With all of the current market challenges, many online coaches are left wondering how to market education courses. Since this is a niche that we are very familiar with, we have made a few discoveries and would like to make the following six recommendations.
1. Don’t Get Complacent With Your Platform Selection
Your platform is only as good as your last campaign. Despite previous successes on big platforms, like Facebook, it’s important to remain objective and assess whether each platform is delivering a return on investment for you.
For one of our clients, we were observing that the lead costs were increasing and lead volume was decreasing on Facebook so we moved their remarketing ad campaign spending over to Pinterest and we’re seeing terrific results in comparison. So don’t get too complacent with where you’re putting your ad dollars.
2. Landing Page Basics: Yours Might (Still) Suck
We often find that clients need to adopt more of an experimental mindset when it comes to their landing page. They need to think of it as a working document as opposed to a one-time project that is now closed in perpetuity.
We often have thousands of dollars funnelling into one critical landing page, but have consistently come up against friction with our clients to optimize their landing page(s). This mindset ends up costing them thousands of dollars in wasted ad spend because their landing page conversion rate is the bottleneck in the customer journey. So we recommend not getting too precious about your landing page and to keep iterating.
3. Keep Your Landing Page Visitors Focused
One of our clients recently added a banner to the top of their landing page to divert traffic to a separate landing page for a different variation of their program. Our calculations determined that this banner was redirecting over 80% of the page traffic to another page so it was rare for visitors to see the offer on the page, especially on mobile devices.
The same goes for pesky pop-ups, they can be game-changers too when you want someone to focus on the page content.
Unless the pop-up is an exit intent or a way to get someone into your mailing list, we typically avoid pop-ups or banners at the top unless they punctuate your on-page message.
4. Facebook Audience Targeting Changes: What you need to know
In January 2022, Facebook removed the ability for marketers to target specific interest-based audiences. These are the detailed audiences that were removed:
- Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)
- Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)
- Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)
- Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures
For some of our clients, this was a setback with respect to ad performance. Our typical fallback was to use lookalike audiences, but those aren’t as effective as they used to be either.
What we’ve been using in these cases are broad audiences paired with hyper-specific headlines so our audience can easily self-identify that the ad is a fit for them. Don’t be afraid to go broad as long as you’re dialling in your messaging.
5. To Tik Tok, Or Not To Tik Tok
That is the question. What we’ve been observing in the rapid rise in popularity of this platform is that all of the other platforms are trying to copy them. Yes, I’m looking at you Instagram.
So far, there are other platforms such as YouTube ads that are still getting more conversions than Tik Tok ads. This means that we’re still supportive of using Tik Tok organically for our clients, but we’re hanging tight for it to be our platform of choice for paid ads at this point.
6. Yes, Coaches Can Run Google Search Ads (Even If You’re New to Paid Ads)
If you’re a coach and you’re serving a specific niche, there is an opportunity for you to consider Google Search Ads. People are often searching Google to solve their specific problems and they have higher buying intent on that platform than on social media.
This means that Google is a nice addition for a mature coaching business to bolt onto their social media advertising. In some cases, it can be an introductory platform before you start advertising on social media.
We recently onboarded a coach who has grown her business through organic search engine optimization over the past several years. She had a solid understanding of what people were searching for and how to help them.
Our strategy for her was to utilize Google Search ads as an introduction to digital advertising for this coach so she could get increased results in countries where she didn’t get ranked as well organically. She is now receiving multiple inquiries each day for her high-ticket certification program.
Final Thoughts
If nothing else, the past two years have taught us to be more nimble in all of our businesses despite our size. Being nimble requires a certain amount of humility and a willingness to continuously experiment with what works. It’s nice to be comfortably profitable, but online marketing is changing so rapidly that what worked twelve months ago may not necessarily be what we’d be recommending for clients today.
If you’re looking for digital marketers who have a scientific approach to running your paid advertising, we encourage you to reach out to us for a consultation. Or check out our recent online marketing for coaches case study.
Stay nimble folks!
