3 Ways to Find Your Ideal Clients and Fill Your Online Course Using Facebook

How do you find your ideal clients to fill your online course?”

Have you tried boosting a post on Facebook or even dabbled in creating a few Facebook ads to fill your online course? Or, maybe this is something you are planning to do?

The key to getting powerful results with Facebook marketing (or any other marketing) lies in understanding who your target market is and what engages them.

Facebook is THE most targeted advertising tool you can use to grow your list. It allows you to determine exactly who sees your ads (and who doesn’t). Since your investment in ads is based on how many people see them or how many people click on the ad, it’s important that you control who sees your ad.

You can target who sees your ads using demographic information like age, gender, income, etc. The surprising thing that many course promoters do not realize is that you can target behaviors and interests, too. You can show your ads to people who belong to certain associations, or who like a celebrity expert/author, or even people who “like” the Facebook pages of your competitors.

Bonus: Click the button below to download your Create Your Ideal Client Map Worksheet, which will help you start creating an in-depth, specific audience profile for your online course.
Click Here to Get Your Ideal Client Map Worksheet

The problem is that most first-time Facebook ad creators only use the superficial demographic targeting criteria when they build their first ad using the Facebook Ads Manager tool. This can be a big mistake that can cost you time and money. Let’s look at an example.

Karen is a health coach in our Create 6-Figure Courses community who is marketing her course on eliminating stomach pain through diet. She was targeting women 25-65 who liked “webMD.com” on Facebook.

The problem is that with this limited information Facebook was showing Karen’s ads to all kinds of people who are not her ideal audience, including people who are just interested in the latest health updates, physicians, nurses, other health coaches, and people searching for answers around 1000’s of symptoms (not just the ones she addresses). The results were depressing.

Karen and I worked to narrow her audience using some strategies I’ll share in a second. She was then able to show the same ad to a more targeted audience that is already interested in finding information about stomach pain. How? She showed her ads to people who were specifically interested in “IBS,” “Crohn’s disease,” “gastritis,” and others. The results were dramatically different (lower cost and higher conversions — people signing up for her upcoming webinar) because she was only showing her ads to people that are already interested in the solutions she had to offer.

Getting clear on exactly who your target audience is will help you laser-focus your marketing so that you can generate the most leads with the least investment of time and money to fill your online courses.

Here are 3 ways to get clear on your target audience so you can use tools like Facebook to fill your online courses:

Approach #1: Define Basic Demographics to Find Your Ideal Clients to Fill Your Online Courses

This is the most obvious place to start. I think of this as the low-hanging fruit in defining your ideal target audience. Here’s what you should think about:

• Age
• Gender
• Education level
• Occupation or Job Title
• Income
• Marital Status
• Number & Age of Children
• Geographic Location

    Why do you need to know this? You can direct who you you show your ads to on platforms like Facebook using this criteria.

Approach #2: Analyze your Audience’s Behavior

Now, that you have the obvious demographics like age, gender, etc. You can dig deeper and get a clearer idea of who your people are by analyzing their behavior.

Here are some questions you can focus on to start to identify behaviors you can target online:

• What do they buy?
• What do they read?
• Who do they follow online (authors, celebrity experts, bloggers, podcasters)?
• What groups do they belong to?

You can use this information to find your people online*. When you know what they buy, who they follow, and what they read, you can begin to understand which topics and content they are engaged in. Creating engaging content is key to drive both paid and free traffic to fill your courses.

**Facebook Ads Manager tool allows you to type in these targets when you build an ad. Even the easy-to-use boost function on your Facebook business page allows some limited and very easy targeting options. We cover how to do this step-by-step in our Create 6-Figure Courses Launch Lab program.

Approach #3: Follow the Rabbit Trail

When you start to explore the behaviors of your audience, you will discover all kinds of new information that can help you find your people online. Knowing this, you can effectively promote your offers in the right place and to the right audience.

For example, when you research books that your people buy related to your course topic on Amazon.com, you might find authors you recognize and authors you did not even know about.

When Karen, our health coach, searched on Amazon, she found the book The First Year: IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome)–An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed by Heather Van Vorous. Scrolling down in the page, she found dozens of other books, tools, and resources that her ideal client might read and buy:

These authors may have a highly followed Facebook page for their blog, podcast, or programs. This information will help you target the people that like these pages (your ideal client). Bonus: you can attract free traffic when you approach these authors, bloggers and podcasters to share your expertise in an interview or blog post which you deliver for their audience.

Getting Started in Finding Your Clients to Fill Your Online Course

The first place to start is to begin answering the basic questions that can help you begin your research to build your target audience map. This research will lead to where you can find your people online and start creating engaging content to fill your online course.

Got a question? Feel free to post in the comments below. And, please feel free to share.

Bonus: Click the button below to download your Create Your Ideal Client Map Worksheet, which will help you start creating an in-depth, specific audience profile for your online course.
Click Here to Get Your Ideal Client Map Worksheet