By: Andrea Mac | February 22, 2024

If you can only handle me in small doses:

Do you want to know something else cool about that Dinner party that I keep talking about – There are 15 women registered that I don’t know. We have no idea how they found us, who they are, and what they do. Serendipity is already commencing. Janet King says those who are meant to be in the room that night will be there.

Only 30 spots remain for the party above, which is also exciting.

I am increasingly called to create ongoing experiences that prioritize fun and connection. Stay tuned, but only if you like fun experiences and a little bit of adventure too.

Building Prequal Vol. 28: Exploring Meta Ads

I've used this newsletter to talk about many things related to Building Prequal - what's happening with my clients, my personal goals, events I'm hosting, and even what my business looks and feels like according to my husband Ken. As important as it is to give you all a peek behind the curtain of my life, I want this newsletter to be useful to anyone in the stage of building a business I'm in or is actively working to get there.

That's why today, I want to talk about Meta ads. We've embarked on them this week, and if you've ever wondered what it's like to run ads or why anyone would want to try them, this newsletter is for you. Let's dig in.

What We're Doing

I've mentioned a few times that impact is high on my to-do list. I want Prequal's methodologies and tools to reach a much wider audience and, in turn, significantly impact women's equality and their ability to make more money. One of the things I need in place to make this happen is passive revenue. Having multiple revenue streams is a good business practice, but I'm focused on passive revenue because I've hit an upper limit.

I can't scale my revenue or impact around myself. I am only one person with a limited number of hours every day. Even if I wanted to take on 100 more clients, I couldn't. So, my impact is limited until I can figure out how to scale with passive revenue.

Enter ads.

Before I get to how we created these ads, here’s why we decided on ads.

Ads and Impact

One of the ways to create a bigger impact is to get in front of more people. There are several traction channels to achieve that goal, and one of them is advertising. We decided to try Meta ads to play with the Facebook and Instagram algorithms versus against them.

We spent most of 2023 documenting Prequal's curriculum and framework. We put together tools and courses that teach Prequal's proven methodologies, and we can offer those courses and tools to many without adding anything to my to-do list.

I do not think we will sell hundreds of Prequal courses right out of the gate with these ads. The price point is high enough that it's an unrealistic outcome.

Why ads?

The main goal of our ads is to increase awareness and get people on our email list. A foundational rule of marketing is that your potential buyers need to know, like and trust you. No one is going to buy what you’re selling unless they know, like, and trust you first.

Our ads aim to address that part of the marketing funnel and get more people on our email list. Once they're on our list, we have a way to nurture and communicate with them. We can build up the like and trust factor outside of ads.

Process

If you’ve run Meta ads, you know it's an endeavor best left to the experts. My team did a test run of ads early in 2023 with no success. So, this time, we hired The Ad Girls to create and manage our ads. We interviewed a few agencies and went with The Ad Girls for two reasons: 1) their results and 2) their client roster, which includes several female entrepreneurs.

We committed to a four-month test process and are very much at the beginning of that process. Our ads went live on Monday, but there was a lot of behind-the-scenes legwork to get to that point.

To run ads, we had to create or implement the following:

• Onboarding with the Ad Girls – This included a detailed intake questionnaire, an onboarding call, a discovery call, and regular check-ins leading up to the launch of our ads.

• New lead magnet – We created a quiz that speaks to our target audience while providing immense value. Creating this quiz also meant we had to build three new landing pages on our site, each with their own 10+ minute explainer video tied to their quiz results.

• Edits to our website – This included editing our main offer pages and creating new landing pages that would support and guide people through our quiz funnel. That included opt-in pages, a quiz page, quiz results pages, and new offer pages specifically for people who took the quiz.

• Email automation – We had to create a new email nurture sequence to send to anyone who took our quiz. That meant writing a series of emails and building out that automation in Active Campaign.

• Creation of the actual ads – The Ad Girls mainly handled this. They created a series of ads that included different messaging and formats, so we have a mix of ads to test and eventually double down on. We reviewed and signed off on them all.

It took us about a month of work and coordination before we posted our first ads. We had to thoroughly test all the new systems before we flipped the switch.

This is our starting point:

What's Working

It's hard to tell. We're less than a week into running ads, and our ads team assures us we need to let them run for two weeks before we do significant tweaks. However, they're keeping a close eye and suggested edits to a few of our pages to help boost conversions about 24 hours after the ads went live.

No one has purchased our course yet, but we have added 13 contacts to our email system. It’s not an earth-shattering number, but it suggests some things are working. And in two weeks' time the Meta data will show us which ads are performing better so we can maximize impact and ad spend.

Our ads are live, and I’m excited that we’re officially out there reaching more people. You may see them in your Instagram or Facebook feed, especially if you’ve ever visited the Prequal website. Let me know what you think if you see our ads in the wild. I'd love your feedback – but not your clicks. Usually, I'm all about the clicks, but since I'm paying for them with these ads, I'd rather you message me and tell me what you think.

-A.

P.S. I purposefully have not included the link to our quiz here. The only way to access it is through our ads. Since I've invested a lot of money into them, I want to see what these ads can do without promoting the quiz myself. I will probably share it with Prequal's email list before we post it publicly. Subscribe here if you want to get on our list.