Ep 9: How to decide if you should hire or DIY your ads

One of the biggest decisions local business owners face is whether to learn Facebook ads themselves or hire someone to do it for them. In this episode, Nicole breaks down the real costs, time commitment, and results you can expect from each option.

You'll discover:

• The true price ranges for agencies, freelancers, and budget options (and the hidden pitfalls of each)
• Why that $300 Fiverr ad setup might actually cost you thousands
• The surprising amount of your time still required when "outsourcing" your ads
• Real client stories of wasted ad spend vs. $1/day campaigns that actually convert
• Why learning ads is like "buying" vs. "renting" a critical business skill

If you're interested in learning more about my approach to profitable local ads, I'm hosting a free live workshop on June 10th.

I'll be breaking down my entire profitable local ads formula, explaining why my clients see such strong results, and sharing what's working (and not working) right now for local businesses.

Many of my clients are seeing incredible results with just $5-10 daily ad budgets, and I'll be sharing exactly what they're doing.

Live attendees will receive:

• My highest-performing local ad templates
• Fill-in-the-blank post ideas for summer (optimized for local businesses)
• My ad numbers cheat sheet (showing you exactly what metrics to watch)

Plus, I'll be offering a special 48-hour promotion for my Hometown ADvantage program with an exclusive fast-action bonus.

To sign up, visit www.NicoleEldridgeAds.com/training or click the link in my Instagram bio.

Can't attend live? No problem! There will be a replay available – just make sure to watch it within the 48-hour window to claim the special bonus.

Have questions? Message me on Instagram – I'd love to chat about your specific situation and help you determine the best approach for your local business.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome. Welcome to Hometown Advantage, a podcast for local business owners where we don't just focus on social media, that results in views and visibility. We're talking about turning the time and money that you spend on marketing online. Into paying customers for your local business, actually seeing an ROI. Okay. I'm Nicole Eldridge. I'm a marketing strategist who supported hundreds of business owners with Facebook and Instagram ads, and I specialize in supporting local business owners like you when it comes to spending less time on old strategies that don't work, and instead. Optimizing your time by implementing automatic marketing techniques that do the heavy lifting for you. So today we're going to be talking about if you should hire out and have an expert or an agency come in and do your ads, or if you should do them and learn them yourself. So let's dive right in. I get this question a lot because I do both. I run ads for businesses and I have a program that helps teach local business owners how to run their own ads. First thing I wanna say is that I'll never fully recommend legitimately just going off and completely flying solo when it comes to your social media marketing, especially your ads, because two reasons. One, there's just no way to keep up with everything that you need to. When it comes to what's working on social media, that's what marketing experts are for. You are a business owner. You are an expert in your craft. You wouldn't expect your clients and customers to know everything that you know. But since you are a business owner and that is the route you decided to take, you do have to learn marketing, and that's where the marketing experts come in. And then with ads, while they can be magical, there's so many things that can go wrong. And when you don't know those things or you don't know what you're looking at inside the ads manager and you don't know what works, what doesn't, yada yada. There's a lot more ways to lose money than make money. Let's just say that. The other thing is mindset around marketing. I'm not gonna spend too much time on this'cause I don't wanna bore you, but I've noticed with my clients and students that. So many people have it in their heads now that they constantly need to be doing more and more and more when it comes to marketing their business. And a lot of times that's because they don't know if what they're doing is working or if it's working as well as it should be. And that's where eventually frustration and burnout and de-motivation starts to come in because you just can't sustain. Doing more and more and more and not feeling some sort of result coming from it for more than, you know, however long. So that's a huge change I see in my clients once they come through my program and learn my ad frameworks is okay, I don't need to post more. I need to just do what works better and that makes it so I can do less. I don't need to change out my ads every other day. I don't need to be adding all these things onto my plate because the work I've done already is doing exactly what it's supposed to do for me, so I can just chill out for a second. All right. We're gonna dive into four different points here to touch on and consider when it comes to deciding if you wanna learn ads or hire them out. We're gonna talk about price time. Like your own time results and then longevity and like long-term investments. So let's get into it with the most important one. Price. Okay, so there's really two routes you can go when hiring out your ads. You can go with a big agency that works at volume, or you can hire a freelance ad manager. Actually, there's technically a third route because you could also go the low cost like Fiverr, Upwork, VA route. So we'll talk about that too. The thing about agencies is I've honestly just heard so many stories, and I've actually worked for one that was a complete mess. And what I think happens here is that they grow so fast because the owners know how to market and sell. So they'll add a ton of new clients quickly. They'll come up with a very copy and paste strategy that they're. That they plan to implement for every single business that comes through. And then since they get so many clients so quickly, they have to hire quickly. And while there's so many marketers out there and people who understand marketing, a lot of times I. So many people don't understand how to translate their marketing knowledge into social media, and especially not to pay ads. So I'm sure there is good agencies out there. I'm not saying they're all bad. I would just vet whatever company you decide to go with. If this is throughout, you decide to go. And I would lean on like personal experiences from friends and reviews from people you know. But I'm getting off topic because I wanna talk solely about pricier and not results yet. We're gonna address that later. When it comes to the big agencies, price ranges I usually see are like 700,$800 per month, up to a couple thousand. Actually, the agency I worked for charged like 400 to$500 a month. If someone is charging that. Small, I say run because that means they're operating their business solely on volume. They just have to get as many people in the door for as little money as possible to make money. So at that company I was working for, they had ad managers on like 25 to 30 accounts at once, which is. Insane to me. If you think running your own ads or keeping up with your own social media is hard, imagine trying to do that for 25 to 30 different businesses at once. Yes, it's your full-time job, but it's still just way too much. Okay, so that's a little bit about price on the big agencies. Now moving on to hiring. Like a freelance ad manager or a boutique agency where it's like there's one freelance ad manager and then they might have some support in deliverables like creating graphics and building ads and things like that. That's what I consider myself. So for those, you're going to pay a minimum of$1,500 a month. I am in several ad manager. I am in several ad manager like training groups from certifications and courses that I've taken. And so I see when new people are coming in and learning how to be ad managers and things like that, and the people teaching these courses are teaching the freelancers that they should not charge less than$1,500 a month. And I see tons of new ad managers like getting their first clients. For$1,500 a month, which is kind of crazy to me because I charged like 700 or$800 for my first couple of ad clients and that felt like a lot. But that's pretty much the minimum of a freelancer. Now, of course, you're gonna get more of their time and they're only taking on a couple of clients and they are an expert in ads specifically, so that is super helpful. But it usually is gonna cost more than like a big agency. Now for an experienced freelancer that's got results in years under their belt, you're looking at 2000 to$5,000 a month just in the service fee. So the prices I'm saying right now are just for services. It's not counting ad spend. So for context, I charge between two and$3,000 per month with a minimum ad spend of$1,500 per month. And the reason I and others do that is to make sure that our fee is going to be worth your while. Because the truth is when you're spending five, 10, even up to 20. Dollars a day on ads. There's just not a ton of work that has to be done day to day, week to week for several thousand dollars a month to be worth it. Now, someone still needs to be responsible for those ads and keeping up with them and making sure they're getting results, of course. But when it comes to the nitty gritty day to day management, there's not a ton there. So I've gotten to a point in my business where I want to take clients, where the work is there because I know how to do it, but I'm going to charge for it. So I'll charge two or$3,000 per month, and then I need to make sure that my clients are making enough to cover their ad spend and my fee. So I need a good chunk of money to be able to spend to get results. Does that make sense? And honestly, this doesn't go for every single client I've had, but most of the people I run ads for or have run ads for ran them themselves first. That's because I work with businesses that are doing. Half a million to a million dollars a year in revenue. And the ad strategy and creation that we're able to implement for them helps them go past that past where they were so that they can make more money from their ads than their ads spend. And my service fee combined, like I said, plus save themselves loads of time and energy because they're spending. A lot of money on their ads and keeping up with all those ads involves daily check-ins, optimizing, re-strategizing things that they just no longer have time for, or frankly that they just don't want to do because it starts to be a lot to keep up with when you're spending 20, 30,$50,000 a month on ads. Okay, so that's price when it comes to paying some. Okay, so that's a little bit about prices you can expect to pay someone to run your ads. Now, investing in a program like Mine, hometown Advantage, where I show you exactly what I do for clients, but broken down in a way that you don't have to be a marketing expert to understand. A lot of these programs only cost a couple thousand dollars, so same as one month's worth of management a lot of the time, but you get support for longer and you're learning a skill that's gonna stay with you forever. Now, I forgot to put this in my notes, but I want to talk about it. That third option of hiring someone for really cheap, from like a freelance website like Fiverr or Upwork. A lot of times you can find people, usually they're overseas that charge very minimal to set up your ads for you. So I had a client that came to me and she had hired someone and it cost$300 and the person. Built an ad campaign for her, so she didn't have money to pay like agencies and all these things. She paid the$300 and then she had spent$300 in the ads, and she came to me saying, okay, I've spent$300 on my ads and I haven't gotten a single booking, a single lead, nothing. So when we met, I asked. You know who set these up or this isn't how I would've done it. This is how you should have done it. And that's when she told me that she paid someone$300 to set things up for her and they were set up completely wrong. I have since heard so many of these stories because people end up wanting to go the more affordable route and. It ends up costing them a lot more money because they'll waste money in ad spend and then they have to pay someone to clean it up and to just do it right for them. Anyway. I, I know I probably won't say this once, I know I probably will say this more than once, but you get what you pay for, right? That saying is so true when it comes to business and marketing and investing in yourself and your business. My program, hometown Advantage, it costs$1,800. I am running a promotion right now for$300 off, and this is. Where you get three months of mentorship from me, you get a lifetime access to the course that teaches you how to run your own ads, and you get weekly calls with me where I'm giving you feedback on your ads. We're talking about your numbers, your results, how to make'em better. And you have five different access points to me throughout the program. So when you complete each marketing step, you get personalized feedback from me, which ends with a one-to-one strategy call where we can work on more things that you haven't finished yet. Okay. I wanna move on to time. So obviously hiring out is going to take less of your time, but it might not be. Like the full time saver that you think it might be. So if you've done a lot of hiring or outsourcing for your business, you probably already know this and realize this, but bringing anyone in to support you with anything is almost always going to result in needing to spend. More time with them to get them onboarded, trained, accustomed to things, all of that. So if you have a freelancer, they're hopefully going to com be communicating with you quite a bit. So if you're just expecting to bring this person on and then you don't have to think about advertising, you don't have to think about marketing, you just are bringing them on and that's totally checked off your list. That's just not going to be the case. I actually don't even advertise or position my done-for-you services anymore as this like. We'll handle it all situation, because the truth is we simply can't. We don't know your business like you do. We're not the ones following up with leads. We're not the ones. Balancing the checkbooks, like we need pretty consistent communication happening in order to make sure that our ads are set up for the best results. And honestly, I did position it as that before, as the Hey, hire us and you never have to worry about this again. And what happened was I had several clients just not work out because they would hire me. And then completely ghost when it came to answering questions about how lead quality was or like numbers we couldn't always see on the back end or even just getting back to us on like copy and creative approvals, like they didn't have time to hire. I. Because they didn't have time to communicate with us, consult with us, but they also didn't have time to run their own ads. So that is like a different internal structural and time management issue that hiring someone cannot solve. I actually just had a one-to-one call. With someone inside Hometown Advantage. She's a social media manager who wants to hire for her business. And trust me, I'm no expert at hiring and standard operating procedures and management and all that, but I've been doing quite a bit of hiring in my business for the past year or so for several different types of roles. And I've learned so much along the way. And the main thing is that hiring someone is an investment. You have to be willing to give up. Time and money in order to get back time and money down the line. So anyways, that's just a big note on the time front is yes, it seems like hiring out will save you time, which it will, but it's not an all or nothing situation. You're still going to have to invest time into the person or an agency that you're hiring. So that kind of touches on time with hiring a freelancer. I feel strongly about that one since I am a freelancer and I find people have a misconception about time and commitment that it takes to bring on a freelancer in their business. Now, with agencies, a lot of agencies come with the complaint that communication is just so slow or non-existent. So sometimes you're then spending your time trying to. Hunt people down, get answers on where all your ad spend is going, what in the world is going on with your ads, all of that. So that's not fun. Not to mention we're gonna talk about results next, but sometimes redoing things that agencies have done wrong or freelancers, you know, from Fiverr and all these things, like you end up not saving time by trying to go the quick and easy route. But when it comes to learning yourself. Yes, this is going to take more time upfront with my program Hometown Advantage, I estimate that you can spend about two hours a week between learning the frameworks through the course and then also implementing each step. But that only takes about a month or a month and a half. And then you can go down to 30 minutes to an hour a week just implementing and tweaking. You don't have endless videos to be watching and things like that. Either way, implementing new marketing strategies, new advertising strategies, learning new things takes time. Building a business, growing a business takes time. You can either outsource that times that you don't have to worry about it and pay, like actually pay a lot of money, or you can decide to invest that money in yourself and your own skills and make sure that you just. Create the time that you need to learn. Okay, we've talked cost, we've talked time. Let's talk results. This is gonna be my favorite topic to talk about. This is where I'm gonna say again, the age old saying of you get what you pay for. So going back to my client who hired the five person who set up her ads completely wrong, she did not know that, of course. How would she know that? So she spent money on her ads. And saw nothing from it until she came to me and we changed the strategy to one that works. I've heard so many other stories of so many of my clients and besting. Someone told me over$4,000 and still not getting any bookings or new leads. My client, Robert, who's in the program right now, talked about paying an agency$1,500 a month, which is very average, but they also required a$15, 15,$1,500 in ad spend for him to spend to work with them. And they were running one type of ad and handing over a leads list that never converted month after month. The thing about agencies is they have a hard time keeping up with what's working right now because by the time the whole company's caught up, they're behind again and they follow these rigid SOPs and protocols. And sometimes marketing and social media just has more nuance than that. It's not always black and white, cut and dry, but when you have these beginning marketer, social media marketers. Working in your business, you have to make it cut or dry. You have to tell them if this, then this, even though that's just not always how it works. Now Robert spends like$20 a day on my framework versus the$50 a day that the agency was making him spend, and he just posted in our Facebook group that he hasn't gotten so many people coming through his doors in Egypt. I once was going to work with a client for done for you services and they had an agency and they were having the hardest time getting answers to questions from the agency and they asked me to come on a call and just act as like somebody internal that works on their marketing. And we got on the call and it was just so interesting seeing behind the scenes of some of these. Marketing agencies because the account manager really could not speak to the results that my potential client was or wasn't getting. And they had a second person on the call who's like her higher up, who could speak a little bit better to results, but they had no idea who that person was. Like they had no idea that person was working with them or working on their account. And when I looked at their ads, I just noticed they were just boosting a lot of posts. They were running around a lot of graphics that I know don't work because I've tried them for several other businesses as well. And when they weren't working, I had to change gears. But they had been running them for months. They were running promotions for Black Friday in the springtime. It was crazy. Versus the results you can get when you learn yourself and you have full control, you have full control over how much you spend on ads when you turn ads on and off. When you wanna change things up and you're able to see results in real time, having full control might feel scary at first, that thought. But when you have an expert that you can turn to that's looking at your ads, that's telling you, this is good, this is not, let's change this, let's not. When you have a compass that's telling you exactly what you should try first and then what you should try next, and what numbers to watch for all of that. It makes it so you can make fast decisions and you can see results so much faster than paying someone who's spreading out their time over so many different accounts. The client who told me she had spent$4,000 in an agency to create ads and set up ads for her, actually created a dollar a day ad inside my program and she has clients still coming to her. Okay. Last I wanna speak to the longevity and kind of the long term. Thought process between hiring out or learning yourself Now, if you can find someone to teach and support you on ads without doing it completely yourself. Now, this kind of reminds me of the renting versus selling idea, right? When you rent, you're paying and paying and paying towards something you'll never own versus buying, you might have to pay a little more. And in the marketing sense, what you're paying with is your time. But you come out of it with an asset that you own and that can make you money for the rest of your business career. When you decide that you're not going to learn and you're going to pay someone the second you don't want to pay them anymore, or you're not able to pay them anymore, hopefully that doesn't happen. But if it does, and it does happen, it does happen to most people. Let's be real. At some point in their business, you are back at square one. You've gotta figure something else out. You have nothing to go off of because you paid someone to do a huge job in your business for you. And it's not their job to teach you, it's just their job to do it. So when they stop, everything stops. Now if you can find someone to teach and support you on your ads without you completely going about it alone, for a thousand, 2000, even several thousand dollars total, the ROI there is so much bigger because you're investing in. One, learning a new skill that's absolutely essential for all business owners to have. Marketing, advertising, selling, there's just no getting around, needing to learn that if you want to sustain and grow a business. And then two, that skill is with you for versus paying thousands every month. And the second you wanna stop, you're back at square one. In summary, I'm sure you can tell that I'm a proponent of learning ads first. I think this is a pivotal investment for you as a business owner in order to understand what it takes to then hire it out. I will never say, never hire it out. I'm all for hiring it out. Actually. What I think would be an amazing investment. Is for you to hire a va, a virtual assistant so they're not a specialist, which means that they're more affordable, and then go through a program like mine together so you can understand it. They can understand it, and then you can pay them and you can kind of work together closely on it. But they can be the ones doing while you save time, but there's just no getting out of learning. I am actually hosting a free live workshop next month. It's gonna be on June 10th. I'm gonna be going through my entire profitable local ads formula. I'm gonna be talking about why the clients that work with me do so well with their ads. I'm gonna be talking about what's working, what's not, why so many local ads fail so that you can learn what it takes to run. Ads that see an ROI, A lot of my clients are using five,$10 a day budgets and they're seeing amazing results. So I'm gonna talk about what they're doing on this free workshop, and I would love to have you there. The link to sign up is www dot. Nicole Eldridge ads.com/training. I'll put it in the show notes. It's on my Instagram, on the link in my bio. Make sure you're on the list so you get the Zoom link and all the things on that training. I'm also going to be offering an insane promotion for my program, hometown Advantage. There's going to be a really cool 48 hour fast action bonus, so make sure you sign up, you come live. The live attendees are gonna get several of my free local ad resources. They're going to get my highest performing local ad templates. They're gonna get fill in the blank post ideas for summertime, specifically optimized for local businesses, and they're going to get my ads numbers cheat sheet, which shows you what ad numbers to be looking for, what's good and what's not. If you can't come live, that's totally fine. There is going to be a replay. Just make sure you watch it within that 48 hour time. So that you can get this done for you. Bonus that I'm planning. Okay, this was great. Let me know what you thought of it over on Instagram. I would love to message with you and until next time, go launch those ads.