By the way, Hi! I’m Frannie, founder & CEO of Elevate Her Marketing. We serve female online course creators, helping them scale their businesses and income so they have the power to create the lives that they desire.

Since starting EHM, we’ve generated over 600,000 leads for clients and have helped them bring in over $8 million in profit.

Anyway, despite the hours and complexity of your social media marketing efforts — those daily reels, IG Stories, endless video takes… you’re still not seeing the results you’ve been working so hard towards.

This can feel exhausting, like you’re making all this progress only to go absolutely nowhere. 

The type of traction you need to see to consistently sell your course via social used to be fairly simple. But we’ve seen a slow decline over the years and in the last 8-12 months it’s snowballed into a massive issue.

The way we work with our clients, we know everything from their long-term business strategy to the code on the back end of their website…we see their monthly finances and data reports, which allows us to see the marketing strategies that perform best.

We also see what doesn’t work and the trends as they happen, from the inside. This experience has given us a broader perspective of the industry as a whole and insight most people can’t see.

Old course marketing strategies just don’t work like they used to. You need to make a shift now if you really want your business to make it for the long haul.

A number of course creators have successfully improvised their strategy with our help. One of our clients, Cristina Galbato, made about $4 million in sales working with us. Other other clients are hitting their first $20k months or making consistent high five-figures every month!

You might feel like that’s an unreachable goal at the moment or wonder “How the HECK is that possible?!”

It is 100% possible, when you adjust your marketing to the current industry, and that’s exactly what you’ll learn in this blog, so keep reading…

Since 2020, competition in the online course industry has seen a massive spike alongside a significant increase in content production on Instagram.

It’s due to a number of things, including the increasing demand for flexible and accessible education options after the pandemic. This shift has led to a cultural transformation, with people turning to online courses to acquire new skills, further their education, or pursue personal interests.

Plus, with the quick rise of A.I., creating a course is easier than ever. People that previously spent months creating a program can now spend hours putting something together with the help of tools like ChatGPT.

In total, the Online Learning industry is expected to grow to a $687 billion dollar industry by 2030, up from $240 billion in 2022!

The social platforms course creators have traditionally used to market their products have also seen massive growth. The sheer volume of people producing content on Instagram has exploded, it’s grown from 1.5 billion to 2.3 billion users. There’s simply a much larger pool of people trying to have their content seen…

Another crucial challenge organic marketing faces in promoting online courses is the evolving complexity of algorithms & governing platforms like Meta.

You may wonder what Meta gets out of this evolving approach. First and foremost, it’s good for Meta’s business. As organic reach goes down, Meta’s stock price goes up. Meta is a business with shareholders to answer to and being in that position they have to do what benefits the bottom line. We don’t like it when it impacts what we’re able to do, but it’s the nature of running a business.

Want to know what bothers me the most? Even after brilliant and hard-working course creators like you put in so much effort into your content, ROI is very uncertain and untrackable with organic content. Sure you can take an educated guess based on when a post does well and if you made sales, but the data is extremely vague.

You become a content creator. Not in the literal sense, but you go all in on creating the high-quality and quantity of content needed to see results with organic social media today.

Remember that visual I showed you earlier about the recommended amount of content to create each month? In total she suggests about 35 posts a week, on average. You can commit to sticking to this cadence (at minimum) and ensuring that the content you create is of the highest quality you can afford (not only in production but strategy as well.)

Don’t forget that it’s more than just content creation as well, you need to be engaging with 70+ accounts daily.

In order to do this you’ll need to research a running list of relevant people you want to interact with, you’re not just going to engage with  random people, you’ll need to be strategic.

When you do commit to this strategy, you have to make sure it’s thoughtful & relationship building engagement. None of the “wow amazing post” type of comments. DMs are the same, no sales pitching or blanket messages to 20 people, you have to be thoughtful with each interaction.

All of this is just for Instagram, you can and should also consider branching out to other platforms.

To be honest, even those that LOVE creating content are finding this impossible to keep up with and almost all of the highly successful course creators today are using other marketing strategies to supplement their organic efforts.

…this is all in addition to running the actual business you have.

This next option is something most course creators don’t consider for themselves, they see it as something they’ll graduate to when their business is at a certain size. However, I’ve found, as the online course and social media industries have matured, that every single course creator can benefit from this strategy. 

It’s paid social media marketing, specifically Facebook & Instagram ads. 

The reason entrepreneurs feel it’s for larger businesses is because of the cost of ads, but if you consider the time and resources you put into other strategies along with the potential results, there’s really NO comparison at all. 

Ads generate results for you much faster than other marketing strategies. And, regardless of what strategy you choose, you’re still having to spend time and money, but with ads if you can guarantee visibility, that all your followers will see your content, & generate a consistent return why wouldn’t you invest in THAT strategy? 

Plus, the potential for scaling is exponential.

Another reason people don’t think ads are for them is because they feel they can’t do it themselves, but I’m here to tell you my most successful clients almost always start running ads on their own and scale up to a place where they’re ready for the investment of support!

One of the biggest benefits of Facebook & Instagram ads is the targeting possibilities.

First, you can reach people all over the globe with paid ads and you can specify who you want those people to “be” based on data.

For example, you can target your ads to female Europeans that are 33-47 or to men from ages 25 to 55 in all English speaking countries.

That’s not all though, you can also target using filters like certain hobbies, shopping habits, education levels, and more. The specificity of targeting is like nothing the marketing & advertising world has ever seen. Think about television or even hashtags from your organic efforts, with those marketing channels you can define a couple of things, but with Meta ads you’re able to get extremely granular.

With organic social media, if you can even achieve reach, your post may  shared to a country where people don’t even speak your language or an age group that can’t afford your product.

Another massive benefit of the targeting capabilities of Facebook & Instagram ads is the Meta tracking Pixel! This is a piece of code that’s embedded in your website and funnel softwares. It tracks the actions people take throughout your business’s ecosystem.

…THIS is arguably the most powerful tool in marketing today!

With organic social media today you can’t even confirm that people following your account will see your content, never mind show them specific content based on actions they’ve taken.

The problem with organic reach is BIG, in 2023 if you had:

• 500 to 2k followers: 37% of your audience saw your posts
• 2-10k followers: only 17% of them saw your organic content
• 10-50K followers: about 12% of your audience saw your content
• 50k+ followers: worst of all, 5% of followers saw your posts

You’ve worked so hard to grow your community, but if you’re only posting organically more than 70-80% of them aren’t seeing your content.

With paid ads on social media apps, you won’t have to wait for months or years to see the results. You’ll start seeing impressions, clicks, and leads almost right away! 

It can take weeks or sometimes months to optimize a full online course funnel that delivers you consistent sales, but it’s also possible that you will see purchases on the first day! This timeline is very dependent on your specific business and funnel, most of our clients start to see a positive return by month 2 or 3.

When our client Esther Inman, creator of the Virtual Assistant Internship course, started working with us she was running ads and selling around 20 course spots per month. In just a few months we were able to increase that to somewhere between 100-200 per month!

We did this by helping Esther improve her ad messaging so that it was compliant with platform policies. Her ads were getting rejected for marketing products Meta doesn’t allow (she didn’t have this type of product, it was just the messaging in her ads that caused red flags with the algorithm.)

Another messaging shift we made was to focus on what her ideal audience needed to hear to convert (more about how the course would help them achieve their desires vs. the specific details of the course.)

Ads are the fastest way to figure out what works and what doesn’t with your messaging. To truly figure this out you need a significant amount of data, which comes quickly with ads; organically it will take you forever to get enough people to view your content (unless you’re already a large account, but we now know that even then most of your audience won’t even see your content.)

We also researched new audiences to target and in just a few weeks these fresh audiences started delivering over 50% of revenue!

When you’re running ads for your online course business, you don’t just see growth with the one thing you’re marketing with ads, but instead your entire business grows. It’s like a 2 for 1 deal but instead more like 7 for 1!

I’ll be really transparent and tell you that getting your campaign built and set up does take a solid amount of time (a couple weeks), but once ads are running you’ll need about an hour a week, on average, to keep things going.

Weekly you’ll want to review your ad results and make changes to optimize the ads. You’ll also want to track your data in a report so you can better analyze overtime and recognize any patterns.

Monthly you’ll need to create new ads (we like to create a handful of ads so we can launch them throughout the coming weeks) which does take a couple of hours. While we do recommend testing new ad creatives fairly often, we do find that some clients can run the same ads for months and see good results!

You will also have to optimize your funnel (landing pages, lead magnet, emails, etc.) but that’s something you’ll be doing regardless…right?!! 😉

And that’s it! When you’re in your first year or so of running ads, the time commitment really is minimal.

OR look it could look like hiring a team so you’re no longer a solopreneur and have the space to create all the ideas that you’ve been keeping a running list of, but were too busy to implement.

Maybe, it looks like having the freedom to work from anywhere and traveling somewhere new every few months or living in two different countries!

Whatever your dream is, having an online course business that consistently delivers you profit is what will make that possible for you.

But don’t forget that seeing success with a paid advertising strategy requires a strategic approach. You can google or listen to the gurus telling you there’s just “one trick” that will allow you to see wild ad success, but the truth is you need an honest partner that will support you throughout your journey.

“Literally in the first three months of working together, I grew my email list by 10,000 new subscribers and earned a revenue of over $100,000. That’s the first three months.

And then over the next year of working together, my email list is now over 100,000 new subscribers, super-targeted for the audience that I want. And we consistently see a return in our ad spend between two to six just depending on the month. So every single month has been profitable for my business working with Elevate Her Marketing.

I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Facebook ads are the number one best investment that I’ve made in my business.

They have been completely transformative both in terms of the number of people that I’m able to impact with my online courses, in terms of revenue generation in my business, in terms of my mindset and the security that I have working online, and also just, I don’t know, it’s expanded the realm of what I considered possible for myself and my business.”

“Strategy Parties are THE BEST! They truly take out all the guesswork on how to set up and run successful ad campaigns for your courses. I took the strategy Frannie created for me in my first Party and went from making $2k/month from my course to $10k/month, then to $20k/month!

I’ve now had a second Party to get a strategy for scaling even further, and I’m confident that will happen. HUGE thanks to Frannie and the EHM team for taking something seemingly so complicated and making it so doable. My business runs smoothly and easily because of my ad strategy.”

That’s where EHM comes in. We offer different levels of support but my personal favorite is having clients start with our Strategy Party (pretty much all of my most successful clients start here!)

This is where we create a customized ad campaign for your unique business, based on information you provide us and our past experience of working with businesses just like yours for the last 10 years.

We provide you with everything you need to know in order to build your first ad campaign and even connect with you for a follow up call a few weeks after you launch your ads to ensure everything is working smoothly!

Don’t worry if you’re not a techy person, we’ll hold your hand through that stuff and provide a number of video resources in case you get stuck!

Wondering how much you’ll need to spend on your first campaign? It really depends on your goals, course price, and a few other things. But it’s very likely you can get started with just $500-$1000/month.

When you reserve your spot on the waitlist you’ll receive a FREE Ad Results Calculator that will show you the type of results you can expect when you launch your first campaign, based on your business numbers!