Hometown ADvantage - Local Marketing

Ep 7: Is $5/day Enough to Spend on Facebook Ads?

• Nicole Eldridge

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🎙️ Is $5/day enough for Facebook & Instagram ads? In this straightforward episode of Hometown Advantage, I'm breaking down the truth about local ad budgets and what you REALLY need to spend to see results.

You'll discover:

  • How Facebook ad budgeting actually works for local businesses
  • Why your CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) are likely lower than online businesses
  • Real success stories: How one client booked a $3,500 photoshoot on just $6/day
  • The difference between visibility ads ($1-2/day) and lead generation ads ($10+/day)
  • How to calculate exactly how much you need to spend based on your business goals

If you're tired of conflicting advice about ad spend and want a clear strategy that works specifically for LOCAL businesses, this episode is for you!

🔥 PODCAST LISTENER SPECIAL: DM me "podcast promo" on Instagram for $200 OFF my Hometown Advantage program! (Limited time offer)

💡 Resources mentioned:

Welcome to Hometown Advantage, a podcast for local business owners where we don't just focus on views and visibility. We prioritize turning your social media scrollers into paying customers for your local business. I'm Nicole Eltridge, a marketing strategist who supported hundreds of business owners with Facebook and Instagram ads. And today, we are diving into the hot topic of, Is 5 a day enough for local Facebook and Instagram ads? This is one of the most common questions I get from local business owners, so I thought it deserved its own episode here because I want to address this question as straightforward and, as honest as possible and give you some real world insights here that will hopefully help you make the right decision for your business because I see both messages floating around the internet, in the sense of, there's people saying, you only need to spend 5 a day learn my 5 a day strategy, and then there's also people saying, if you want ads to actually be profitable, you have to spend thousands for it to be worth it, and it's simply just not that cut and dry either way, unfortunately. First things first, let's talk about how ad budgeting even works in the ads manager. When you set up your ads, you have to set a daily budget for each campaign that you're running. So this daily budget will determine how many people you get in front of every day. And all industries are different when it comes to how much it costs you to get in front of. A certain amount of people, but usually local businesses have it on the more affordable side. But, super competitive industries, like I'm running ads for some nutrition online, like health and nutrition coaches right now. That is extremely competitive, so it costs them probably four times the amount to get in front of the same amount of people as it would cost you as a local business owner. So you don't have as much competition. Also, if your ad quality is really low, Facebook will penalize you by boosting the cost of your ads. So whenever I'm talking about the cost of ads, I'm talking about a number in your ads manager. called your CPMs. So if you run ads right now, you could look at this. The CPMs stand for Cost Per 1, 000 Impressions. So basically, how much are you paying to get in front of 1, 000 people? A lot of my local business owners are in like the 10, 11, 12, 13 range. It costs them to get in front of 1, 000 people. While my health and nutrition coaches are like in the 40s and 50 it costs them just to get in front of a thousand people because they're competing with so many other advertisers. But. All in all, the more you spend, the more people you get in front of. And if you have good ads, the more people you get in front of, the more leads and sales you can make in your business. That's, basic math. But a little side note that I have to say here, because I was just chatting with a lash artist in my DMs who wants to book more lash appointments, and she was asking about my local ads mini course that teaches my signature local visibility ad. And I was trying to explain to her that while the visibility ad is the first step in a good ad strategy, it's not what's going to get you more leads and bookings. More visibility does not actually equal more leads and bookings in the most simple and broken down sense, right? Because you can pay, anybody can pay to get visible. Anybody can pay Meta ten bucks to get in front of a thousand people. But if the way your ads are set up are wrong, if the content of your ads If the offer is not good, if people don't even know that you're talking to them because your ad doesn't call them out, no, that visibility will not lead to more leads and bookings. Okay, it has to be a strategic setup, which is exactly what I teach on. But visibility is the first step and very important, obviously. Anyways. The first thing that comes to mind when people ask me this question of how much should I spend or is 5 a day enough is this, if you have a good solid business and a good strategy, then it's not a matter of figuring out How little you can spend to still see results. Honestly, it's more the opposite. How much can I spend to see optimal results, right? Before, before we're spending too much that the spend versus the profit isn't worth it. We want to Spend as much as possible because that's going to make us as much as possible if we have a good strategy. It's all about learning your numbers so that you know how much you can spend to see those optimal results. Because advertising is simply a business expense. A lot of people make it mean way more than that. Like so many people will come to me saying, Oh, Facebook ads were a waste of my money. It's just crazy to me because seasoned business owners know that advertising is simply an expense that comes with being in business. Especially with how the algorithms are now on Facebook and Instagram. It really is, unfortunately, a pay to play platform. And honestly, only the people who know how to correctly market and advertise their business are the ones who are going to win from social media. As the owner of your business, you know your numbers better than anyone else, at least you should. If you don't know your numbers, that's something you need to figure out before you ever run ads. I just mean your profit, your expenses, the most simple things, like how much is left over, how much money can you budget towards advertising, all of that, like you need to have a marketing and advertising budget and you need to be using it strategically. So right here, right now on this podcast, I'm not able to tell you exactly how much you should spend on Facebook and Instagram ads. Sometimes it's just a matter of putting. your big girl pants on, right? Making moves, seeing what happens, investing in your business because you know that it's bomb and you know that you can serve a lot more people really well and having the confidence that if people at least know you exist, then they're going to book you and they're going to love you. Sometimes this might mean spending a little bit of extra money that you would normally spend elsewhere or dipping into savings to create a marketing specific budget in the name of investing back into the business. I'm not your accountant. I don't know your numbers. You do. So instead, I'm just going to give you some ballpark ranges on how much I would spend if I owned your type of business. Okay, so the age old question of is 5 enough to spend on Facebook and Instagram ads? The short answer is yes, because you actually can spend as little as 1 a day on your ads. That's the minimum amount they will allow you to spend. So if you wanted to just dip your toe into paid advertising, then 5 a day can be enough. I've had clients get really good results on 5 a day, but I will say that's not typical results. My client Jen, who owns a car detailing business in Michigan, she turned on her ads at 2 a day and saw an immediate uptick in her bookings. And then I just had a client who I did a custom ad strategy for. She is a brand photographer and she was running, The lead, the Instagram DM lead ad that I teach, and she said she was running her ads at 6 a day total, and that was even split up between two different campaigns, and she just booked a 3, 500 photo shoot, and, by finding the right people and running the right strategy. So it's definitely possible to see great results, but a lot of times it takes a little bit more than that. Or It's not that it takes more than that per day. It just takes some time to figure out the exact right strategy. This client, Jessica, the brand photographer, she's been running ads for a long time. So it's not like she's only spent five dollars a day and then within three days she had amazing results. She has to try some different strategies and some different things to, find the sweet spot. Once you start running ads, we start looking at numbers, like what is your average cost per lead? And what is the average amount of times that a lead turns into a sale? Because if you know that it costs you, I'm going to use easy numbers here for math, let's say, if you know that it costs you 1 to get a lead, which Won't be the case for anybody. So you spend a hundred dollars and get a hundred leads and you know that ten percent of your leads become sales, then you know if you spend a hundred dollars you get a hundred leads and ten of them become sales. So you could multiply ten by whatever the cost of your service is to figure out how much money you're getting in return after that hundred dollars. Once you know these things, it makes it so that you can say, okay, I want Five clients next month. I'm gonna do the backwards math. If I want five clients, then I know I need So many, however many leads which means I need to spend this much because it costs me This much to get a lead. Hopefully you're still following Basically, you can work backwards do the math to know exactly how much to spend and exactly what your results could be. Obviously, they're never guaranteed, but after a while, you'll learn your numbers, and for the most part, they all begin to shake out. With my ad strategy that I teach that you are building several different types of campaigns to make sure that you are providing multiple touch points for people who are interested in buying from you. And that you're using the right type of ads that actually convert to customers. So a lot of people are using the wrong settings in their ad manager, they're using the wrong content for their ads, and that's why they're spending money without seeing a return. So with my visibility ads and my retargeting ads that I teach, you can keep those really low costs, one to 2 a day. But then we also need the lead generation. ads and those just cost a little bit more because we're asking a little bit more from people and we're competing with other people who also want leads in their business. So those I usually recommend starting around ten dollars a day. If you don't want to spend that much, I also have other strategies for making it more affordable, but usually lead quality and like the amount of leads that come in will just be slower. But that's fine. Slow is better than nothing. So if you just want to spread awareness and keep getting in front of new people so that you don't have to post every day to continue to be seen, you can do that for super affordable, but just don't expect a line out the door or like your messages to be full of people wanting to work with you. That is going to be a passive marketing strategy. Very similar to a billboard, right? When someone puts up a billboard for their business, they're not expecting that their business is going to blow up overnight. Even though they're paying thousands of dollars usually, if not hundreds, for that billboard. It's just a visibility strategy. It's just a way that after people drive by it four times, five times on their way to work, they can remember, oh yeah, I should call that lawyer when I need them. So if you want to go that more passive, slower route, then you can spend less. If you're ready to start bringing in leads now and booking new clients now, then we got to pick up the spending a little bit more and we got to be really strategic with all of our different. Campaigns that need to be running in order for this to become a machine and constantly get you visible to new people, constantly get leads showing up on your website form or in your DMs or what is it, and then constantly be staying in front of those people so that they can book when they're ready. The key is starting somewhere. Tracking your results and adjusting based on what the data tells you. You're never locked in to spending a certain amount. You can literally change it from$10 to$1 the next day. So it's just a matter of getting in there and trying things. When you work with me, I will give you like a general amount hey, I would start with at least this much for this type of ad but it's never that cut and dry. And then as we meet and we go over your results, a lot of times I'll have clients that are just getting too busy with booked appointments, so they'll turn their ad spend down. Other times the ad's working really well and they have a lot more capacity still, so we'll turn the ad spend up. All in all, it's a matter of getting in there, trying it, setting it at a decent budget based on what you're asking for. So if you're just asking for engagement or video views, then you can run it for less than 5 a day. If you're asking for leads, we usually have to run it for more than that. If you're asking for calls, we usually have to run it for more than that. Think! commitment level of what we're asking the ads to do. If we're asking for a big commitment, like a booking, or giving their name and phone number to become a lead, then we have to spend more. If we're asking for just awareness, we have to spend less. The other factor is retargeting ads because you can spend So, so little to actually get in front of people who are already interested and care about your business. So we can retarget your followers, retarget people who have engaged with your ad, retarget people who have visited your website because they found you from Google. Which just means we're going to actually get our content in front of them. Because when we're posting organically, it's not getting in front of them. It's only getting in front of 5 percent of your audience. So you can spend a dollar a day to make sure that your content is actually being seen when you use a retargeting strategy. All in all, the goal isn't to spend as little as possible on ads. The goal is to make as much money as possible from your ad spend. So if that means spending 20 a day will get you three times as much money as spending 5 a day, then that's obviously the better business decision. If you're ready to learn the local ad strategies that work, get expert feedback, get somebody to tell you this is exactly how much money I would start with for your specific business and your strategy, and have me in your back pocket for three months while you build and launch and grow your business. You are the perfect. person for Hometown Advantage. When you're not in there, you're wasting time and ad spend on strategies that you don't even know if they work or not. And that's exactly what we're not doing. We are making sure that we are confident in our strategies and confident that our ads are working. So this program gives you the expert guidance to have that confidence, but you don't have to pay an agency expert price tag to get that knowledge. Okay, it's 1, 500 or three payments of 500. And I do have a special offer for podcast listeners. If you DM me on Instagram or email me saying, podcast promo, I'll send you a link for 200 off. This isn't going to last forever, but if you're listening to this episode when it first comes out, definitely reach out. Thank you so much for being here and I will see you next week.