How to get strategy sessions and fill your programs using Facebook ads

If you are using strategy sessions (or consultation, discovery calls or any kind of phone selling) to get sales, here’s a strategy you can use to increase number of calls using Facebook ads.

INBOUND SALES TEAM

If you are selling on the phone your revenue is directly tied to number of sessions you have per day.

When your sales team isn’t on the phone, you are basically wasting money.

And how do you make them busy?

How do you get them Fresh Stream of Leads?

ONLY SOLUTION TO GROWTH — ADVERTISING

“If you wish to survive and grow, you must advertise” — Jay Abraham

That may not be the only way but it’s the fastest.

McDonald’s and Coca cola built multi billion dollar business by placing their ads in front of everyone, and paid premium for that. But today we live in time where advertising is cheaper than ever.

This is where Facebook ads come in. Today you have possibility to get your ads in front of 1000 highly targeted people for about $20. This means that your are ads will see only people that can benefit from your offer. And you won’t spend a fortune to reach them.

Recently cost of advertising on Facebook skyrocketed. That’s due to increase in volume (everybody is advertising on Facebook)

But you can still get clicks, even in US market, for pennies on the dollar on Facebook

You can still get clicks for under $0.10

Imagine if you could get 1000 people in your funnel for $100 ($0,10 per click). And if your funnel converted 1% of the visitors into call applications. That’s 10 strategy sessions right there.

If your sales team closed 10% you’d already have one sale.

If you are selling $1500 program you’d be vastly profitable.

So if you are spending $20 a day you should regularly have one sale a week

Now of course you are not going to get this kinds of results. But if you got 10 times worse results you’d still be profitable.

Before we jump into dissecting this strategy, you need to be aware of specific of Facebook

Facebook as an advertising platform works little bit different than others.

ADVERTISING ON FACEBOOK

There are 2 important factors about Facebook in direct response marketing:

1. Interruption marketing
2. Content platform

INTERRUPTION

Facebook ads work as interruption.

So your ads will inevitably interrupt your prospect. Now you need to make sure that this interruption is positive.

You need to make them grateful that you interrupted them. — this is important because it will allow you to reach most of your target market without having to wait for them.

You can get hundreds of clicks to your website a day.

This factor is going to enable you to get predictable flow of new leads every day.

You will only show your ads to people you can help. No wasting money. Your solution will be offered to your targeted audience every day.

CONTENT

Second is that newsfeed is biggest content provider today. Your prospect is there to consume content he’s interested in. So you need to serve them with great content.

Lot of social share will give you Free traffic — which means Free money.

This factor is the method to exploit the interruption you will make.

Just like in every other ad platforms where you need to adapt to the surroundings.

You will be creating content that will stick out for it’s quality.

And not only for quality but it’s ability to solve your markets problems.

Your content must be sooo attractive to your audience that they need to stop and literally think: “wow this looks great, I’d better check it out before it disappears”

So this strategy is basically combination of the two. You will be using understanding of the Facebook as content platform and power of highly targeted interruption ads.

When setup right ,this system does most of the work for you, and you can focus on helping your clients!

How can you do all that?

1. KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

This is by far the most important part. If you don’t have a deep understanding of your audience’s problems, desires and needs, you can’t make this work. I consistently see people failing with Facebook and saying that it doesn’t work — It works AMAZING, but you have to understand your audience first.

- biggest problems they face
- what effect not solving those problems has on their life
- biggest desires they have
- what do they dream of
- what do they don’t want to do
- pain points that make them take action

This is the biggest difference between people who are killing it with their marketing and sales and the ones who can’t make anything work.

If you don’t know what they desire you won’t be able to create content that resonates with them. If they don’t feel understood by you they won’t trust you.

To learn more about your audience you can use different methods: Lean Customer Development, ASK method, interviews, testing out different content

Important thing is that you learn what type of content they want to consume and in what format. Then when you learn that you will finally get the results everybody is buzzing about.

If you serve them with right content, you will see the results instantly.

2. HAVE A SIMPLE VALUE FUNNEL IN PLACE

Sometimes if you want to go from point A to point B straight line is not always the fastest path.

With Facebook, a lot of people I see are sending people straight to Strategy session applications. This is WRONG. Even if you’re getting strategy sessions this way, you’re wasting your time selling non-qualified prospects that aren’t at a “desire PEAK”.

What you need to do is to give them some content before asking them to book a call with you.

There are several reasons why you will give them content:

- to make them like you,
- to educate them,
- to introduce them to your practices,
- to earn trust that you can give them results.

Remember, people only buy from people they know, like and trust. You will get all of that with pre-structured content.

FORMAT OF THE CONTENT

Your content piece can be something of following:

- webinar
- blog post
- video
- lead magnet

Choice of following will depend on two things:

1. your ability to create certain format
2. actual structure and type of your offer.

Webinars — they are generally great for selling higher ticket offers. Main point in webinars is that you have to provide an hour of really helpful content. In addition to that you need to be able to present it in a meaningful way.

If you are really good with webinars do it. You will have a lot easier time selling people on the phone.

If you have a good webinar you can easily leverage it with Facebook ads.

Blog post — easiest type of content to create. With that come some problems.

You need to be really good at writing blog posts that make people take action. Another problem is that it’s very impersonal and feels generic.
Usually it’s best in B2B industries and it works the best as a Case study.

Good blog posts can easily make leads very hot.

Lead magnet — highly actionable piece of content. You will provide clear action steps your prospect can do right now and move closer to his goal. This will give them clear sign that you can solve their problems.

You can use it as a first step in your sales/content funnel, or you can use it as only content piece you are offering. It’s super easy to test it out with Lead ads

Test Lead magnets with lead ads and keep the winning ones.

Video — presenting valuable content in multi-medial way. Use all possibilities that video editing is enabling you.

Video is usually the best media to give value — You have lot’s of opportunities to make it more interesting and educational.

You can show them your expertise more closely. You can create a relationship with your audience because they will feel like you are talking to them.

Video is great media for providing value and creating rapport with prospects.

STRUCTURE OF THE CONTENT

There are several strategies and tactics you can use to write this content.

In short this process looks like this — you diagnose their problems, show them how life is awesome when they solve them, give advice on how to solve them, and just offer to help even more with a strategy session at the end.

I advise you to hire a professional because they will know what’s best.

But if you want to do it yourself here are some pointers:

- it’s about you understanding them, not them understanding you.
- Talk about their pain problems — as long as you can describe your audience’s biggest problems more vividly than them, you will be judged as an authority
- Talk about benefits — more specifically talk about results this benefits will give them
- Create an atmosphere around your product that will make it more desirable.
- tell it as a story
- Talk about people who have taken the action that you recommend and how they got to amazing results

CREATE KICK-ASS ADS

When you sell a high ticket program/service, you don’t have to micromanage the ads, and you can be profitable even if your clicks cost $3-$5. But if you follow this process, you’ll get 20–70 cents per click, and profitable fast.

There are 3 things you need to do in order to create kick-ass ads — you have to do all 3 right.

1. Targeting

This is by far the most important one for ads. You have to show your ads to relevant people. If you don’t show them to relevant people, your copy can be the best in the world, but it doesn’t matter.

In order to laser target your audience, you have to first understand your audience.

After that — you have to research your audience. You have to know where they spend time online, what people that follow, what magazines they read. You have to know their demographics. Use Audience Insights — it’s a really really cool tool.

Use behavioral targeting as well as targeting BY job titles. This is very straightforward and you will also get awesome results with that.

You can easily target people by their job titles.

Facebook interest targeting is really great — if you know what you’re doing.

When creating ads; DON’T target big interests. For example, if you help your clients to lose weight, don’t target “weight loss”. Target more specific interests — think about what your audience likes on Facebook, do a google search for big websites in your niche. If you target one interest, check out if the other pages that people like are in your niche too.

You target:
1. Relevant people in your niche that they follow
2. Magazines in your niche that they read
3. Website in your niche
4. Associations and organizations in your niche

You need to be very precise with your interest targets.

2. Images and copy

This is the part where you have to attract people’s attention, and then engage them and make them click.

For images, the most important thing is to drive their attention. Use images that are in contrast with news feed colors. DON’T use cheap stock photos. Again it’s important to understand your audience here. It’s cool to use your own photos, specially if you’re advertising to audience that already knows you. Outline the biggest benefit or result in a few words on the photo.

Use only high quality images that contrast usual news feed stuff in your ads

Copy — Here I’m going to share formula I use to write ads that work every single time.

1. Start with question — excellent for attracting attention, ask a question where you qualify your prospect or problem they have
2. Create urgency — tell them that for next few days you are offering them name of magnet and offer or claim
3. State the benefit — state how and why it will be beneficial to them to get this offer
4. Call To Action — tell them precisely what to do and how to do it.

“See more” trick to improve the CTR (all)

When it comes to creating lead generation campaigns (to get more leads, webinar registrations or even phone calls) — my friendly suggestion for you is to stick with long ad copy that will have a “SEE MORE…” in the news feed.

And here’s why.

If heaps of people click ‘See More’ to read the rest of the ad, your CTR (all) increases and you get better relevance scores.

If you follow the first step of creating long copy ads — your CTRs will be improved a lot as well as your relevance score.

And when it happens — Facebook will mark you as a person who’s providing useful content that your audience really want to see. And because of that they will show your ads to more people (lower CPM).

3. Split testing

Just like you tested out different media and content to see what attracts your clients the best, you also need test everything about the ads.

You must test out different ad copies, interests and images. You can think you have the best copy in the world, but sometimes things that you never thought will work, work best. Get creative here.

Split test absolutely everything — that’s the only way to success.

We usually test 20–40 copy/image variations, some of them fail bad, some of them work okayish and then there 2–3 ads that absolutely kick ass. Turn off the other ones and leave 2–3 that work best running. When people get tired of seeing the same ads, repeat this process.
For about $100–200 spent you’ll know which ads work best.

BONUS TIP

Retargeting -

The most powerful way of using FB ads. With this strategy alone we’ve been able to increase ROI by 50%.

So what you need to do is to create brackets of people that have visited your website. Then you show different offer to each of them based on content they have consumed.

This is more advanced strategy and will come to full fruition once you have developed more sophisticated funnel and way of communicating and providing value to your clients/prospects.

Retarget people who have declined any of your offers

Here’s exactly what we did for people that saw the offer for strategy session on webinar but didn’t applied:

1–3 days — You simply send them back to the application page. You’ll see that many of them will apply in first 24–72 hours.

4–6 days — But those you didn’t do it — they should be nurtured/indoctrinated more. Give them more valuable content that will build trust and position you as an authority.

7–8 days — Send them back again to application page by using the different ad copy — tell them that spots are almost filled up, but they still have a chance to join.

9–12 days — More content — ideal would be to put testimonial videos of other clients who got successful results using your product/service.

13–15 days — Last chance ads. Create urgency and scarcity. Tell them this is last chance to get the offer.

So this is the end of this veery long post. It’s filled with golden nuggets that you can, and you should, implement in your business straight away.

Comment below any questions you might have!