Hello, and welcome to episode number 167 of the Shine Show. Today, I'm going to share with you three lies you were told about hiring an ads manager.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host, Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads, so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you are ready to be inspired to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tuning because you are ready to shine, and this is the Shine Show.

The purpose of this episode for me is to help you decide when is the right time to hire an ads manager and to know what to look for. And maybe you've already hired someone and it didn't go so well, which is a story I hear way, way, way too often. It just breaks my heart when I hear someone say they hired an expert in ads and they didn't have a good experience.

The story is often told to me either in frustration, because the client had an expectation that the ads manager are going to make them some money and that didn't happen, or they had expectation that the ads manager are going to find leads on Facebook and Instagram that will absolutely, certainly convert to sales. And both those things come from lies. And it comes from lies that we believe because of the marketing that Facebook ads managers use. And I want to say, guilty is charged. When I started out, I also believed that this was true and it's only been through years and years and years of experience and working with many, many clients, seeing many students work with ads managers and learning the absolute interdependent, absolute marriage between traffic, in other words, your audiences, your ads, where you're finding people and conversion. And conversion happens through some form of a launch mechanism, either a webinar or an email series or a video series, and it happens through your offer.

So I've created this model and a lot of my students have seen this model. It's kind of a vein diagram. And in this vein diagram, I have audiences in one of the circles, I have your offer in one of the other circles and I have a launch of mechanism in a third circle. And really these three things, all three need to come together in a synergistic way and they need to blend together. I'm looking for a cool name for my model. It's like, The Wheel Of Wonder, it has been called, The Model Of Money, The Online Course Vein Diagram Of How To Make Money. If you have a cool name for that, send me a DM. I will take you up on your cool name. But it wasn't until I realized that we are all buying into a lie, we're buying into a lie that Facebook ads can make you money. It cannot. Ads can never, ever make you money.

Hear me when I say this. This is me, the ads manager, telling you that ads will never make you money. So if you've ever hired an ads manager and your expectation was that they are going to bring the right people to your launch or to your webinar, and it didn't turn out well and your relationship with that ads manager ended because of this, I want to first off tell you, you're not alone. I hear the story all the time. But secondly, I want to tell you that it possibly wasn't the ads manager's fault. It also wasn't your fault. It's both of you buying into the lie that Facebook ads can make you money. And so when a Facebook ads manager takes on a client, they're usually just looking for things like, oh, do they have an existing audience? And so, you can look at someone who has a million followers on Instagram, and they can still do a launch that doesn't work because they have learned how to sell organically, but they haven't yet learned how to sell to cold traffic.

So I make it my personal mission to restore this relationship between online course creators and ads managers, because I love both, because I am both and because I work with both. And I believe that ads managers need to be nurtured and loved and taken care of and never, ever be blamed for lack of results when a client's funnels didn't work. Well, unless the ads manager did something really weird, which also happens. But then that's just lack of experience. You need to send me those ads managers so I can train them properly. Or it is lack of funnel converting, which is the client's job. It is your job as the online course creator. So today's episode is about that. And I trust that at the end of this episode, you are going to walk away feeling empowered and feeling confident that you are going to know when to hire an ads manager and how to know the right ads manager and what to do about it if you've hired someone in the past and it didn't go well.

There's a French expression that when you translate it, it literally means, to put a hose in one's mouth. I don't know what actually the French expression is. So if you're French and you know the expression, please let me know. But I was Googling things because I want you to picture even a person with a fire hose in front of their mouth. I mean, you can picture it, right? And then I found that there is a French expression that says this. Or a hose to the mouth, right? You can see that. That is going to go badly for you. That is really going to go badly for you. And it's one of those things that it's not going to go badly because you don't want water in your mouth, it's going to go badly because you don't want that much water with that much force in your mouth. Right? So it's quite the picture, if you want to imagine it. That's kind of what happens when you hire an ads manager before you're ready to really handle that much traffic into your live launches.

And today I want to help you know exactly why it's not your fault if you did hire an ads manager too soon and what you can do about it so that you never waste money hiring people without knowing that you're absolutely ready to make the most of what they can do for you. Now, I have divided this into three reasons that it may not have worked out between you and your ads manager.

The first reason is, you weren't ready for these large amounts of traffic. And I'm going to unpack that a little bit for you. The second reason is, one of you or both of you didn't really understand how to measure the conversion rights of the traffic your ads brought in. And then the third reason we're going to talk about is, you needed warm traffic and what you got was cold traffic. So let's go over these one by one. Let's start with number one, you weren't ready for large amounts of traffic. I remember feeling that if I can only get my offer in front of more people, I will make more money. I remember it so vividly, it is almost, I want to say, well, it's almost stuck in my nervous system. Those first few years of starting a business truly is traumatic. So I'm sending you lots of love if you're still in year one to three.

I remember feeling so frustrated because social media was such a slow slog. And I thought, if I can only get more people to see my offer, that would be the solution to my problems. And I understand why I felt that way then. And I understand if you are feeling that way. You're probably busy running your coaching business or your practice, and you've already spent a year creating your course. You've taken several online courses. You've spent hours and hours. You've poured hours and hours into this. And you're doing your very base to stay up to date with posting on socials. And maybe you've even launched this course a couple of times with different results. And now you feel you would like to have more people going through your launch. And so you hire an ads manager.

One of the places where I see this often is particularly if you have a second source of income. So maybe you're a coach with a very successful coaching business or perhaps you are a done-for-you specialist. You're a consultant. You do something for someone. And so that is a source of income. So often when business owners have another source of income that is not their online course, then of course they have the means to just hire the ads manager. Whereas the person who does not have the other revenue stream won't necessarily have the cash to hire the ads manager and therefore is actually spared from making this mistake. That's kind of what I'm seeing is, when your online course hasn't made enough money for you to hire an ads manager, you're less likely to hire one prematurely. Okay. So the mistake that you make if you do believe this, if only I can get more people to see my offer, is your offer has to convert well to warm traffic before you can even begin to think about launching it to a cold audience. Facebook and Instagram ads bring cold traffic to your launch.

It brings people who do not know, like, or trust you. People who have not had time to build a relationship with you. And unless you know exactly how much time and effort you need to put into building that relationship with people, then you are going to need to launch this thing warm to your list until you can see that your list converts really, really well. And by really well, I don't mean you're breaking even. I mean, you're making a return on ad spend of three or more. That means if you've spent money to build that list, you need to figure out, did I make three times more money than I put into ads to build my list.

So you want to launch to your list as many times as you can and make sure you have your funnel entirely optimized. So you know that when you're inviting people to your webinar or your challenge or your workshop, your launch mechanism, that live party that you have where you announce the court is open, that they actually come and that they show up and that they participate and that they buy live in the session with you. And then that a whole bunch of other people buy not live, afterwards. Right? So perhaps you do need more eyes on your offer, but the best way to get that is to start by building your list and then invite people on your email list to your launch. Then when you can see that they convert, well, then you're ready to start adding in cold traffic.

So an example of this was a friend of mine who is a business coach, a successful business coach, created an online course about managing your money. And she launched this course twice to her list and using affiliates. She made some good money and then she hired an ads manager and she said, okay, ads manager, I don't want to do another affiliate launch. I don't want to do another warm launch. I don't want to talk about social media. I just want to run ads to this launch. And she was expecting the same results and it was very disappointing. It was very, very indeed very disappointing. A.

Nd one of the things that we had to talk about was when she said to me, she said, yes, but the ads manager just didn't find the right people because if they'd found the right people, then those people would've converted. And my heart just breaks because I understand why she feels that way. I understand that there is a logic in thinking that it was just the wrong people.

But here's the thing is it cannot ever be the wrong people, particularly with how the algorithm is set up at the moment where we are targeting large open audiences. We're not even putting in a lot of interests anymore because the algorithm needs that much volume in order to find the right people. So if you signed off on ad creative, that was talking to your ideal customer and that message in the ad, in the copy and in the image was aligned with who your ideal customer is, and then that ads manager ran the ads to probably very large cold audiences, I'm talking 60 million people in cold audiences, and whoever signed up for that launch were people who reacted and responded to the creatives in the ad. So it is actually impossible to find the wrong people.

It is possible to drill down and make them more right than they would be. But in this case, I had to kind of talk to her and say, well, you cannot expect a cold audience to behave the same as a warm audience. So if you are in those shoes or if you're around that period of time where you've done a couple of successful launches, but you've used your list and your warm audiences and some affiliates, then just be careful to go and hire someone and expect the same results. By all means, hire someone and start out by building your email list. Just let them just help you build your email list and then see how the people behaved in your launch that came in from list building ads prior to your launch. Okay. So, that's number one. Number one is you weren't ready for large amounts of traffic.

Number two is, one or both of you didn't really understand how to measure the conversion rates of the traffic that your ads brought in. And this is another one of those that I totally understand. And I can see how this industry that we worked in have set up the relationship between online course creators and Facebook ads managers to fail. The reason it has is because you can take an online course with a step by step, paint by numbers instructions on how to build your course and how to market your course. And if you follow the step by step instructions in those step by step courses, you are probably going to get a good result, because they're pretty good.

If you hang out with me and you buy from any of the people I have bought from and any of the people I recommend, then you're likely to get a good result if you follow it step by step. Your ads manager though, does not have the intimate knowledge of your step by step process of how you are taking people through a funnel. Your ads manager does have technical knowledge in that they can use the backend of the ads manager and they have data and analytics knowledge in that they can analyze the numbers that the ads manager gives them in order to know if your ads are working or not. But there's a third element here that unless one of you or both of you know this, it could result in some unhappiness, it could result in a challenging relationship.

So, that third element... So I've told you about my model, my vein diagram, where we have audiences in one of the circle and those audiences include all of your audiences that you have, your email list, your social media, your website visitors, but it also includes cold traffic from ads. And then the second circle is your offer. And we need to know for sure, for sure, that your offer converts. And that's why in point number one I tell you, build your list first, make your offer so that we know before we add cold traffic into this mix, we know the offer converts.

And the third element is your launch mechanism. And I call it a launch mechanism, but because again, I'm like, can someone help me come up with a cooler name than launch mechanism? But launch mechanism actually really describes it. It is your webinar, your challenge, your video series, whatever that conversion event is, that party that you host, where you invite a whole bunch of people to and you present something to them live, and at the end of that presentation, you say, go to this link to buy my course, that is your launch mechanism. And that launch mechanism goes hand in hand with which mechanism you choose and how you manage that goes hand in hand with the cost of your offer, your course, the price of your course and the temperature of your audience.

So you cannot make a $3,000 offer to a cold audience with one or two emails. You can, if you have a very big audience and you're very well known and your offer is very established. But if you're starting out and you have a $3,000 offer and you're making it to cold traffic, you're not going to make money very quickly. It's going to be very hard for you. So I hope you see how there's this relationship between audiences and your offer and your launch mechanism. And it's actually like three cogs that have to turn in the right way.

So that's why I say ads cannot make you money. Ads is just traffic. Ads is just more audiences. The thing that results in money is knowing how those audiences move through your launch mechanism, to the point where they see your offer and then either convert or not convert. Ads have nothing to do with making money. Now, the problem we have is that ads managers feel or ads managers often feel, I think ads managers believe that their role in this relationship ends when the traffic comes in. And this is perpetuated by mentors and online marketers who've been doing this for yonkers of years, who says things to online course creators, like your ads manager is just responsible to get you leads under whatever cost you give them.

That's the most ridiculous thing because a cheap lead is not going to convert into a sale unless you know how to convert them into a sale. Now, if you've been in the game for 10 years and you're still in the game, you know how to convert a lead into a sale. But so, if a mentor, if anybody, any of the big cheeses in our community says that, if you hear them say, it's the ads manager's job is just to bring you leads at a certain cost, that perpetuates this lie. It perpetuates this terrible relationship that exists between online course creators and Facebook ads managers, because now the ads manager goes, well, my job is done. I've brought you the traffic. And if they're a nice person, they're going to say, I'm really sorry you didn't make any money. I hope it goes better for you next time. But I have heard ads managers just shrug their shoulders and say, well, it was your webinar. And they're not wrong, but they're also being an asshole.

So just please understand that you and or your ads manager needs to understand how to measure the conversion rights of your traffic as it moves through your funnel. Ads is the icing on the already delicious cake. Ads managers learn a technical skill. People do not buy an online course because the ads were so great. It's like a dating analogy. The ad is the dating app. It just connects you with one another. What makes dating turn into lasting love is the relationship you build with that date that you're on. That is called the funnel. Ads managers often are not trained well to understand that relationship between advertising and marketing.

It's like the old school fight between the sales department and the marketing department. The one needs the other, but one good marketing is a prerequisite for ads to work and good marketing cannot rely on ads alone to succeed. So if you were unhappy about the results in your launch and your ads manager couldn't help you understand why you spent so much money and didn't make any money, then that's usually a sign that neither of you fully understand the relationship between ads and marketing and it's likely that your funnel needs work. It might be likely that your ads need work as well. But if neither your ads or your funnel work, then the gap in the education is marketing. It's online marketing. It's knowing how to make offers to people that they want to take you up on.

So we need to restore that relationship between online course marketers and ads managers by teaching both to fully understand the relationship between audiences, offers and launch mechanisms, and to be able to identify exactly where the most profitable customer journey is that your client takes or your student takes from the day they see your first ad to the day that they convert to a sale. That is exactly what we teach our students inside The Launch Lounge. And it is not sexy. And it's not getting the whole world's attention just yet, because I am saying things that are different from what all of the gurus are saying, right? But we're seeing results. We really are seeing... And I'm seeing light bulbs go off for our students when they discover this relationship between the audience, the offers and the launch mechanisms. Okay.

So if you want an example of how this works, you just have to look at every other bro marketer out there. Every bro marketer spewing that you can make money if you understand this ad strategy or that ad strategy, or all you need is a couple of video ads to make money. It's ridiculous. It is just, it's ridiculous. Ads have never made anybody money. Ads do not make you money. Unless you have an e-commerce business. If you have an e-commerce business, it does. But if you sell online knowledge, sorry, no ads make your money.

All right, number three, you needed warm traffic and what you got was cold traffic. Have you guys heard people say, you can launch with ads before you build your email list, or you can launch your course before you build your email list? Ah, man. I just shake my head. It's lunacy. That's what it is. It's lunacy. You cannot launch a course before you've built your email list. You need an email list. There was once a client who came to us and she was, ah, she was just fabulous. Just the most elegant woman ever. And she had built an audience of over a hundred thousand followers on Facebook within three months by going live every single day.

She went live every single day for three months for at least an hour. And she presented herself in the most wonderful way. And she spoke to other women about building confidence and presenting themselves well in the world. And she had this absolute natural talent for being on camera. She was able to launch before she built her list because she had a hundred thousand followers who had watched her for an hour every single day for three months. She's the only person I've ever met, who was able to launch without an email list.

`So unless you want to go live every single day for three months, please don't buy into the bull dust that you can launch with ads before you build your list. Because what you're going to be doing is you are going to be launching to strangers and that is creepy. And that makes for a very icky experience. The key to making money online is to build your audience, practice getting good at making offers to your audience. And when you know that your offers convert, then you scale your offers. And when you start scaling, that's when you go bigger and bigger and bigger on the cold audiences. So you don't need to build an online course, you don't need to have a big audience and you don't need to have a big launch before you can start making money online. But you will sure waste a lot of money if you run ads to cold audiences and invite them to your launch if you've never tested your offer to your warm audiences before.

We worked with a client in the agency about a year ago, and she was a photographer, food photographer. Ah, she took the most beautiful photos of food. Hauntingly beautiful. They made you hungry just looking at them. And she was selling in a few different countries, which did not include the US. And during our planning for her launch, she said she would like to break into the US market and spend most of her money on the US market. And that's what we did. And the US market did not respond and they did not convert during her launch. So this is just an example of where somebody went into a new market and this could be a new market for you, or it could be just a new offer. And she went straight in with cold traffic into that market.

And so, I don't know. Needless to say, after the launch, she couldn't afford to continue to pay us. We have ended our relationship. It's always very, very sad for me when that happens. It was sad for her. It was sad for me. She didn't make the money that she wanted to make in her launch and that she would've made, if she'd stuck to the countries where she had proven her offer before. But we both thought that since the offer is proven, it should work in the US. And we were both wrong. And what we should have done is we should have built her list in the US slowly and then seeing what the most profitable customer journey in the US is before we put too much money into the cold launch for the US market. Okay. So, that's number three.

So the three things again is number one, you may have hired an ad manager too early, or made a mistake hiring an ads manager because you weren't ready for large amounts of traffic. Number two is one or both of you didn't really understand how to measure the conversion rights of the traffic your ads brought in. And number three is, you needed warm traffic and what you got was cold traffic. So don't put a hose in front of your mouth, when what you're looking for is everlasting love. Build relationships with your audience over time, invest in that relationship and spend time with your audience. Don't waste money on ads because you think it'll solve your conversion problems, because it won't, and you'll just be donating your money to Mark Zuckerberg. And I don't love that.

Thank you very much for listening this week. Please send me a DM on Instagram and tell me what your key takeaway is from this week's episode. And if you are thinking about launching in September, October, November, now is the time to reach out to me and see how we can help you get all your ducks in a row. Make sure you're organized, make sure you have your data collected, your copies written, all the things are in place so that you can have a profitable launch. This launch season coming up, my American friends say, "I'm going to launch in the fall." And I always laugh about that because it's spring over here then. So I want to say, if you're going to launch in the fall, September, October, November, let me know now and I can tell you what the best way is that my team and I can help you make sure your launch is profitable. Have a lovely day. Take care.

If you love this episode and you are a committed online course launcher who wants to learn how to grow your profits in your next course launch, and you want to know how to successfully scale your online courses business to seven figures and beyond, then I'd love to see you inside The Launch Lounge. The Launch Lounge is the only community online that is dedicated solely to helping you develop every aspect of your online courses business so that you can build your business to scale. With no one size fits all solutions, just the right education you need when you need it, coaching from our team of experts in different areas of launching and scaling and the best community on the internet, The Launch Lounge is your online course building home if you want profitable launches that scale your business to seven figures and beyond. To get on the wait list for our next enrollment season, go to shineandsucceed.com/launch.

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