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- How to Run Ads for Cheap
967 Words | 4 Min 3 Sec Read
Welcome to another issue of Passionate Income.
Today we’ll be discussing how to run ads for cheap.
While hustling organic is great, it can take 6-12+ months to get momentum. On the flip side, ads can drive results immediately. And you can start for just $5/day.
And because of that, the ideal situation is to do both at the same time.
Let’s dive in.
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Want to drive near-immediate results for your business?
Without having to do cold outreach to thousands of people or spend hundreds of hours creating content?
If so, you’re in luck.
While many marketers get scared of running ads, in most cases that’s because they assume you have to spend a lot of money to advertise.
In reality, however, you can run ads for as little as $1 per day.
Admittedly, running ads on such a small budget will make it incredibly difficult to build up the amount of data you need to make informed decisions. In particular, decisions regarding which ads are working and which ones are not.
But the point remains: Advertising does not have to be expensive.
Especially when it comes to Facebook and Instagram.
What matters is having a strategy, appropriate budget allocation and realistic expectations.
As it relates to your strategy, if you’re running ads on a small budget, you probably want to optimize for a revenue event—aka making some kind of sale.
Mainly because small-budget advertising does not give you the depth you need to run more long-term awareness strategies.
Instead, with small budget ads, you want to capture the 1% to 3% of the market that’s hot and bothered and looking for the type of solution your product or service provides.
With that said, if you can afford to invest a little more, you'll be able to run a much more effective campaign.
While we don’t have the time or space to explain in-depth advertising strategies here, bumping your budget up to $25 a day opens up the possibility of using a multi-pronged approach (e.g. running awareness, conversion and retargeting ads all at once).
And the more you spend, the more flexibility you have when it comes to allocating funds.
Speaking of budget allocation, most experts recommend distributing 80% of your budget between awareness and conversion campaigns, with the remaining 20% going to retargeting ads.
Reason being, it’s the awareness campaigns that put your business in front of new people, while conversion campaigns drive sales and allow you to make a positive ROI.
And because of that, awareness and conversion campaigns are the engines that drive your advertising.*
*But like we said earlier, if you’re only advertising on $5 per day, you’ll want to focus 100% of that on conversions. Then, once you make your first sale or two, hopefully you can reinvest some of the funds into more complex strategies.
Along the same lines, once you reach the $50 or $100 per day level, you’ll definitely want to start running an awareness campaign. Why?
Because on average, only 1% to 3% of any given market that is ready to make a purchase right now (per Chet Holmes Ultimate Sales Machine book).
Meaning, if you're constantly running ads to that 1-3%, you will very quickly exhaust their attention.
However, if you can shift to running an awareness campaign, you can tap into the 97% to 99% who aren’t ready to buy today, but will become ready at some point over the next 6 to 12+ months.
In terms of having realistic expectations, understand leads from Western countries (and the US in particular) can cost anywhere from $1 to $10 each (with $3 being a healthy average).
As you can imagine, if you’re paying $3 per lead on a $5 per day budget, you aren’t going to get massive results right out of the gate.
Because of that, it can take a long time to identify which ads are performing well and which ones are not.
I mention this because testing is a huge part of the optimization process.
It’s unrealistic to assume your first ad is going to crush it right away.
Instead, amateur media buyers test dozens, if not hundreds, of ads just to find two or three winners (while pros who manage million dollar budgets test thousands per week).
So watch the numbers and keep your expectations realistic.
In conclusion, the only problem with low-budget advertising is how slowly the data comes in. Which, in turn, makes it hard to optimize for winners.
Despite this, given advertising can generate immediate results, you’re better off testing two ads and having the data come in slowly vs not running any ads at all.
Further, there are tons of free and low-cost resources you can tap into to learn how to advertise on Facebook and Instagram.
So if you’re sick of cold outreach and the organic content hamster wheel, maybe it’s time you gave ads a shot!
💡 Takeaway: Right up there with cold outreach and organic, ads are one of the most powerful tools for driving leads and buyers into your business. The data will come in slower if you start with a small budget, but you know what they say about the best time to plant a tree.
🎁 Resources:
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