I've personally managed Meta Ads for hundreds of brands big and small
Feature lists don't convert. Showing people who they'd become on the other side of joining does.
Work withMembership businesses tend to advertise themselves as a list of things included, which is the least persuasive thing about them.
The ads describe what members get access to, when what people are buying is who they get to be around.
You acquire members who never engage, and disengaged members cancel, so acquisition is quietly funding your churn rate.
Cost per member is judged against the first month's fee, which makes almost every campaign look unaffordable.
Your community is your best possible advertising and almost none of it appears in the advertising.
Membership is an identity purchase with a recurring payment attached. Both halves of that shape the work.
Nobody joins for the resource library. They join to become the sort of person who takes this seriously, or to stop feeling alone in something. Creative that shows the people already inside, behaving the way a prospective member wishes they behaved, outperforms any feature list you could write.
You are sitting on the most persuasive raw material available: members talking about what changed for them. That is more convincing than anything produced to brief, and it removes the biggest bottleneck in most accounts, which is having enough genuine material to test with.
A member who never turns up cancels, and cancels quickly. The signup is the wrong event to optimise toward if you can identify an early engagement moment instead. Feeding that back to Meta shifts acquisition toward people who behave like your members who stay.
As with any recurring model, spending only what the first payment covers caps your growth artificially. Work out what a member is worth across their actual tenure and how long you can wait to recover the cost. That number is what determines how competitive you can afford to be.
I've personally managed Meta Ads for hundreds of brands big and small
The account, the tracking and the creative, plus a look at how new members behave in their first weeks and which ones stay.
Turn what existing members say into angles and proof, which gives us real material rather than invented positioning.
Identity led angles that show belonging rather than listing benefits, tested against each other deliberately.
Send the early engagement signal back to Meta and scale against member lifetime value rather than first month revenue.
What founders say about working with John on Meta campaigns
What I value most is the honesty. John tells me when an idea won't work and why, rather than nodding along and billing me for it. He's genuinely part of the business now, not a supplier I chase for updates.
Sandra Roycroft-DavisFounder, Slimpod
John does the work himself, which after three agencies felt almost strange. He found problems in our account nobody had mentioned in two years, fixed them quickly, and explained every decision in plain English. Our creative output has never been stronger.
Giles HumphriesFounder, Mindful Chef
A free trial fills the community with people who never intended to pay, and in a membership that dilutes the thing you are selling. Paid trials or a low first month usually attract better people. The right answer depends on how much your community suffers from passive members.
Yes, and you should be careful about it. Consent matters, particularly if your membership touches anything sensitive. Plenty of persuasive material can be produced with members who are happy to be visible, without turning the private space into a marketing asset.
Partly. If people arrive expecting something different from what they find, that is an advertising problem and I can fix it. If they arrive, get what was promised and still leave, that sits with the product and the onboarding, and no amount of media buying will paper over it.
By showing the outcome rather than explaining the mechanism. You do not need someone to understand how the community works, you need them to want what it produces. That is a creative problem and it is a solvable one.
Tell me what you're spending, what a member is worth over their tenure and where they tend to drop off. I'll come back with an honest view on whether I can help.