[Case Study] How A Financial Coach Filled Her Facebook Group With 230 Financial Coaching Leads Within 6 Weeks
By DAWN-MARIE NESBITT
The Client
My client is a financial coach who helps other financial coaches attract clients and revenue using the 4Ms – mindset, message, marketing and money.
She is based in the US and for the past few years have made a name for herself as an insurance agent, the owner of a property preservation company and an international speaker.
She also has a free Facebook group and it is this that she came to me wanting help to grow it with qualified prospects.
A Sneak Peak into Her Results
My client and I worked together for 6 weeks. She used Facebook as her traffic source and increased her visibility on the platform by paying for ads. Overall her ad spend on this particular campaign was $1447.
She got 230 subscribers to her email list and Facebook group from cold traffic.
Expected ROI: 40 students at $2000 per sold program = $80,000.
My Role
I am a sales funnel and Facebook Ads strategist and offer done for you services where I help my clients build sales funnel strategies and implement them to achieve their business objectives.
To implement the sales funnel strategy, I use paid traffic sources and one of them is Facebook Ads. I manipulate the Facebook ad platform to help clients generate leads and sales into their business.
Clients from time to time also engage me to help them convert those leads into paying clients through re-targeting and a content marketing strategy.
On this occasion I was only engaged to help my client fill her Facebook group with qualified prospects.
If the goal is sales generation, I typically work with my clients over a 3-month trial period where they eventually turn into retainer clients. If the goal is lead generation, I work with clients over a month, where they eventually turn into retainer clients.
During the time that I work with my clients, my role is to consult with them by providing creative ideas and strategies that may work to help them achieve their business objectives. I do this through consulting calls and emails.
Most of the time my clients give me liberty to oversee the management of the overall marketing strategy and I update them on a weekly basis to let them know what’s going right, what’s not going right and where we should change our strategy.
This case study will give you insight into how I work with my clients so if you are interested in working with me, you will understand my thought process and how I think as I navigate a marketing strategy.
The Goal
When my client came to me, she wanted to start marketing for the launch of her 2k Revenue Attraction Factor program, which is a coaching program to help financial coaches master their revenue attraction.
My client was working with another marketing agency to oversee the launch of the program but wanted my help in the initial stages to help her attract new prospects to her Facebook group.
The Facebook group is where she would nurture her prospects and warm them up for a webinar that she was going to use to convert her prospects into sales of the program.
My client built an organic following from doing Facebook Lives and speaking gigs. But she realised that in order to grow, she needed to get more visibility to her brand and easily get in front of people who did not know that she existed.
She already understood the power of Facebook ads and thought that it would be a good idea to use this platform to start her brand awareness and channel people into her Facebook group.
When I met my client, she already had a Facebook group that had some people in it. She said that the people in there were not financial coaches and wanted to focus her efforts on attracting financial coaches since this is where she wanted to specialise.
The Strategy
Kickoff Meeting
Before I start working with clients, I conduct a one-hour kickoff meeting where I speak with my clients to understand who their ideal prospects are and what their offer is.
My client and I met and I gathered from her that she wanted to attract financial coaches who could afford her program.
She mentioned that her Facebook group had people who had network marketing backgrounds and some were starters. She did not want these types of people in her group as she was concerned that they may not be able to invest in her program which was $2000.
I explained to her that whilst I can create the perfect target audience to attract financial coaches with Facebook ads, what would attract the right people who can invest, is her marketing message.
My client did not engage me to create her ad copy, so I consulted with her and told her that her message has to speak to people who are already successful and are simply looking for a way to improve their business.
This type of message would help attract financial coaches who are already making money and are looking for solutions to help them grow.
My client also engaged me to build her lead generation funnel. Because the goal was to fill her Facebook group, the strategy that I decided on was to direct people from the ad to a landing page that gave a call to action to join her Facebook group.
The Facebook group was the lead magnet and she also wanted to get people subscribed to her messenger bot.
Therefore the steps that the lead would take would be from ad to landing page to messenger to Facebook group.
I explained to my client that so many steps in a funnel can reduce her conversion rate. I suggested that we start testing these steps but if conversions are poor that we remove a step and test without directing the lead to the messenger bot.
My concern was including the messenger bot in these funnel steps and so by removing it, she could potentially increase her conversion rate.
Whilst this wasn’t ideal for my client, she understood conversion rates and wanted to make sure that she didn’t lose any leads and that every effort was made to get them to the Facebook group.
Before I started the ad campaign it was difficult to establish a benchmark for the cost per lead. That’s because my client did not have any data since she only ever did organic marketing.
Based on my experience of working with coaches, I set a benchmark to try and get her lead cost between $1 and $2.50. Anything less than $3 would be ideal.
I explained that this is not guaranteed to be achieved but it is simply a guide that I will try to meet when optimising her ad campaign for the lowest lead cost.
The Lead Magnet
My client wanted to fill her Facebook group, so this was the lead magnet that I started with.
I decided to create a simple landing page which would be the bridge from the ad to the Facebook group, since as of today, you cannot create an ad with a direct link to a Facebook group.
The landing page was a simple landing page.
In my experience, simple landing pages convert better. So that means a page with very simple, straight-forward copy that told the visitor what they were going to get and what they should do.
I do not have a copy of the landing page to show here, since if you read further on you will see that later on we changed strategy.
Targeting
Many people struggle with targeting and one of the complaints I see most often, is that people who engage with their ads are not from the right niche, from the correct country or don’t speak the right language.
My client wanted financial coaches to see her ads. I therefore did research using the Audience Insights Tool, to find people who were interested in finance related topics.
When creating your audiences with Facebook Ads, the problem where most people go wrong is that they target very broad audiences. For example, audiences like “entrepreneurs” or “small business owners” hardly perform well because they are too broad.
As a financial coach people who had an interest in finance related TV shows, blogs, magazines or websites would be a much better match for my client.
Ad Copy And Images
For this campaign I sourced the images for my client. I decided to use images over videos, just to see how it would perform.
There is no way to know whether a video or image would perform better. You simply need to test it and see how it resonates with the audience that you are targeting.
As my client did not engage me to write her ad copy, I asked her to provide two forms of copy. This would help me split test the copy and see which one resonated with the audience better.
As I tested the ad copy and images, to determine whether they were “working”, I pay attention to the click-through rate (CTR) and the cost per click (CPC).
If the CTR and CPC were low and high respectively, then I know that the ad copy needed a change or the audience were not the best fit.
Here is what one of the ads look like.
Here is how the campaign was set up in my client’s ad account.
You will see from the results that my client spent $125 and only got 4 leads.
During this specific campaign, I made several adjustments to the ad. I tested and tweaked the copy, I tested different images and I also tested different audiences.
I ran this test for about 3-4 days, paying attention each time to the CTR and the CPC.
I was not impressed with the performance and explained to my client that the results were telling me two things – that either the audience did not like the offer or the audience were not the right fit.
I came to the conclusion that the offer was not the right fit when I examined closely the metrics since the ad attracted people (CTR all), but they were simply not moving forward to click on the ad (CTR link click-through).
You can see this from the metrics below.
Changing Strategy
From time to time, the strategy that you thought would work, does not always go to plan.
And that’s ok.
Competent Facebook Ads marketers can determine quickly whether a campaign is working or not and make adjustments so they are not wasting the client’s budget.
I kept a watchful eye over my client’s campaign over 3-4 days. Usually within 48 hours I can tell if a campaign is going to work and if it doesn’t look like it, I start thinking of tests that I can perform to turn that campaign around.
In my client’s case, I decided to change strategy completely and came up with an idea to get people to join the Facebook group, by first delivering value and incentivising them to take action.
The next strategy was to create a tangible lead magnet. In this case my client offered 30 Live Video Streams as a downloadable lead magnet.
When the lead downloaded the lead magnet, I created a call to action to join the Facebook group.
This new strategy required me to build and design a new lead generation funnel.
I therefore updated the landing page, added a thank you page and then on the thank you page, I created a compelling offer to encourage the lead to join the Facebook group.
The Landing Page
Online business owners have to become very savvy in the types of offers they are making to people on the internet.
That’s because people are becoming more and more aware about different marketing practices and so are now guarded when it comes to providing their contact details.
Keeping this in mind, I designed a landing page with a compelling offer and decided to create a split test to test design and layout to see which one people would better respond to.
When deciding on a lead magnet, I advised the client that what was working right now, were lead magnets that helped people save time. If an offer can help people save time, make money or improve their way of doing something, they’re more likely to exchange their contact details for that offer.
Here are the split test landing pages that I created. Can you guess which one performed better?
The second landing page actually performed better achieving a 45% conversion rate! When optimising your landing pages, you should aim to get a 20% and above conversion rate.
Anything less than that with paid traffic, will make it almost unsustainable.
The Campaign
With a completely new offer to work with and new lead generation funnel built and designed, I started a brand new campaign using the same audiences from the first failed campaign.
In the second campaign, I immediately started getting leads but I found that they were too expensive.
You will see from the above image that my client got leads between $7 and $28. This is definitely too high for the coaching industry and I thought that the cost per lead could be improved if we continued testing different audiences.
Typically a high lead cost indicates that not many people are subscribing to the offer.
My overall goal was to aim for a lead cost that fell below $3. If I could get a lower cost per lead, I would be happy, so I decided to test different audiences, since I knew that the offer was converting.
Here are the results from my second test.
I was able to reduce the client’s lead cost by $2 and whilst it was still a bit too expensive, I reminded my client that a low lead cost does not always determine a high-quality lead.
The client was pleased with the type of leads that were coming through her funnel, since she measured their performance through her client management system – she uses Ontraport where she measures how often people open her emails, whether they click on her links or talk to her in her messenger.
She confirmed that most of the leads were scoring 5/5 which indicated that they were engaging with her.
Sometimes a lower lead cost indicates a lower quality lead. You know when you have a lower quality lead, when they don’t engage with you in any way. That means they’re not opening or clicking on your emails or taking action when you ask them.
As an advertiser you should always aim to find out the quality of your leads by checking the back-end of your funnel. The front-end is important but your Facebook ads consultant should also advise you on how to engage your leads so you can determine whether your money is being spent to attract high-quality people.
At the end of the day, what good is it, spending a bunch of money to attract people that do not take action with you.
The Facebook Group
As a Facebook Ads marketer, I do not only help my clients get leads and sales from Facebook.
There are some Facebook ads managers who are only concerned with the front end of the campaign. As a Facebook ads consultant I am also involved in the back-end of the campaign.
I go a step further and make sure that my clients’ leads are from their target audience and that they’re doing what my client expects them to do.
As I checked my client’s Facebook group I saw that people were joining her group but also they were interacting with her.
My client wanted Financial Coaches who were already successful and ready to improve their business and lives.
My ads management delivered just that. Here’s what I found in my client’s Facebook group.
Facebook Ad Results In 6 Weeks
Once I realised that the ad was performing well, I increased the budget and let it run on autopilot.
The ad ended up generating 230 leads before dying out.
My client added 230 subscribers to her email list.
Increased her Facebook group to 252 members.
Cost per lead on average was $5.63.
Overall ad spend $1447.
Expected ROI from program launch $80k from 40 seats sold to a $2000 program.
What's Next For My Client?
Launch her 2k Revenue Attraction Factor program.
Want Similar Results in Your Business?
The best part about working on this project were the challenges, but being able to fix it immediately and helping my client get the results she wanted – more financial coaches in her Facebook group.
Here’s what my client had to say:
Interested in creating your own Facebook Ads marketing strategy where I help you create a campaign that converts into your ideal prospects and clients?
Let’s work together over 90 days where I will build out a solid campaign and implement everything for you, whilst you focus on doing what you love.
Who Is This For?
I work with service providers, coaches and consultants who have been in business for a few years and are ready to attract new and ideal clients through Facebook Ads.
You should already have an offer and you’re ready to invest in your business. Please budget from $997 per month for Facebook Ads coaching and from $2500 per month for Facebook Ads management.
Who Is This Not For?
If you are not ready to invest in yourself, you don’t know who you want to serve, you don’t have an offer and you’re not coachable.
Book your free 30-minute Facebook Ads Breakthrough Call here.
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