How To Crush Facebook Ads with a Small Budget

when I first started my Facebook ads agency I ran successful Facebook ad campaigns for clients with tiny budgets literally $100 per month that's about $3 per day and the good news is you absolutely can succeed with Facebook ads with a small budget and in this video I'm going to show you how Okay so let's start by defining what a small Facebook ads budget actually is so I would Define a small Facebook ads budget as anything less than $33,000 per month so about $100 per day or less and a tiny Facebook ads budget is anything less

than $600 per month so $20 per day or less now like I've already said you absolutely can succeed with a small Facebook ads budget you can succeed with a tiny Facebook ads budget so that's the good news and actually recommend a lot of businesses start there they start with a small budget because your first Facebook ad campaigns might not perform really well out of the gate they might take a bit of time to work it out that sometimes happens and it's better to start small start with an amount that's not going to put you or

your business in any financial difficulties and then once you know your campaigns are profitable you can always scale from there there are however some things I'd recommend you do differently or things you really need to focus on when you're operating with a small Facebook ad budget as opposed to a larger budget and that's what we're going to run through in this video those things that you might need to adjust that you really need to focus on if you want success with a small budget so Point number one is to copy from what works best in

your industry already when you have a small budget you don't have a lot of money with which to test you can't go out and test lots of different ad formats and different creative options and different headline options you just you just don't have the money to be able to dedicate to all those different variables to know which works best and which doesn't so the way you massively shortcut that is you take a look at what's already working really well in your industry now you can do that with a free tool called The Meta ads Library

you literally Google it pop right up and then you can take a look at any Facebook and Instagram advertisers ads that are currently live and you can see what ads they're running and how long Those ads have been running for so I'd recommend you go and check out a number of competitors find those that are that are running Facebook and Instagram ads take a look at the ads that they're running and then a top tip is to analyze in particular the ones that have been running a long time so if you find an ad that's

been live for 3 months or 6 months or longer the chances are that that ad's performing really well otherwise that company would have turned off Those ads so you take a look at those ads that have been live for quite a long time is still currently live you'll be able to see all that information within the meta ads library and then you think okay why are those ads working can we replicate that in our own ads can we create ads with a similar style can we create ads with the same format are they image are

they video uh can we use some of the a similar language in our copy you don't want to fully copy Those ads you want to model from them and create your own versions but that can massively shortcut your path to success because you can basically benefit from all the testing that someone else has done potentially with a much larger budget and bring that into your ads and have a much higher percentage of your ads working which is what you need to do with a small budget because like I said you don't have the budget to

go out and do a lot of testing and to make this even easier for you HubSpot who I'm partnering with on this video have created a fantastic fantastic free resource that contains 50 High performing Facebook ads there is a link in the video description below where you can download these Facebook ad examples and find great options to model from they've included ads from Nike Hulu VMO and so much more my favorite part is that it's sorted by industry to make it really easy to find what you're looking for I'd strongly recommend you check it out

and use it to level up your Facebook ad creative check the link in the description below and thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring today's video Point number two is to reduce the number of variables so firstly I'd recommend that you focus on one off only just try and sell the one product or service I'd recommend that you start by trying to sell what is sold best previously if you don't have data on that you're a brand new business then go with whichever option you think will sell best or at least the option that has the best

margins because obviously the better margins the more profitable your Facebook ads are going to be if you do manage to sell um that product or service and that really helps reduce the number of variables and doesn't spread your budget your small budget across too many campaigns too many ad sets too many ads because if you do that you're not going to get enough data enough conversions on any one of those campaigns adssets etc for a you to know whether or not they're performing well and be for meta to be able to optimize properly so really

really important to reduce the number of variables and then when you're just advertising that one offer make sure that you don't overload meta with too many variables within that one campaign so not too many adets not too many ads really reduce right down obviously once it's working and then you're looking to scale you can expand you can sell other products sell other services and things like that but do that once you're able to start increasing your budget because your One Core offer your most profitable or your bestselling thing is performing really well number three is

to trust matter what do I mean by that it means using Advantage Plus shopping campaigns or using Advantage Plus audience when using manual campaigns giving meta some suggestions around targeting But ultimately allowing mattera to do what it thinks is best in terms of finding the Right audience and and doing all the things that it wants to do from an optimization standpoint when you have a small budget you can't afford to be cute or ever or try and think around the system or risk part of that budget on unusual or out there things something we might

do with larger budgets we think this has a low probability of working but if it does work it might work really really well so it's worth dedicating a small po portion of our budget and giving this a go that doesn't work with small budgets you don't have the budget with which to play so just go with the recommendations the guidelines remember meta wants you to get the best ad results possible because they know if you do that you're going to spend more stick around for longer Etc so go with their recommendations for the most part

use their systems and try and get all of that on your side now Point number four is that you should be willing to spend more on conversions now a lot of new Facebook advertisers particularly those operating with small budgets they have unrealistic expectations of how profitable and how successful their ad campaign should be so I've spoken to a lot of Facebook advertisers relatively new usually operating with small budgets and I'll ask them what's your target return on adspend like what do you want to hit from a return on adspend number that would make your campaigns

work and you'd be happy with that and then they'll often say a 10x so for every dollar they spend on Facebook ads they want $10 worth of sales leads Etc um back that's pretty unrealistic particularly for a relatively new Facebook ad account without a lot of conversion data operating um with a small budget so I think you should be willing to be much more aggressive with what you're happy to spend to get a new customer I would personally recommend being quite aggressive and going all the way up to your break even number that might be

a 2 XRS that might be a 2.5 XRS 3x rows obviously a lot lot less than what people typically say when they're operating with small budgets and their beginners and that's a 10x rows now what that allow you to do yes you won't make as much money from each new customer acquired but what that allow you to do is scale and when you're apprting with a small budget it's really important to remember that the results you get aren't forever the point of the campaigns and the ads that you're running right now is to get them

successful get them to at least break even and allow you to scale when you do that your campaign are going to generate more conversion data you'll have more budget to then play with meta will be able to optimize your campaigns better you will likely see an improvement in results um you also start building a larger customer base you start building a bigger brand because the more people interact with your business uh the more brand awareness there is the more likely there are to be referrals the more likely to be Word of Mouth the more um

repeat business you get because you've got a larger customer base now perhaps you don't want to be quite as aggressive as going all the way to break even um in terms of your your sort of cost per purchase or your cost per lead but would you not be happy with a 4X Rass I think you should be with a small budget I think that's a pretty good outcome and if you can achieve that you can then scale um and like I said you get all those benefits that I've just discussed so in general be braver

with your ad spend see a lower Rass number than something like a 10x Ras as a success because what we're doing right now with a small budget is not trying to make a lot of profit is to get us ready to be able to scale and produce better results and build a better more profitable business so Point number four five is no brand awareness I've heard a lot of small business owners over the years say things like oh it's good to spend a bit of money on ads just sort of get your business out there

what does that even mean that's so wishy-washy isn't it get your business out there that that's that's nothing tangible that's nothing concrete you're not really measuring any sort of return on investment from that it's just a a throwaway sentence but it absolutely dictates some advertisers Behavior they spend a bit of money on an awareness campaign to sort of get their business out there as a small business with a small budget if you run an awareness campaign and you're aiming for brand awareness that's a really good way to just see no results from your marketing efforts

just literally get no return no customers no leads ex I've seen it happen so many times it's what a lot of new advertisers do particularly those operating with a small budget when you're using a small budget you have to go for what you really want which is either going to be leads or sales depending on your business you need to set your campaign up for that you need to um craft your ad copy for that you need to produce creative that is designed to get you that you don't have the budget to mess around with

other things brand awareness campaigns are for larger companies typically those that already have an element of brand awareness and they're looking to multiply that to refresh it to keep it going as opposed to build it um from scratch now one exception to that is my omnipresent content strategy which actually does use the awareness campaign objective it can be very effective with small budgets because you're using it with a small targeted audience only works for certain types of business I'll include a link in the video description in case you want to go ahead and check that

out for further information so that is an exception but for the vast majority of businesses operating with small budgets they should be going directly for leads directly for sales and not trying to run awareness campaigns guess how much I've spent on Facebook ads in Total 1 million 10 million no the real number is at least $50 million and I'm giving away everything I've learned from spending those $50 million on Facebook ads in one crazy bundle where you'll get 100 plus step-by-step training videos access to an exclusive School Community with more than 700 business owners just

like you live calls and live trainings with me and my team first no updates on changes to algorithms and what's working right now plus so much more all for the tiny price of just £97 per month and this bundle is filled with the exact strategies that we use to generate insane results like this and like this and like this so if you want to stop messing around with your Facebook ads and actually have them change your business and your life click the link and I'll see you on the inside okay Point number six is to

not mess with your Facebook ad campaigns too frequently now one of the most important parts of Facebook advertising and understanding how it works is the learning phase when you create a new campaign you set it live the ad set will go into the learning phase and that's where meta is running all sorts of experiments to try and get you the best results possible so they're working out who within the target audience should they put the ads in front of uh what time of day should they put ads in front of people how many Impressions do

people need on average in order to take the action that you want to take so all these various experiments now during the learning phase your results are quite volatile because all these tests are being run now the learning phase can last varying amounts of times it depends on conversion volume but let's say for example on average it's 48 Hours within your ad account if you are going back into your campaigns and making adjustments and tweaks and things like that every time you do that it resets the learning phase so you restart you go through that

process again which means that a lot of I've seen this happen so many different ad accounts a lot of Facebook advertisers are making changes at least once every 48 hours to the point where their campaigns can never properly optimize can never properly get out of the learning phase and they miss out on the better results and the full optimization that they could have had um because they just can't help themselves but tinker and make these changes and when you're operating with a small budget it's more difficult for your campaigns to get out of the learning

phase anyway because what meta really needs to learn to optimize is conversions and I often get the questions one of the most common questions I get asked is once I create a new Facebook ad and set it live how long should I leave leave that before knowing it it whether it works or not and there is no set time and the reason why is because it depends on conversion volume so let's say for example you're running a campaign in ad account that gets 2,000 purchases a day like we have clients that operate with that sort

of volume well we can set an ad live and we will know whether or not it's working within a couple of hours it'd be really that quick because you get so many conversions right whereas if you're running a campaign in an ad account that gets five conversions a week it might take you a month to know whether whether or not a new ad is performing well in comparison to say previous benchmarks so it's absolutely based on conversion volume not time when you have a smaller budget you normally generate less conversions than if you have a

larger budget and therefore it takes longer to get through the learning phase therefore it's really important for you to just leave things alone let meta do it thing also make sure that you give your ads your campaigns longer to assess whether or not they are actually working because of what I just described it might take a couple of weeks for you to know if this ad is actually producing results the the less you spend the conversions you get the more you need to expand your time frames to assess things okay so Point number seven is

to Niche down now when you're operating with a smaller budget instead of trying to advertise to your total target market it's better to to pick a specific section of that market and advertise to them instead otherwise your ads are just going to get lost in the other ads that are sort of generically targeting the whole Market whereas if you pick a small section of your Market you can then tailor your messaging to really speak to those people which makes it much more likely that they will engage much more likely that they will then convert it's

actually one of the advantages that smaller businesses with smaller budgets have is they can go more Niche they can be more specific whereas the larger businesses they need uh the larger volume of customers the larger volume of leads they have to stay more broad typically so really lean into that and and take advantage so I'll give you an example so my agency my meta ads agency now we can we're big enough to go broad like we work with all different types of business when it comes to running their Facebook and Instagram ads but if I

was to start all over I would pick a very specific Niche to start with for example we could position ourselves as a meta ads agency that specializes in software businesses SAS businesses right we could say this is the only types of business we run ads for we're really specialist at this we're really good at this and then tailor all our marketing and and the messaging for those people specifically so that when those people the people that own SAS businesses or you know marketing managers for SAS businesses they see our advertising they see our marketing and

think these guys are perfect for us because they spend specializ in specifically what we do so when you're operating with a smaller budget do that go for a specific subsection of your market and then as you scale and as you grow you can add in other subsections and then eventually uh be large enough to sort of go broad across your your potential total Market but at the beginning that's a real competitive Advantage you can have over some of the big boys is like yeah you know their brand you don't know us but look we specialize

in you that's why you should click on our ad that's why you should buy our product that's why you should use our service Point number eight is to jump on new new features and strategies so larger companies with bigger budgets they normally take longer to do things there's lots of decision makers it can be really quite slow trust me as an agency that works we work with all different types of businesses but some of them are very large businesses it can be quite frustrating the speed with which they operate at when you're a smaller business

operating with a smaller budget that's another competitive Advantage you can jump on new features you can jump on new strategies and take advantage of stuff that's going to take the bigger players 6 months maybe longer to actually get round to using themselves and with that in mind I'd recommend you check out this video in it I share a new Facebook ad strategy that is brilliant for maximizing leads and sales and if that's what you want which most Facebook advertisers do go ahead and check it out