Successful Facebook Ads Strategy for O.I.T.A

Facebook Ads Campaign Strategy

Considering launching your first Facebook Ads campaign but not sure where to start OR, created an ad in the past that's been an epic fail A.K.A waste of time, money and effort?

Today, we are breaking down a highly successful Facebook Ads campaign and strategy by Oceans International Trading Academy (O.I.T.A) and exactly what they did to generate 1000's of quality leads for their course launch.

When we say leads, we mean email contacts. O.I.T.A used ads to build their email list so that they could later sell their course to these people.

O.I.T.A teaches aspiring yachties the ins and outs of the industry including how to secure their first job on a SUPERYACHT in their 3-level training program.

O.I.T.A is headed up by chief stewardess herself Hannah Ferrier and her partner in crime Anastasia Surmuva. Together, they teach future seaman and woman around the globe how to ditch their mundane lives on land and travel the world on a superyacht.

Where do we sign up Hannah?!

Hannah reached out to us here at The Digital Exchange when they were getting ready to launch their program at O.I.T.A. They were originally planning to get us to manage their Facebook Ads until I suggested she get somebody in her team to learn how to do them instead.

Facebook Ads is a powerful skill to have within your business and not as difficult (or overwhelming) to learn as you may think. You just need to be shown the right way by an expert or team (that you know is producing results).

Enter Cameron, the O.I.T.A Social Media Manager and superstar student in this own right. He gave A+ effort and produced the best results we’ve seen in our "Ace Your Ads" workshop from all his learnings.

Cameron joined our ‘Ace Your Ads’ Facebook Ads Training workshop with the goal of generating more leads and sales for their O.I.T.A training course and his results were ground-breaking.

Why?

Because he followed the exact strategy and set-up we gave him in our Ace Your Ads workshop, testing and optimising different creative until he basically reached perfection.

By fine-tuning each element of the campaign set-up, Cam managed to find the sweet spot of exactly what creative and messaging resonated with his dream buyer.

The leads produced by O.I.T.A were in the thousands and they even saw them coming in for as low as 7c which is basically unheard of.

Remember: don't focus on reducing your 'cost per lead' unless the quality of the lead is where you want it (meaning the lead will go on to buy and not just be a freebie seeker).

Don’t get me wrong, O.I.T.A have an incredible OFFER which is always the first tick of approval you need before running ads.

Without a product, service or program that your audience wants, no amount of ground-breaking creative, targeting or perfectly set-up campaigns will make up for an offer with zero demand.

So how exactly did O.I.T.A achieve these results?

When it comes to setting up a campaign correctly, there are a few items you need to nail and that’s exactly what O.I.T.A did. It may have taken a little testing to optimise towards perfection, but they did it.

Having an offer that sells is paramount and by sales offer we mean your actual product, service, or courses and how it’s packaged as a whole from your pricing to the inclusions, messaging and how you set yourself apart in the marketplace. If you know you have an offer that converts, Facebook Ads is a great scaling tool.

O.I.T.A had pre-validated their idea with their audience first before they began running ads, reinforcing that their Facebook Ads were likely to work for their business and bring in the leads and sales they were aiming for. If you haven't gotten sales organically (consistently), we don't recommend running Facebook Ads.

It’s imperative to select the right campaign objective when creating your Facebook Ads campaign. Choose the objective most aligned with your final goal for that campaign. For example, if you want leads, choose leads as the campaign objective, if you want sales, choose sales.

The same theory applies to conversion events in Facebook Ads. If you want sales from your campaign, choose ‘purchases’ as your conversion event, not ‘add to cart’. Unfortunately, we see this error all the time and it’s such a simple mistake to avoid.

O.I.T.A knew they wanted leads and sales from their campaigns and went with those objectives for their relevant campaigns.

After doing their research and from their experience in the industry, Hannah and Ana had a firm understanding of who their audience was before they began their Facebook Ads. This made the whole process a lot easier when setting up the campaigns as we could easily input the geographical locations, gender, age, languages and interests they wanted to target.

Where possible (particularly when you have a new account with zero data) we suggest giving Meta a broad guide of who to target to ensure you bring in high quality people for the best price.

O.I.T.A followed the exact set-up we taught in our Ace Your Ads workshop from selecting the right campaign objective, to testing out different creative to finding their sweet spot for scoring leads on autopilot.

One thing you will learn in our workshop is that testing and optimising your ads is an ongoing process. All ads experience fatigue so it’s important to refresh them when they start to get a little stale and stop producing results, otherwise scaling will be basically impossible.

To take that one step further – Cameron also didn’t tweak his campaigns too much. This is absolute NO NO. Don’t make any changes to your ads until they’ve been running for at least seven days. Every time you make a change, give Meta at least five to seven days before making any more changes.

O.I.T.A wanted to hit the ground running and organised a professional photoshoot that they hands-down knew would appeal to their target audience and that it did.

Not only that, they used creative copy and headlines that appealed to their dream students and it dare we say, reeled them in.

Take a look for yourself below. Anyone else ready to quit their online business for a sailing career on the Mediterranean.

Where you send your audience after they click your Facebook Ads needs to reflect exactly what was in the ad. The experience needs to be seamless from the branding to the layout and the offer on the page. O.I.T.A nailed this perfectly. They followed up with a irresistible program that future yachties couldn't wait to get their hands on.

We spoke to Cameron after the training to find out his favourite and most difficult part of the training.

Here it is:

So, there you have it.

Now you can see why O.I.T.A’s campaign was so successful.

If you aren’t sure if you’re ready for Facebook Ads, we have created a 6-stepChecklist so you can determine your brand’s readiness before investing a cent. Download your free copy here.

Ready to get started with Facebook Ads? We have a new offer to attract quality leads into your sales funnel that will buy, launching in a few short weeks. If you're looking to scale in 2025, keep your eyes peeled.