3 Ways I've Scaled my Business Using Ads: Part 1 | Live Launches

🚀 3 Ways I’ve Used Facebook & Instagram Ads to Scale My Online Business in 2025

In this episode, I’m kicking off a 3-part series where I’m breaking down the exact strategies I’ve used to grow my online business with ads this year — starting with live launching.

You’ll learn:
 💡 The difference between live launching, evergreen webinars, and low-ticket funnels
 📈 Why I recommend live launching first (especially for coaches and course creators)
 💰 How I set my launch revenue goals and calculate ad spend to hit them
 🔥 Real examples from clients who generated 6–9X returns on ad spend

I also pull back the curtain on how me and my team help business owners plan, build, and manage profitable live launches — from messaging and ad copy to funnel strategy and retargeting ads.

👉 Want me and my team to run your next launch or ads for you?
 Book a free call here: https://hello.dubsado.com/public/appointment-scheduler/6895076496905696e2549c58/schedule

🎙️ About the Podcast:
The Hometown Advantage Podcast is where I teach local and online business owners how to use Facebook and Instagram ads to grow their reach, fill their offers, and create consistent revenue — without wasting money on guesswork.

Follow me on Instagram → @nicoleeldridge_ads

Email → support@nicoleeldridgemedia.com

Next up in the series: The Evergreen Webinar Funnel 🎧

Transcript

0:00

welcome. This is going to be a three part podcast series about the three ways I've used ads to scale my online business so far in 2025. So if you're new here. Hi, my name's Nicole. I'm the host of the Hometown Advantage Podcast. I am the leader of the Hometown Advantage Local Ads Program. I run a program that's specific for local business owners that want to learn how to use ads to bring in more local clients. But what a lot of people might not know is that I have been in the ads industry for four years and have dedicated so much of my time, my life, my energy, happily to learning. Ads and scaling ads and working with other business owners on their ads. So my story kind of starts working with other small agency owners, some that taught me practically everything I know about scaling ads, because I would run ads for their clients who were spending 10, 20, 30,$40,000 a month. Wow. And I worked strategically to help them continue to scale those ads. And then I worked at agencies where I worked specifically with local businesses, spending 150,$300 a month. I even worked in an agency where I brought the ad program to them and I helped manage ad managers that worked at their company. I've also served dozens upon dozens of clients of my own, and I've scaled my own online program to over a hundred members in less than a year using these three different types of ads, and I didn't use them all at the same time. I've tried and tested different things and that's why I'm here today to share what those things are in the case that you are interested in using these types of ads. To grow your own. Online business, or you can take some of these strategies and think, how can I translate this to my local business? Because we actually have a co-coach inside the Hometown Advantage program. Her name is Maddie. She owns several pelvic floor physical therapy practices around my home state of Michigan, and she has learned a ton about ads and scaling ads in digital marketing as well, and she has been able to translate it. To her local practice and she's made it so that she can open up a practice anywhere in the state. She's looking at opening up practices around the country and she can scale it up and fill it with patients using her ad strategies. So another reason to jump in to the program so you can learn from her and I. Anyways. The three ways I've used to scale my online program is through live launching. Evergreen webinar funnels and low ticket offer funnels. So by the end of the series, I'm hoping for you to know which method feels right for you and where your business is now, and how you can use ads to grow your business, and then how you can work with me and my team in the case you're interested in having us run those ads or build those funnels for you. So we're gonna start with live launching. What is live launching? When I say live launching, I'm talking about a time bound campaign where usually you're driving people to a live event that usually is free and you're gonna deliver value there while positioning your main offer and pitching your offer to people and giving them a promotion or an offer. That's super juicy and is time bound, so they have to sign up by a certain time in order to get that promotion. I think of these as like my business's Super Bowl moment, and I have done five of them now in the past year, and boy, oh boy have I learned so much. Of course, even before I launched my own program, I had done probably 30 plus launches for other businesses. I have helped so many different types of coaches, course creators launch their own programs using ads, but the thing was, I was only in charge of the ads. I wasn't in charge of the pre-launch warmup. The emails. The live webinar, any of the other stuff that goes into live launching that I now have learned so much about so let's start by talking about the pros and cons for a minute here, because I often recommend that people start out by selling their online programs through live launches. And the reason for that is because of the amount of data, that you can get quickly from a live launch, which makes it so that you can tweak your ads, your sales page, what have you, based on what's working and what's not, to then go flip it around and sell it again faster. Versus selling on an evergreen offer. So many people make this mistake where they are trying to sell something. With not a lot of urgency, and they're just using the same exact tactics for weeks and weeks. And especially if they're not using ads, they're not getting a lot of data in to be able to tell what's working and what's not. And then even if they are using ads, it's still slower. And a lot of times they don't know how to, read the data to figure out what they need to change to start seeing sales. So a pro is that speed of getting something out. Also setting a date for your launch to hold yourself accountable for getting something out into the world. And then just having that live piece. Live events like a free live workshop with a specific cart, close date or promotion end date are always going to convert higher than something that's always being sold. So for reference, my live launches usually convert in between two and 3%, whereas when I'm running Evergreen ads, they're converting closer to 1%. I've actually pulled up some debriefs of some past clients that I've done launches for, so I can pull exact numbers. I have two clients pulled up where both of their conversion rates are just over 2% as well. Meaning we took the amount of people that bought the program and divided it by the amount of people who signed up for the live webinar. And we're hanging out in between two and 3%. Whereas when we're running Evergreen ads, we're usually hanging out around 1%. Now, some of you may be hearing that 1% difference and thinking it doesn't make a big difference. But if you think about a thousand leads. Coming into your funnel and 1% of them converting would be 10 sales. Two or two and a half percent of them converting would be 20 to 25 sales. It's double right. That's what makes a big difference overall. And of course your conversion rates depend on a lot of things. We're gonna go into the numbers in a minute, but I just wanted to talk about the pros and cons for a second. Usually you convert higher. Usually you make more sales when you do a live launch. Not always, but usually now a big con of a live launch is that one. It can feel a little stressful, a little hard on the nervous system because you are. Doing this big push. You need lots of content, lots of things happening in a short amount of time. And the other thing is that you have to spend all your money up front. You have to really make the investment and then hope that your plan works to make your money back on the back end after your live event. But you don't know for sure what's going to happen, right? Versus with an evergreen funnel, which I'm gonna talk about in the next podcast. You are able to work on a direct feedback loop where you're bringing in leads, and the goal is to be bringing in sales as well. And if you're not, you can change things quickly until you do start bringing in sales. And when you do start bringing in sales, you can then scale. Up your ads immediately to start making more sales, right? It's a give and a take constantly versus the live launch you're giving, and then hoping it's coming back to you and planning for it to come back to you strategically, but you just never quite know how things are going to fall in the end. Okay, so let's talk numbers here. When it comes to budgets and expectations and what have you, if you've never done a launch before, you have to obviously do one to get your baseline numbers. But if you have ran ads for a launch before, it can be really helpful when it comes to predicting how much you can make. So now I can set a goal of how much I wanna make from a launch and then work backwards to figure out how much I need to spend to get there. For example, I really wanted to make$50,000 in revenue from this most recent launch. So to do that, I needed to take my total revenue that I wanted and divide it by the price of my program to see how many people I would need to enroll, and that came out to around 30. I needed 30 people to enroll to hit that revenue. Then I know that since I usually convert around 2%. When I'm doing my number projections here, I could figure out what is 32% of right? So 30 divided by 0.02 comes out to 1500, which would mean I need to generate 1500 leads in order to plan on hitting$50,000 in revenue. From there, I can take what my guesstimated cost per lead would be and times that by 1500. So my guesstimated cost per lead was$7. So I can multiply 1500 by seven, it comes out to$10,500. Then you can make a decision from there. Do I wanna spend$10,500 to try and make$50,000? Do I not wanna spend that much? Ultimately that choice is up to you, but that's how we work our numbers to get our goal revenue and figure out how much we need to spend to get there. I've worked with people who've done launches for the very first time and we had no idea what those numbers were, so we spent a thousand dollars, even when you're not converting everyone or converting at the percentage that you want to. You're still growing your email list substantially during a live launch, which can be super helpful because I've now had people sign up for the program in the second, third, or fourth free live workshop that they've signed up for. It's not always the first one that they're going to buy on. Actually, that's. Pretty unlikely. Even though mine does convert quite well from a cold audience, and we do want it to convert to brand new people, it's more likely that you're going to convert people who've already been on your list before. So a lot of times doing a live launch is one to boost your revenue and get a big cash injection from that big push, but it's also to build the overall health of your business and build up your list for launches to come. Now if you're listening to this thinking, this sounds amazing, I would love to fill my group programs. With 30 people or even 10 people, or even five people. I just don't have the visibility and I need ads to get it done. I hear you. Managing a live launch while also creating the content, finalizing the program, the offer, all of these things, showing up live, running your business is a lot. So that's exactly why me and my team do done for you Launch management. So I wanna walk you through exactly what that looks like when you work with us. Ideally, you're coming to us at least six weeks before your launch is going to start, meaning before the launch warmup. The launch warmup starts two to three weeks before the live event. A lot of times this can depend on your ad budget. If you have a really large budget, we need to start a little bit farther out to be able to spend it all. But if you're in the 1000 to$5,000 range, we can start more like two weeks out. Either way, I like starting three weeks out for just like my warm audience. So sending emails into my organic content, starting three weeks out to start promoting the live event. So we're gonna meet, ideally, six weeks before that, and we're gonna look at your whole funnel. We're gonna look at your landing page for people to sign up for the free course or free workshop. We're going to look at your thank you page, and we may even talk about putting an upsell on your thank you page so that you can make some ad spend back immediately instead of having to wait for the live event and the pitch. This can be really helpful in the quality of. Leads that you're bringing in. If we are running purchase ads instead of leads ads, that's getting into the weeds a little bit on the technicals of the ad setup, but we can help you come up with a great low ticket offer that people will be drawn to buy on the thank you page when they sign up for the free workshop. We can help you build out that thank you page. We look at your sales page. And we can even talk through your live webinar and what you're gonna say and how you're gonna structure it and how you're gonna pitch your program. The biggest thing we're gonna do on our kickoff call is do a messaging deep dive so that we can pull out bits of information that we need in order to write bomb amazing converting ads that are gonna help sell people before they even get to your workshop. This is a huge mistake people make as well. They will write really short ads that draw curiosity and they draw clicks, but they're not actually selling the offer to the person. So you're wasting a lot of money on people who are just curious, not who are actually invested in the offer that you're selling. So we're gonna do that messaging deep dive so that me and my team can go back and write really good copy. We're gonna write copy in a couple different angles. Probably up to three different angles, and then we're gonna create ads around those base copies. We're gonna create some B roll reels. We're gonna write you a script for you to record your face to camera videos. We're gonna create carousels. We're gonna create static graphics. All of the types of ads to test, we're gonna create them ahead of time and have them ready. Because once the launch kicks off, things move quickly, right? Once that time is here, where it's time to launch your ads, that's exactly what we do. And then we're in there every single day analyzing how the ads are doing, reporting on how much you've spent, how many leads you've brought in. And how the ads are doing based on our own professional opinions. We're optimizing the ads, we're turning off the ones that aren't bringing in leads. We're cranking up spend on ones that are bringing in leads. Sometimes we're creating new ads based on the ones that we see working really well. It might spark a new idea in us that we should be running an ad that says this as well. We are monitoring the budget to make sure that we're staying on pace, to not go over and also not underspend. And then we're also creating what we call retargeting ads and getting those ready for when your cart is open. So you'll deliver your live workshop or what have you. And then retargeting ads start. So then the people who signed up for your workshop and the people who follow you and the people who are on your email list are going to start seeing ads saying, now is the time to buy this. And we're gonna again, write several different copy angles that are really going to compel people to be ready to buy. We're gonna hit them with all different sorts of ads. Graphics, carousels. Face to camera talking videos, and we're gonna have that urgency in there, telling them that the cart is closing here. Click this link, which will take them to the sales page, buy now, and then we're able to track an ads manager. How many sales were attributed to those retargeting ads, specifically when the cart's closed and everything's said and done. We write up a full launch debrief, which is the most important part because then we'll get together and we'll meet, we'll go through all the data, all of the findings that we found. We go through each individual person who buys and see how many people of them came straight from ads, how many came from your organic audience. If we have the tracking capabilities, we track back which ads those people came from. So that we know which ads to use next time, we'll do write ups on which ads perform the best, which ads we can scrap for next time. Reflections on hiccups or things that happened that we wanna remember for next time. Lead cost conversion rates. All of those things that you need to know in order to make projections on what you want your revenue to be for your next launch. This can also be super helpful data for turning your funnel into an evergreen funnel that runs all the time instead of relying on a live event. Like I said, I've done this process for dozens upon dozens of online coaches and course creators. One launch that I ran several times was for a business coach, specifically for photographers. I have one of her last launch debriefs pulled up. We spent around$5,000. In ads, and that's broken up between her lead generating ads for her event and her retargeting ads, and those ads generated$32,000 in revenue, which was a 6.21 return on ad spend. I also have run ads for. A physician who was coaching other physicians in his specific methods, and we spent$19,551. That was split up between webinar signups and retargeting. We also ran like some nurture ads and replay ads during there to try and drive more people to the replay who signed up but didn't watch yet. So that's always an option. That launch generated$183,000, which was a whopping 9.37 x return on ad spend. We did all this by diving into their messaging, writing really good. Usually longer form ads that actually sell the workshop and the program. And working fast inside Ads Manager during the launch based on what's working and what's not, and knowing how to monitor those numbers closely. Okay, so I love talking about live launching. It's always such a thrill. Again, I'm excited to do another episode, breaking down my most recent live launch soon. Now, if you have something you want to run ads for when it comes to a live launch. Me and my team would love to help you do that. I'm so excited to be bringing back some more done for you ads clients. At the end of 2025 here that I'm actually running a promo for the first three people that sign on with us for a launch. You will get. A free audit of your entire funnel, no extra charge. We will break down each page and tell you what we would change to make it optimized for more sales, and you will get a thousand dollars off the price of the ad management services. So there are normally$3,500 for a launch. The next three people who join with us are going to get it for only$2,500 per launch. I have a link in my bio on my Instagram to book a call with me. I will leave the link in the show notes. Please feel free to send me a DM at nicole Eldridge ads or send me an email at support@nicoleeldridgemedia.com if you have more questions about how ad services can help fill your next launch with tons of leads and sales. Or book a call if you're interested in booking. Next up is going to be the episode on the Evergreen Webinar funnel. Okay.