How This Coach Filled Her Facebook Group and Built Her Email List With 500+ Targeted Leads at £0.85 Per Lead (And Got Clients) Within 7 Weeks Using Facebook Ads.

In this case study, I will share with you how I quickly built my Facebook group and email list from scratch within 7 weeks using the power of Facebook Ads. 

During this time, I was also able to monetise my Facebook group by securing 3 coaching clients.

Snapshot of my results 

The amount spent was £793.15

I got 336 email subscribers

Cost per lead was £0.85 per lead

I added 410 people to my Facebook group

I grew my Facebook page to 236 followers

I grew my Instagram page to 114 followers

Initial ROI was £2272 which was a 2.86x return on ad spend

As a Facebook Ads Strategist, I help coaches and consultants grow their brand authentically using Facebook and Instagram Ads. 

Depending on the goal of the client, I will help them either build their email list or use content to engage and interact with their audience to convert them into clients.

I typically work with my clients over a 3-month period, where I share strategies, I jump on consulting calls, offer email support and any other business support they may need to grow their business. 

I also provide weekly updates, so they are always kept in the loop about what’s going on with their ads. When they work with me, they really have nothing to worry about as I am their marketing team to help them promote their business effectively. 

I understand how powerful Facebook ads can be and so it was a no-brainer for me to use this platform when I started my coaching business.

I started a new business this year, 2020 and to grow it quickly, I thought that including Facebook + Instagram Ads in my strategy would be a wise choice. 

This case study will outline the exact steps I took, to take my new business from £0 to it’s first 4-figures in less than 2 months. 

If you are interested in using this strategy to help you grow your own coaching business, this will give you an insight into how I work. 

The Goal

My overall goal for my brand is to grow it into a global brand where I help black and mixed-black service-based business owners and entrepreneurs use online marketing and effective content strategies to build a business where they can show up, serve and make an impact on their ideal clients. 

I am passionate about leading this new brand because as a black woman, it pains me to see other black business owners struggling to grow their business because they’re not educated nor are they equipped with the tools and systems that are available to them and simply don’t have the know-how to use these systems to grow their business effectively.

By teaching them and showing them how I have done it, my hope is that they feel positively inspired and encouraged to build their own successful brands and business.

As I started this new brand, my first goal was to quickly start getting in front of my target audience and build an email list and Facebook group of people who were having challenges with online marketing on a broad spectrum. 

My ultimate goal is to attract small businesses to my coaching program and membership site where I intend to offer several online marketing products to help them. This is a passion project that I am working on for 2020 and my expectation is that I will finally complete and launch this sometime toward the end of 2020.

So as I build my audience with Facebook Ads, the aim will be to nurture them and pitch several different products to see which one converts better. 

The Strategy

Before I start running an ad campaign, I do research on Facebook, to find out what interests my target audience had, so I can use this information to target them. 

I use the Facebook Audience Insights Tool, to help me find Facebook Business Pages that my target audience probably liked and followed. 

In this campaign I created four different targeting groups and set them up individually as adsets within a campaign. 

Typically I would run a campaign with 4-5 adsets simultaneously. But because I had a monthly budget and wanted to spend it wisely, I decided to test each audience one by one to see how they would perform. 

I knew that doing it this way, my results would take longer, but I decided to continue regardless, since I wanted to remain within budget. 

Therefore only one adset was started, whilst I kept the other 3 adsets in draft as backups, in the event the first adset did not perform.

In order to grow my Facebook group, I could not link directly to the Facebook group within the ad. 

Therefore I created a separate landing page with a call to action to the visitors to join the Facebook group. 

This worked perfectly and on the first day of running the ad, I got two leads. 

It was important for me to keep my lead cost low, especially if I was working with a budget of £500 per month.

I wanted to make sure that I got the most number of leads for my money, so seeing that on the first day my lead cost was £2.54, I knew that improvements could be made.

When I start a Facebook Ads campaign, I allow three days to pass before I make any decisions on whether the ad was performing.

On day three of running this campaign, I saw that my lead cost went from £2.54 on day one, £0.81 on day two and £0.78 on day three, giving me an average lead cost of £0.93. 

This was very exciting because this meant that I would be able to fill my email list and Facebook group very cheaply and had a good chance at converting my leads into paying clients over time, which would give me a handsome return on investment. 

Building My Email List

If you are using Facebook Ads to build your Facebook group, a good way to “kill two birds with one stone” is to get the lead’s email address when they join your Facebook group.

You can have a lead opt in page as the first page the prospect lands on from the ad. But for this strategy, I directed all traffic to a landing page to join the Facebook group, then I used Facebook’s questions to ask all people who were joining, whether they wanted my freebie to join my email list. 

This is a great way to build your email list from your Facebook group and whilst conversions were probably lower this way, I was still able to add 336 subscribers to my email list. Which is not a bad conversion overall, considering that 82% of the 410 people who were added to my Facebook group, opted to join my email list to get my freebie.

The freebie that I offered was a business marketing blueprint. I simply created a question for people to answer prior to entering the group and asked whether they would want it. 

Tip: when creating opt-in freebies for your Facebook Ad campaign, ensure that the freebie is relevant to a challenge that your target audience is having. 

My Facebook Ad invited business owners to join my group to learn how to use online marketing to grow their business. 

I know one of their challenges is marketing, so I created a small business marketing blueprint as my freebie opt-in.

Targeting

To make Facebook Ads work and to put your ad in front of the right people who are likely to take action, you have to know your targeting. 

In this case, I spent some time researching targeting groups where I felt entrepreneurs would hang out. 

The groups I saved and targeted included web platforms, entrepreneur magazines, tools and startup businesses.

I started with one campaign which had a potential audience size of 2.3 million people and I targeted the US, UK and CA. 

When it comes to audience size, I like to target 500k people and above. 

This gives Facebook enough room to find people that would take your desired action. 

If you are a local business, your audience size will likely be lower than this, since you are only targeting a city or town. If that is the case, do not worry since this audience does work too.

If you are a national or global business, then my recommendation is to keep your audience size at 500k and above.

Ad copy and Video

Before I found a winning campaign, I have to add that I tried three or four other campaigns that did not do well because of the image and the copy. 

I cannot remember the exact copy that I used, but it was not performing well and my lead cost came out to be more than £5 per lead.

I then created another campaign where I switched out the image and instead used a video. Whilst I was starting to get more leads, the cost was still expensive and I noticed that the people who were engaging with my ad, were not from my target audience. 

It was the final tweak that I did, which was to change the copy so it really resonated with my target audience and called them out, that did the trick.

Leads started pouring in and my click through rate was just where I wanted it – above 1%.

The Budget

I started my budget at £10/day for the lead generation campaign and then reduced this to £5/day whilst allocating a budget of £5/day to my retargeting campaign.  

I have not increased this budget and leads continue to trickle in to my Facebook group on a daily basis.

Takeaway: You do not need to start your Facebook Ads budget on $100/day as some people think.

Use a daily budget that you are comfortable with, until you start seeing what’s working. If things are working well, you can then increase the budget to scale your campaign. 

Campaigns

Campaign 1 Join FB group

I tested several images before I created a video ad that performed really well. 

The copy was kept short and to the point, making sure that I used the language of my target audience. 

Here is the ad: 

Landing Page 

As people clicked on the ad and took them to the landing page, I realised that not everyone who clicked, actually became a lead. 

And this is usually the case with any online marketing. Only a percentage of your website visitors would actually convert. 

In my case, over the entire campaign period, I had 1035 clicks, but only 517 people tried to join my Facebook group. 

This meant that my landing page converted 50% of my visitors which isn’t a bad conversion rate at all, especially since I am paying less than £1 for my leads. 

When running Facebook Ads to your landing page, a good conversion rate is 40% and above.

Here’s what my landing page looked like:

I kept my landing page simple and to the point. 

The biggest mistake advertisers make when they’re just getting started with Facebook Ads, is they complicate their landing page. 

Short landing pages work best and you only need the following layout:

Headline 

Subheadline

Image

3-5 bullet points

Call to action

Here is a snapshot of the ad itself showing the performance from link clicks to subscribers. 

Retargeting Campaign 

After I filled my Facebook group with leads, I continued to nurture them with Facebook Ads by creating several retargeting campaigns that delivered valuable content. 

The retarget campaigns were created using custom audiences from people who engaged with the page, people who clicked on a post, people who watched 50% and more of the video and leads. 

I previously mentioned that my goal was to promote my coaching program. I also promoted one other product that I created which was a WordPress course.

My retarget campaigns used several live video content to continue to “show up” so I could build a relationship with my target audience.

Here are a couple of the ads that I created:

In these ads I sent the traffic directly to the relevant sales pages for my coaching program and the WordPress course and that will continue to be my retargeting ad strategy.

Whatever product I am offering to this audience, I will simply send them directly to the sales page in my retarget campaigns. 

Facebook Ad results in 7 weeks

I spent £793.15

Got 517 Facebook group lead conversions (50% converted from the landing page to join the Facebook group. All these people never heard of me before.)

My average cost per lead is £0.84.

1035 website clicks which will help me build my custom audience of website visitors.

I added 336 business leads to my email list.

I added 410 people to my Facebook group (as some of the people did not answer all my questions).

I grew my Facebook page to 236 followers.

I grew my Instagram page to 114 followers.

Initial ROI was £2272 which was a 2.86x return on ad spend.

Also do not forget that I will continue to make offers to my acquired subscribers which will increase my overall ROI in the future.

What’s Next?

Creating several products and launching them to my new audience.

Continuing to promote my coaching program.

Want similar results in your business?

If you’re interested in having a Facebook Ads Strategist like myself, create a killer Facebook Ads strategy that can grow your business quickly, whilst you focus on doing the things that matter to you to help you grow your income and impact, then click here to book a free strategy call.

Who’s this for?

My ideal clients are service-based entrepreneurs who have a digital service or product that they want to promote. You must already have an offer that sells or you’re ready to start building your email list to grow your brand authentically so you can promote your offers.

Please budget from $745 for my Facebook Ads packages. 

Who is this not for?

If you are not ready to invest in yourself and the growth of your business this is not for you. This is also not for you, if you do not yet have an offer to promote or you’re just getting started in your business.

Click here to book your free strategy call.