you will be able to target them effectively.

How to create a custom audience for your traffic ads campaign

A custom audience for your traffic ads campaign should not be too specific. 

The best recommendation is to create custom audiences with at least several hundred thousand people (a million people is even better) and let the algorithm work its magic. 

By creating a custom audience that isn’t too specific, you’re giving Facebook’s algorithm a larger pool to play in.

For this type of campaign, the best audience to create is the interest-based type of audience.

How to create an interest-based custom audience

Interest-based targeting is generally used for cold audiences – when you want to introduce yourself to people who haven’t heard of you before.

Here are the basic steps involved in creating an interest-based custom audience.

• Log in to your Facebook Business Manager
• Click on Audience Insights
• Click on Create New, then select “Everyone on Facebook”
• In the left menu, start selecting specific criteria (countries, age, interests, etc.)
• When finished, click on Save

(For a more in-depth tutorial, check out Facebook’s instructions here)

2. Lead magnet campaign

This is the middle of the funnel ads, this should be the campaign to run after the traffic campaign. 

As the name implies this is a campaign you run to your lead magnet. 

A lead magnet is a specific incentive used to generate an early lead.

The idea behind this campaign is that for people to get your lead magnet and be interested in it, means they are more likely to be interested in your paid offers.

Your lead magnet can be anything of value to your audience. Whether it’s in the form of a digital download or info product, like an ebook, template, tip sheet, or guide.

Or even, your lead magnet can be a very low ticket offer.

For this type of campaign, the best audience to create is the lookalike type of audience. A lookalike audience can be created from your email list subscribers, social media followership, people who have bought your course before, and also people who have visited your websites.

How to create a Facebook lookalike audience

• Go to your Audiences. (You can also create a Lookalike Audience during ad creation in Ads Manager.)
• Select the Create audience drop-down and choose Lookalike Audience
• Choose your source. A source can be a Custom Audience not created with your pixel data, your mobile app data, or fans of your Page. Consider using a group of 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers based on lifetime value, transaction value, total order size, or engagement
• Choose the country/countries where you’d like to find a similar set of people.
• Choose your desired audience size with the slide.
• Select Create Audience

Once you’re finished, it may take 6-24 hours for your Lookalike Audience to be created. Going forward, your audience will refresh every 3-7 days (as long as you’re still actively targeting ads to it). However, you don’t need to wait for your Lookalike Audience to update to use it.

3. Purchase ads campaign

Purchase ads campaign encourages people to purchase your online course. 

The main goal of this campaign is to convert people to buy your online course.

They’re targeted toward the very bottom of the funnel and are aimed at directly increasing your bottom line. 

These ad campaigns are the easiest to measure results but also tend to cost much more than the other ad types. 

As mentioned earlier, you can’t just target anybody, here’s where you retarget a warm audience who’s ready to purchase your online course or another info product.

This is where retargeting takes place. 

Retargeting is a marketing technique that adds a small code snippet to your site, usually referred to as a “cookie” -or in Facebook’s case “Conversion Pixel”- which anonymously follows your visitors around the Web.

A Facebook pixel is code that you place on your website. It helps you track conversions from Facebook ads, optimize ads based on collected data, build targeted audiences for future ads, and remarket to people who have taken a specific action on your website.

If you don’t have a website yet, don’t worry.

You can do this on your Selar store as well, by the way. 

Here’s how to integrate Pixel into your selar store.

1. Open your meta business manager and click on the events manager

2. Click on the connect data

3. Click on web and then connect

4. Enter the pixel name, any name of your choice

5. Enter your website ID if you don’t have a website yet, enter your selar store link and click on check.

6. Once a green tick is shown, click on Next. Copy the number beneath the pixel name

7. Then go over to your Selar store and check the dashboard where there’s Integration.

8. Click the Facebook pixel from the dropdown menu

9. Paste the pixel ID you copied from the meta business suite.

For an in-depth understanding of how to add Facebook pixels to your selar store. Kindly click HERE.

How to create a custom audience for retargeting:

Once you have your Facebook pixel set up, you can start creating custom audiences of people who have visited your website and/or specific pages on your website.

To create a retargeting audience, follow these steps:

• Log in to your Facebook Business Manager
• From the Assets column, select “Audiences”
• Click on “Create Audience”, then “Custom Audience”
• Select a source for your custom audience (ex. “Customer File” or “Website Traffic”)
• Select the criteria for your custom audience
• Name your custom audience, then click on “Save

Conclusion

Using Facebook Ads can be a sure way to get more sales for your course but if you don’t do it right you will just be spending money and not getting any return on your investment. 

Are you using Facebook ads to sell out your online courses? Share your experience with us in the comment section below!