Ep 15: Behind the scenes of my Hometown ADvantage launches

Ever wondered what it really takes to launch and scale a group program?

In this special behind-the-scenes episode of Hometown Advantage, I’m peeling back the curtain on the growth of my signature program—from three sales to multi-five-figure launches (and all the messy middle in between). Whether you're a local business owner curious about the online world or a course creator navigating your own launches, this episode is for you.

I’m walking you through:
 ✨ What I spent on ads in each launch (down to the dollar)
 ✨ How many leads and sales I brought in
 ✨ My exact return on ad spend
 ✨ What worked, what flopped, and what I’m changing next time

You’ll also hear how I accidentally invalidated a webinar link 5 minutes before go time (😅), why I believe sales-optimized ads are the secret weapon nobody’s talking about, and how I’m leveling up my systems and conversion strategy for the next round.

If you're a data nerd like me—or just love a good launch story—you’ll want to tune in.

🎧 Let’s talk numbers, mistakes, momentum, and the magic (and math) behind growing an impactful online program.

Transcript

0:00

Oh, welcome to Hometown Advantage. I need to start over. Welcome to Hometown Advantage. This is usually where I share that this is a podcast specifically for local business owners that want to learn a streamlined, simple, but results driven way to market their podcast. But today we're switching it up a little bit. I'm actually gonna take you behind the scenes of my business and the growth of my program, hometown Advantage. So if you own a local business and you're just curious about what my life looks like. Running an online business, running an online course. This is for you. On the flip side, if you're a marketer or you're an online business owner, a course creator, group program leader, or you want to be one, this might be interesting for you as well. Okay, so I'm gonna just take you back to the beginning. And then I'm gonna do some quick debriefs in the past three launches, which is the amount of launches I've done in 2025. And I'm just gonna take you behind the scenes on the cold hard data. I'm gonna tell you about how much I spent on ads, how many leads I brought in, how many sales I made, how much revenue I made, return on ad spend, all of that fun stuff because I. Love this stuff. If you don't already know, I am like a data nerd when it comes to marketing and sales because when you know your data and you act on it, you can make some serious cash. Y'all. And that is what I've been working on. So let's start with a little history. For years I was taking on Done For You Ads clients. I was working as a subcontractor for several different agencies running ads for their clients. When I decided to join a local in-person business mastermind, I was making more money than I've ever made in my life. I was so proud of all the work I had put in to get where I got, but I didn't know it at the time. I was approaching burnout status, which feels so dramatic to say,'cause I feel like burnout should be like. Which feels so dramatic to say, because I feel like burnout is a bit of an overused term in entrepreneurship, especially online business. So I'll say I wasn't there yet, but I now know I was approaching that. So our mastermind had our first in person little retreat. We were staying the night. Everyone had to introduce themselves. Obviously we all were just getting to know each other. I talking about where we're struggling in our business, where we wanna grow, and I basically came and said, I love where I'm at revenue-wise, but of course I would love to keep growing. My only problem is I don't have another single minute in the day, so I'm not sure how I could possibly keep taking on clients. And that's pretty much where I was enlightened, that as a business owner, you don't always have to do more to make more. Since then, I have been obsessed with books like Buy Back Your Time, atomic Habits. 10 x is greater than two x. These business books that talk about how as an entrepreneur, you don't need to be capped by the amount of time you have. It comes down to a lot of different things. But that's for a different podcast. So I had been thinking about how I wanted to create a course, but I wanted to make sure it was impactful. I wanted to make sure it was legit. I wanted to make sure it would really help people. And at this mastermind is when I got this download that I need a course for my local biz besties as I call them now, because I had taken course after course on ads that talked a lot about ads for online products, courses, group programs, masterminds. But I never had any good information on the local business strategies that I ended up having to teach myself over the years. And I actually had so many local business friends and networking connections because I spent a lot of my time in my early business days in person networking with local business owners, getting to know them. And really learning where they were stuck and trying to help them through that with ads. So anyways, it was like May of 20, 24, I started working on the curriculum, planning it out, writing it out, recording it, building it in all the right softwares, all of this stuff. And I decided I was gonna launch it in October. Now, at the time, I probably had a thousand followers. A lot of them were friends, family and other marketers. And when I started the curriculum, I didn't even have an email list. So a long with starting the curriculum, I created a freebie and I started running ads to my email list. Program was not even created yet. So by the time the launch came around, I probably had 300 people on my email list. I was spending a couple hundred a month in ads, and I literally didn't have anything to sell these people when I was running ads. I just knew that if you're going to launch. A product like this, you need a base audience or you need to run ads to get them. So that was my goal there. When launch time came around, I spent around a thousand in ads. I sold the program for$650 and I sold it to three people. I did not have huge expectations for it. Did I think I would sell more that first round? Maybe. But it didn't matter to me. If I sold one spot or 10 spots, I was gonna do the program, see it through. Because when you're selling something for the very first time to a small audience, that's just how it goes. This was like starting a whole new business for me. And I know better than to expect to be successful overnight, right? So that first round was amazing. Everyone got such good results. I was able to collect some case studies and testimonials, and I decided I was gonna do another launch in January. So this is where I wanna dive into the numbers in January of 2025. Of course, I started the ads in December, and then the workshop happened early January. I spent 1500 on ads, so I was a little bit shy to spend any more than that because I had spent that the time before, just barely made my money back on it. So I thought, okay, let's just spend the same amount, see what happens. I ended up bringing in 263 leads. For a cost of$4 and 95 cents a lead, and this time I made eight sales, so doubled my sales on same amount of ad spend. I was thrilled. So these numbers come out to a 3% lead to sale conversion rate, which is good for a cold audience, decent at least. That means 3% of the leads I brought in the 263 leads I brought in, bought, okay. And I sold the program this round at$999. Oh. This launch, I also did what's called a trip wire. So when people opted in for the free workshop that I run. They were prompted to see if they wanted to buy my mini course. So I actually made a thousand dollars off of those sales too. Now, I'm not saying this is like the best strategy, honestly, it's a good strategy and it helps you recoup ad spend, but you need to be really strategic with your product.'cause what happened was I was selling a mini course that taught you how to set up an ad. So the people who bought that a lot of times felt like they had enough to go off of. To get them started, even though it's nothing in comparison to what they get in the program, that it deterred them from buying. So my total revenue was$8,992 with the eight sales and the thousand dollars in tripwire sales, which is almost a six x return on ad spend, which is very, very good. Okay, now I went into that launch. Pretty much blind, just going off of my own experience running ads for huge influencers and course creators who were spending like 20,000 on their launches versus my 1500. And I was happy with that, and I decided I was gonna launch again in April. Now, prior to launching in April, I made hometown advantage a. Evergreen program so anyone can join at any time. I have different offers happening at different times, but I run these big launches where I do a big push in ad spend. I do a big push on emails, and I do a really quick promo, like seven days from the live workshop. So there's a lot of buzz around it, and I do a little bit bigger of a promo than I would run in between launches, so anyone can enroll at any time. But these big launches help me get like big cohorts in at once. Now, something got into me around April, January. Hometowns were getting amazing results too. I said, I'm going big this time. Okay, I'm going much bigger. I ended up spending$7,220 on my April launch ad spend. I set up a trip wire, but I changed the products up a little bit, and this time I made$2,350 back on my trip wire sales. So before in January, I made back almost all of my money. It was like a thousand dollars and I spent 1500. In this case, it was about a third, but it was still something. Now, here's the big thing. In April, I made 20. Sales and I sold the program at$1,300, so my total revenue was$28,000, My profit after ad spend was$21,000 and some change, so my ROAS was pretty much four x. Now the thing with spending more is that obviously, yes, you should bring in more leads and you should make more, but your ROAS can tend to get lower and lower the more you spend, which is fine if you're not familiar. ROAS is return on a spend. So if I spend.$1,000 and I make$10,000. That's a 10 x roas, 10 x return on ad spend versus if I spend$10,000. And I make 50,000 back. That's only a five x roas, but it's$40,000 after ad spend versus in the 1000 to 10,000 example, it's a$9,000 after ad spend. So ROAS can be smaller, but the amount of money you're actually taking home will tend to be bigger. And that's because a lot of times your conversion rate will go down the more people you're bringing in. So if I bring in a hundred people to my launch and three of them buy, that's a 3% conversion rate versus bringing in a thousand people in order to hold up that 3% conversion rate, you need 30 people to buy. It just gets harder and harder the bigger you're getting. But it's okay because. Ultimately, you're still ending up more in the green, right? Like more money after ad spend. Hopefully that makes sense. So in April, I brought in 828 leads for around$8 and 29 cents a lead, and I had a 2.4%. Conversion rate. So my conversion rate went down a bit, but I made over 20 grand after ad spend. I was absolutely thrilled this launch. So of course I did a lot of things different. This is a huge one that so many ads people don't talk about and I can't get over it, and that's choosing. The right campaign objective when you're looking for purchasers. So in years past, the strategy has always been run, lead generation ads, as in you go into the ads manager and you select the lead objective. Bring all those people in for$1,$2,$3 a lead. And then convert one, two, or 3% of them. And as time has gone on, and recently Facebook does this magical thing where it can find the people who are quote unquote, freebie seeking. And serve them the lead ads versus people who really may have the intention to buy and serve them your purchase or your sales optimized ads. So when I was running ads for course creators, we switched to using almost all sales optimized ads, even though we were sending people to a free workshop. And the lead costs would be higher. So we'd get less leads in the door for the same amount of money, but such a higher percentage of those people would convert. So what happened in April was so crazy. I did not do what's called a launch warmup, where I like warm up my email list and my social media following. To the offer and to the launch. I learned about this when I got a new business coach, which I'll talk about in a second, and I sent a couple emails about the launch, like maybe three to my email list, and then the rest of the leads came from my ads in almost all of the people who bought the program in April joined my list from the ads for that launch, meaning they were completely cold to me. And they bought, so technically my lead to sale conversion rate is down a little bit, but I had a lot more leads. And all of the people who converted almost all except for two, were completely cult, which is really, really helpful data to have. It's a really good sign. For my offer in general, but I could have done even better if I actually warmed up my list ahead of time and had more of those people convert. So I really attribute running mostly sales ads, even though my lead cost was much higher to one of the reasons that this launch was so successful. I actually signed up for a new mastermind with my business coach Vic Meldrew, like a week before this launch, and I got on a call with her. I told her about the January launch. I told her about my plans and how my ads were doing and things like that, and she suggested I do a fast action bonus and we came up with one together. I added that in and that sold like crazy. That helped me double my launch for sure. I would've never thought of that offer on my own, so I was so grateful for that. And then she taught me about the launch, like email warmup process, which is what I implemented for June. So going into my most recent launch, which was at the beginning of June this year, I ended up spending$9,951. I put a very half-ass trip wire strategy on the back end of my ads and I ended up making$1,225 for my trip wire, which is funny'cause that's like the same amount I made when I spent 1500 in January, but that's okay. I was just so unbothered by that. That was like not my concern. I had no doubts in my mind, obviously, that I'd make my ad spend back without it. Okay, so this time, I think I already said this, I spent$9,951 on ads and I ended up making 19 sales, so one sale less. Then last launch in April, having spent a couple thousand dollars more. So that was a bummer, which is crazy. Talk to me because six months ago, if you would've told me that I'm enrolling 19 to 20 people in a launch, in general, I would have not believed you. So 19 people is amazing, but of course I spent more because I was hoping. For more, right? So my profit after ad spend this round was$18,000, which was a 2.8 x return on ad spend. So still not bad. No one can ever complain about putting a dollar into a money machine and getting close to three out. That is still amazing. But I have so many notes and thoughts about things that happened with this June launch that I am taking into my September launch. Coming up first, I had a huge tech Zoom snafu. I don't know if this cost me sales or not. It is quite possible. It's one of those things that you'll never know, but I set up a webinar time and that morning I went to practice the webinar and rookie me did not know that then voids the webinar link that I had shared with over a thousand people. So when they went to go in, it was saying webinar has ended. And I did not realize that till about five minutes before we were starting. So I had to create a new webinar link, send an oops email to those a thousand people, say This is the new link, and pray that they saw that email. Of course not everyone did, of course. So that was a huge bummer. And then as much as I tried not to. I am assuming I took some of that nervous and bummed out energy into the webinar itself, right? One of those things, or it is what it is. You live and you learn. The other thing that happened with this launch was that I could not get my sales optimized ads. To get a decent cost per lead. So with the April launch, my lead ads were probably getting$3 cost per leads. My sale ads were getting like seven or$8 cost per leads, and I was happy with that versus in this launch, my cost per lead with those sales optimized ads was like twenties, thirties, like not. Viable costs that I can justly go forward with. So I ended up putting most of my money into my lead optimized ads and was just hoping for the best. I brought in 1081 leads. Actually, I technically brought in more than that, but that was the amount of people who were still on my list by the time I did the workshop. Because another thing that I think that happened is that a lot of people see my messaging in my ads. I talk about how. Local ads are different. You don't need as much budget, things like that. And I swear so many people either graze over the word local or they don't understand what I'm talking about when I say local. And I end up getting a lot of other marketers or online business owners who are starting to, who are trying to start their own coaching program or course opting in for my stuff. And then as they get through some of my emails, they're like, oh, this isn't for me. And they unsubscribe. What she teaches is not what I need, and they unsubscribe, which is great. I don't want those people on my list, but I don't want them to come on my list in the first place. I don't want to pay for them to come on my list in the first place. So I think I need to be more strategic with my messaging. One thing that I've found that I did not do in this June launch that I will be doing in most of my ads, stay tuned in September. Is this very interesting hook that I have found works for this, and it's where I put a little asterisk. This is the very first line of the caption of my ads asterisk. This does not work if you are an e-commerce or online. Coaching business, something like that. This only works for businesses who are local and looking to build their local clientele and customer base. When I do that, then it sparks something in the people who are just looking for a cheap, quick fix to grow their online business and lets them know this is not for them. It also. Reiterates to my local people that this is for them. I have found that's just like an interesting way to make sure I'm getting the right people in right from the start. Because what happens is people will read my hook or they'll watch the first five seconds of my reel, and then they'll opt in. They didn't read the rest of it. That's just the way it goes. Okay, so my lead to sale conversion rate in June was 1.85%. Not great the the worst yet, right? I had a lot of people by who had bought my mini course back in February and March when I was running ads to that I have, I had since stopped that. So now my strategy going into September is to get those back up and running in between. I only had two people who found me from the April webinar ads. No, who found me from the June webinar Ads Convert. This time I take that back. I have a list here that it's six people out of the 19, so about a third, which is still really good for cold conversion, but it's just crazy compared to. The April launch, how almost everyone was completely cold, and it goes to show that my warmup strategy here saved me because most of the people who signed up had already been on my list, whether it was from the April webinar and they hadn't bought from other ads I've ran in between launches. I was able to reengage them and have them buy this round. I also changed up the webinar content a little bit. Actually, I changed it a lot based on some recommendations from my coach, and I just don't think I executed on those changes well, and I need to go back to talking about my step-by-step plan because I really got away from that, and I think a lot of people really love. Knowing how simple the plan is that I teach inside the program, and it helps them have trust that they'll be able to figure it out because they will. Okay. And then last thing I wanna touch on is just all the things I'm working on right now that I planned to do for the September launch to hopefully get my conversion rate up. So I don't have a ton of control over the cost per lead. I play with my ads during the launch, but I pretty much know what works and what doesn't and what my average cost per lead is. So I don't worry about that too much. As much as I worry about getting my conversion rate up, I want to get more people who are opting in for the workshop to buy the program at the end. So I have a little list here of all the things I've been working on behind the scenes. First of all, I invested in a group program called Systems Over Stress, which helps you collect. Data so that you can help your group program members track their results better. That's for them and for me as the group program leader, right? I want to get cold, hard data on how well. My students are doing with their ads so that I can use that in my marketing. And when I'm talking with people, I can say, this is the average amount that people spend on ads in their first three months. This is the average amount of return on ad spend that they're making after going through my program. This is how they usually rate their confidence level in marketing when they come in versus how they rate it when they come out. This is how much time they're usually spending on marketing when they come in versus how much time they're spending on it when they go out. Those kinds of things. This is on average how many leads people get in your industry, like even tracking bispecific industries since local businesses can be kind of brought. That's something I'm working on. And on top of that, I hired an online business manager. My biggest hire yet to help me implement all of that and just get the systems in the background of the program working like. Clockwork. So making sure everyone's getting beautiful onboarding emails so they are feeling so supported and so in the know about how to take advantage of the program, getting offboarding emails when they're 90 days is up. Make sure I'm collecting reviews and testimonials. Helping me get this entire launch process systematized so that my VA can support me more with it, all of that fun stuff. Also, for the next launch, I need to strategize what I'm going to use as my trip wire sale. Because that's gonna help me get my sales ads taking off, actually getting some purchases on the back end of the workshop. If anyone has ideas on a digital product, I can sell on the back end of the workshop signup, please feel free to shoot them my way. I am strategizing on that. I have obviously so many local ed resources. I'm thinking maybe. Ad graphics, including reels, templates, and copy swipe files, or maybe even a custom GPT to write your ad copy for you. Those are some things that are in my head right now, but the biggest thing is that my biggest focus is going to be making sure I can get these sales optimized ads taking off, so prepping more ads ahead of time to test a lot of times face to camera. Sales ads do better than anything else. I have B roll reel ads doing really well right now with the sales optimization, so hoping I can just kind of transfer those over to live workshop ads once we're ready to start promoting that. The other thing is that I'm running quite a bit of ads in between launches, so I haven't been doing that as much, but that's super important because I need to grow my list and my audience in between launches so that I'm not just selling the same program to the same people over and over and over again. Okay. And then I think this is the last thing. No, there's two more things. I am gonna reopen my free Facebook group right now. It's called the Launch Your Local Ads Challenge. We'll see if maybe I change the name of that and I am going to call the month leading up to the workshop. Like ad makeover month or something like that. And I am going to connect with my local biz besties and help them make over their ads. And I'm going to talk about previous ad, quote unquote makeovers that I've been a part of in the past. I'm gonna maybe find other ads just on my feed and talk about how I would make them over and we're gonna. Connect in the free Facebook group over making over our ads into ads that are actually profitable. So I'm gonna be driving people to that free Facebook group as they sign up for the webinar so that I can connect with them there. Support them there, answer questions there, all of that fun stuff. I'm also considering opening certain blocks of time on my calendar during the car open phase to take calls for people who are on the fence. So I have never done that in the past. I've only taken calls from my done for you services, which are like. Four times the price. Right? But I'm thinking this would be a really good way. Again, I'm just, I wanna connect with my people. I want to be so clear on what they're struggling with.'cause obviously I think I have a good idea, but there's always, things are always changing, right? And I wanna make sure that I can help them with this program. And I wanna make sure the program's set up so that I can help them. And if talking to me. It can help them decide that they actually want to invest, then I'm going to go ahead and make that an option. I'm not just gonna open up my calendar altogether. I'm just gonna pick a couple blocks of time and tell people they can schedule a 15 minute block during that time. I think that'll be helpful because. If you haven't heard the term trust recession yet, it refers to the fact that most of people who may want to buy things online or who have bought things online in the past no longer have trust in online coaches, course creators, things like that because they've been burned. Totally makes sense, and I think that offering the call can help combat some of that. We will, I'll be interested to see if the calls are a hit and they end up booking out, and I need to maybe either open up more spots or even eventually decide that like I just can't possibly take up, take enough time to talk to everybody, or if it's like the opposite and like no one's actually interested. I've had people ask me for calls in the past and I've simply said no because I did not work it into my schedule. So I'm gonna work it into my schedule this time, and I'm going to see what that does. Okay. I. Okay. Hopefully that wasn't too much numbers jargon for you. If you listen to this, you thought it was interesting, you are thinking about starting an online program or course, or you have one and you want to run ads for it someday. You wanna launch it. I am helping a friend right now with her group program launch, and I would love to bring this back as one of my main offers going into the end of the year. So if you're looking to do a launch and you want support with your ads on it, reach out to me. I got you. It's so crazy. I've had 61 people come into the program. It's been open for less than a year. My goal is a hundred by the end of the year. We're gonna launch in September and we're gonna launch again in November. So I just need 20 people each time to hit that goal. I just love supporting my local business owners, seeing them win, seeing them grow their business with ads. Oh my gosh. My client, Mindy, just shared that when she started the program, she was doing$4,000 months. Her ads have been taking off and she's doing$10,000 once and looking to hire another dog trainer for her local business like it is just makes me wanna cry how magical this is. And that this, of course I'm laughing'cause I did a post on her story about how it's not magic, it's showing up. But the fact that I get to do this every day and support these people and run this business does feel magical to me. Okay, so like I said, if you listen to this, you thought it was interesting, you have questions, you wanna do this too, or you're just a local business owner who finds the online business space fascinating. Send me a D DM on Instagram. Let's chat business friends. Till next time, bye.