I’ve been running ads online for over 5 years. For most of that time, I was, to put it mildly, not great. But here’s what I’ve learned: when you start, you will always suck. My goal for these articles is simple: to help others suck a little less than I did in the beginning.

After those 5 years, my process, focus, and determination to provide value have brought about an interesting time. We just nailed our best campaign yet (as per the title). I even made a full video on it here.

Now, my primary focus is to deliver tailored content to business owners and founders who need qualified booked calls on their calendars to grow their businesses.

What You Will Learn Today

• What is required to obtain consistent lead flow
• How to turn those leads into qualified booked calls
• The path to optimizing what’s working to achieve exponential scale

Let’s jump in.

Prospect Identification

Let’s cut to the chase.

You can’t properly market if you are trying to serve the whole world.

I don’t recommend the traditional version of “niching down,” but there must be a strong understanding of who your dream customer is.

What I mean by this:

• Look at your past customers.
• Identify the 10%-20% of customers that paid the most, were easiest to find, and easiest to serve.
• Develop a structure for calling them out.

Venture into Reddit, FB Groups, and other user-generated content to spy on your dream customers. Then, write a short paragraph specifically about that person.

This may look like:

John is an investment banker, 42 years old, making $90k-$150k per year. He has 3 kids, lives in Utah, and loves to hike but doesn’t have the time. He often longs for more time to hike, exercise, and spend quality time with his family. He’s a hard worker but lies awake at night debating if it’s worth it. He tends to spend his waning free time on Instagram and often gets ads from health and fitness companies but never follows up because they all sound the same.

Now, we have a clear understanding of your one person. He wants to be healthier but feels like he doesn’t have time. Although he’s determined to make a change, the services that market to him don’t resonate because he has a high level of sophistication.

How do we know this?

Because there’s a lot of competition targeting this persona type (a quick Google search can confirm this). This means you must dig deeper in your marketing to attract this highly sophisticated prospect. You do this by identifying what’s specifically meaningful to John.

In this case, it may be calling out the fact that he feels as though he doesn’t have time and that he’s a motivated professional.

Once you understand this, use it to your advantage.

You now have a decent understanding of your marketing message.

Pro tip: Find many angles regarding your prospect’s desires, pains, and obstacles and call them out specifically in all your marketing messaging. Mark all these ‘sales angles’ or ‘big ideas’ for future reference. The best marketing identifies one person, one pain point, one thought, one angle, and one main idea. The caveat here: it must be the one thing no one else has found in your market. That’s how you convert highly sophisticated prospects.

AI-Driven Growth Engine

The harsh truth for appointment-based businesses: generating leads is easy. It’s the qualified booked calls where things get tricky.

But if you’re reading this today, you’re in luck.

Here’s the system on how we booked over 100+ calls for one of our partners in 30 days.

Overview

The best way to get leads by leveraging media and AI is through advertising. From my experience, it’s the most effective and scalable method.

Sure, folks can get leads from outbound and other methods.

But my preference will always be advertising because of its effectiveness and leverage.

And no, it’s not expensive. $1,500-$2,000 per month is the perfect starting point.

Here’s the best customer journey for booking meetings from ads:

Let’s break down each part back to front:

Back-End

Firstly, we will utilize HighLevel CRM so we can install an AI appointment setting bot natively on the platform (this link is an affiliate link, and I’ll earn a commission if you purchase).

Next, we will go about installing the entire back-end system, which includes:

• Training and testing the bot for SMS, IG DMs, and FB DMs so that we can have an AI appointment setter perpetually in our inbox. Talk about leverage!

• Constructing three simple automations: New lead automation, deadline automation, and long-term nurture automation.

Keep in mind, that you should keep your SMS conversational and open-ended to induce a response. That’s where the AI bot’s magic will come into play. So, if you can automate messages that propose a response from the prospect, the AI will take over to answer questions and book the meeting for you.

These systems will be the customer journey and the accompanying touch points for leads after they opt in through advertising.

Pro tip: Use custom values for links and resources so that you can build them after and just link them in the custom value. This way, you can create the copy for the back-end and the landing pages to send them later. Therefore, you won’t need to manually update each email. For example, you may send them a free resource upon opting into your ads. The link for your freebie will be {{custom_value.freebie.item}} and you can edit that custom value in the settings later.

Middle Funnel

Continuing on, you will need five pages for your conversion assets. These include:

Let’s start front to back. You will need a booking page, qualifying questions, and two separate thank you pages. See below:

Next, you will need a VSL page. See the structure below:

Finally, you will need a freebie landing page. See how below:

Hope you enjoy my beautiful handwriting!

Now, onto making the ads.

Front-End

My favorite way to make ads is to visit the FB ad library and swipe hundreds of ads that have been active for longer than a month. That means they are working.

Steal from the 100–200 you’ve found and create 1 campaign, 3 ad sets, and 3 creative tests in each ad set. Consider at least $20-$30/day on each ad set.

For setting up your ads, you can catch up with me, and I’ll help you for free here. Or, you can probably find a YouTube video that explains this well.

As far as setting up the pixel, I recommend server-side reporting with HighLevel CRM where you put the conversion events within the CRM workflows. This way, you can get the most amount of data.

Stacking Wins

Once you have your campaign created and launched, wait 3 days before making any changes or cutting out any losers. Take the highest-performing ones after that period and make a separate ad set with those three. Then continue to test more.

It’s that simple.

Something is always better than nothing.

Now that you’re off to the races, you will consequently discover new ways to improve the system. Maybe the bot can be trained better? Maybe your VSL can uncover more pains? Maybe your ads suck.

The point is, the truth is in the data.

So every day, note your metrics from top to bottom.

These include: CTRs, CPMs, CPLs, Opt-in %, Booking %, CPBC, Show %, Offer %, Units sold, CC, Revenue, etc.

Pro tip: Improve the system front to back. Going from 2% to 4% on CTR will double the number of visitors you have on the site, which means you double your chances of getting leads. Be sure to always be testing!

Pro tip #2: The best way to discover how these pages should look and operate is by peeking into other high-performing pages in your space or spaces like yours. Again, it’s important to understand that this will never be perfect. Your first VSL will suck. People won’t want your free thing. That’s why you just try and then get better as time goes on. No need to complicate it even more.

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! Here’s what we covered today:

1. How to identify and understand your ideal prospect
2. Setting up an AI-driven appointment booking system
3. Creating effective ads and optimizing them for better results

If you want to view the free training I made on this process, check it out here.

Thanks for joining me on my mission to change the scammy narrative behind advertising and help small businesses use it efficiently to drive growth for services that materially change the world for the better.