This year I’m challenging myself to start my classes back full. That means ‘no ghost mats’. I’m also challenging you, too! If you’re not already signed up for the challenge, you can jump in here: https://bit.ly/ghostmats As a part of the challenge, I’m sharing along with everyone else how I’m tracking to my goal. Of the 36 total mats I have to sell, I have 19 sold, 17 to go. There are two places remaining in my Wednesday night class and 15 in my Tuesday night. I know I have some regulars who will still sign up. I also know I need to bring in at least six brand new (to me) students to meet the goal.
So it’s time to kick off my social media ads campaign.
If you’ve not used FB/Insta ads before, you can go back through my blogs, vlogs and podcasts for more ‘get started’ free info. In this post I’m going to share three tips to fine tune a campaign you already have running or include in the campaign you are about to launch. Again, this is exactly what I am doing in my own Yoga business.
When the geographic area is small, keep the demographic data broad
When it comes to in person classes you’re likely to have fewer people to show your ads to. If you’re teaching online your students could conceivably be anywhere in the world. But when you’re in person your students need to be able to get to you. While normally I would select my audience to include interests such as Yoga, meditation, wellness etc limiting the audience size by interest when I’m already limiting by distance would make the audience too small. A small audience means your ads could be very expensive and/or not effective.
For my ads, I’m choosing a radius from the studio of 25km, age range of 30 - 64 and leaving the rest (interests, gender etc) blank.
2. Let meta decide what works best
This is the spaghetti at the wall principle. Too often Yoga teachers agonise about crafting the perfect copy for their ads. This is a waste of time. Rather, ensure you have ‘dynamic creative’ turned on and then make sure you write 5 variations for the headline and another 5 for the primary text. Keep each of these to about five words. Make sure you’re using the keywords like ‘Yoga’ ‘January’ and the name of the suburb or town where you teach. Don’t bother with the description. They will feel repetitive. That’s OK. Don’t overthink it. Just get 10 slight variations up and get going!
3. Monitor but don’t be hypervigilant
As a part of the first group call for the No Ghost Mats Challenge I asked everyone to set their marketing budget. I’m planning on spending $200. Decide on your over all and then daily budget at the outset. The more Campaigns you run (‘over time) the more certainty you’ll have regarding the return on your ad spend. If you’re unaccustomed to social media paid ads, then you won’t have any data to base your budget on. Instead, determine the amount of money you are choosing to invest, regardless of the outcome. Remember, all money spent on meta yields data, even if it doesn’t yield sales. This doesn’t mean you can’t waste money or spend unwisely, of course you can. But it does mean that even if your ads don’t return as you’d hoped, if you take time to review them and learn, your campaigns will improve over time, and so will your ROI.
Ultimately, deciding your budget and checking your campaign every two days is more than sufficient to monitor the success of the campaign. And remember, if you do decide to make changes while your campaign is running, there will be a lag in delivery as it reoptimises post-editing.
OK, let’s go put up our ads! I am looking forward to hearing about your results when we have our call Thursday January 11th at 3pm, Thailand time.