Ep 30: My Exact Ad Strategy for 2026

In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on my entire ad and marketing strategy for 2026 — but first, we’re doing a real reflection on what actually worked (and what didn’t) in 2025.

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If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or like you “don’t have a strategy,” this one’s for you.

I walk you through the mindset that has guided my entire marketing career:
 👉 test things
 👉 give them time
 👉 reassess based on real data — not emotions

We talk about:

• Why I double down on what’s working instead of constantly chasing new strategies
• The truth about timelines (and why expecting instant results is killing your momentum)
• What I learned from launching, evergreen funnels, and podcasting in 2025
• Why low-ticket funnels can be more profitable than free ones (if you do them right)
• How I use ads to bring in new people and organic content to build trust and conversions
• Exactly how I’m outsourcing content in 2026 so I can create more space, ease, and consistency
• My full 2026 marketing ecosystem — ads, email, podcasting, Instagram, Facebook, and what I’m not focusing on
• How I plan promotions all year so I’m only ever selling three things at a time
• Why I see marketing the same way I see self-care: non-negotiable if you want growth

This episode is part strategy, part behind-the-scenes, and part mindset shift — especially if you’ve been telling yourself you “don’t have time” to market your business.

And yes, I also share two ways you can work with me and my team if you want ads off your plate:

• Done-For-You Ads Management for scaling businesses
• Ready, Set, Launch — a brand-new VIP week where we build and launch your ads fast

If you’re serious about growing your business in 2026 — and you want a strategy that’s sustainable, profitable, and actually fits real life — this episode will give you a lot to think about.

Transcript

0:00

Okay, we're gonna talk about my ad strategy for 2026, but I want to start by reflecting back on 2025, so you can see how I came up with this. So a lot of people come to me and they say, I don't know where to start. I don't know a strategy. Or my strategy's not working, I'm stuck. Listen, this has been my mindset from the moment I started my career in marketing and it has done me wonders. Basically, it's two steps. Test shit. And then reassess. Okay. So when I test things though, I test it for a long time, like 3, 4, 5, 6 months at a time before I come to a conclusion, unless I'm using ads. And ultimately I feel this too, if something quote unquote isn't working. I actually don't see it as the fault of the strategy or the platform or what have you. I just think I probably need to be doing more, and I know a lot of people don't wanna hear that. It's been so funny. I've been running ads for my program and some of the comments and questions that I get make me chuckle because. The expectation that building a business and marketing should be easy and fast and simple is absolutely crazy to me. I've never had that thought. I've always known it's gonna be hard, and I've welcomed that with open arms. I was trying to explain to one person why boosting posts versus running ads are two different things, and she's was talking about how she can't figure out how to run ads. Like the only option from her app is to click Boost post. So I told her, you need to go to business.facebook.com to go to the Meta business suite, to the ads manager. That's where you run ads. And she was irritated. She said, I have to get on my computer every time I wanna run an ad. Yes. Yes you do. You can do it. You can get on your computer, I promise. It's not hard. That part's not hard, right? Another person, the promise of my program has been to run profitable ads within 90 days. And of course there's so much that goes into that. You have to learn about how ads work. You have to create your ads, you have to get them up and running. You have to test new things. And there was another comment on one of those ads that was like, shees, I cannot wait 90 days. I do not have time for that. And of course there's so many people who run ads Profitably who come into my program within seven days of joining the program. But I'm not gonna promise that you can get that done because that's way too much to fit into seven days. But my question to that person who's saying 90 days is way too long, is, what else are you gonna do? Is there another way to learn a brand new skill? Implement said skill and see results instantly. There's not even hiring out isn't going to make the results much faster than 90 days. If even if you hire an expert who's really good and who's gonna kill it for you, which we know a lot of people struggle with finding growth skills level ups, they take time. But there are ways we can compress that amount of time, but nothing's instant. Okay. I'll get off my tangent there. Basically, I try things. And then I try some more. So my big themes of 2025 were these three things. One, launching, two testing evergreen funnels in between launches, so running ads to other things other than a live event. And then three, podcasting and dialing in my organic content. So posting to Facebook and Instagram and email. I have thoughts on each of those, and that's where I spent a lot of my time, my energy, my focus. So I sat down and reflected how are those things doing? Where should I go next with those things? So my thoughts on each of those, starting with launching launches are mentally taxing, but they have been extremely profitable and fruitful for my business. And every single one gets better as far as profitability and revenue and also easier energy. The mental tax that comes with just spending a lot of money and then having to wait to see if it pays off, the whole process gets more systematic, all of those things. So I knew I wanted to continue and potentially do even more launches this year than last year. The double down mentality double down on what's working right. The next thing I spent time on was testing evergreen funnels between launches, which was great. I just know I didn't put enough time or energy into that because of these other things that I was focused on. And. Still wanting to do a lot of client delivery so I know this could be a great strategy to make sales between launches and to learn a lot about messaging and conversions. What's working and what's not. As far as other strategies other than launching, I just really need to be my own ad manager, right? I need to be my own client, and that's something I didn't have time for last year. I want to do this year, so I have to start thinking about how I'm going to free up time to make that happen. To get more specific on the evergreen funnels I was testing, I ran two, so one was a free training that gave the training and then pitched my program Hometown Advantage. And then the other one was a paid mini course. So similar vibes, but people had to pay to get access to the content. It was a lot more actionable content, and then it pitches the course at the end and in the follow-up emails, both converted fine, but could be better. The mini course funnel converted lower, but ended up having similar profits to the other funnel because of the revenue from the front end of the mini course. So a lot of times when you're running ads to a paid low ticket offer, it's not likely that you make money or at least make a ton of money just from selling that low ticket offer. You need to be selling something bigger. To really see that good return on ad spend, but it was always my goal to break even on ad spend, which really helped with the overall profitability or my profit after ad spend where the free training actually converted higher. So more people who came through the free training ended up buying Hometown Advantage, but my profits were lower because I wasn't making any money on the front end, like with the other offer. I really only ran each funnel for probably three months each during different times of the year. The mini Chorus funnel was in February and March, and my April and June launches enrolled. A lot of people who had come through that funnel, they just didn't convert in the time sequence that I had put on it to begin with. So due to that metric, and due to the fact that I know I can really spend time focusing on increasing the conversion rate to that funnel this year, I'm gonna go all in on. The low ticket offer to start if time allows, I honestly would love to keep testing and tweaking both. It's just fun for me. It's really educational. It's really helpful for my own clients that I can put my own money out first, test it, see what's working, see what's not, try all these different types of ads, and then whatever's working for me, I can bring to them. But this leads me into the time issue and the third thing that I spent a lot of time on this year, organic content, because I do still believe 100% organic content is a great. Modality For me, it's just not my method for getting new people to find me. It's actually my method for getting new people to get to know me. So I use my ads for new people to find me, and then I use organic content to nurture, build, trust, and really promote my program. Now, as staying consistent and finding time for that. To do it a certain amount of times per week. Every week is hard, but I was really committed to finding a system and staying consistent. And I really did. I post three to five times a week, send one to two emails a week. And then I had also brought in the podcast this year, which I was not consistent with, but I get so many people who message me and say they listened to my podcast, they binged it and it. It made them decide that the program was right for them. So I know that's an important piece to the puzzle. So since I've found a system and strategy that works well for me, I am actually going to have my VA tackle all of my organic content writing and email writing start to finish. She's going to use my podcast. And repurpose it into that organic content, and that will be completely off my plate. What was happening before is she was still helping me a lot with it, but I would write it all. I would write out the carousel copy. I would write out what to say on top of my B roll reels. I would write what to say in my emails. And then she would put it onto the carousels for me or onto the reel. I would look at it, make tweaks, approve, and then she would schedule it out. Now we're gonna get rid of the writing process for me. Alls I'm doing is showing up and recording like this. She can take the transcript. We have custom gpt to get us started, and then she is going to have a very specific training on how to take. What the custom GPT spits out and make sure it's using my voice. It's not lost on me. How lucky I am that I have someone who can do this really well. As a little behind the scenes look of how my business is set up, I actually have enough rules in my business for. Five team members. I just added that up for the first time. That sounds crazy, but I only have three because I have a virtual assistant who's like my right hand person. I have two junior ads managers that support with my done for you client work. I have an online business manager, and I now, starting this month, I have a co-coach inside my program that's helping give my hometown advantaged students even more in depth feedback and personalized one-on-one support. So that's five roles, but I only have three people that work in my business because I have one person who's my va, a junior ads manager, and my co-coach. If you're in Hometown Advantage or if you've ever emailed the support inbox in the last couple months, you would have talked to Melissa. She is incredible. She's a really good marketer, a really good copywriter, and I'm so lucky that I have her and that I can trust her to write sometimes better than me. Okay, so now with all of that being said, here is the full on 2026 strategy. I'm gonna be using these four platforms consistently. Again, ads, duh, Instagram and Facebook with, I want more emphasis on Facebook. People are growing on Facebook. It's making its comeback. Email and then podcast slash YouTube. I also would love to sprinkle in threads and TikTok just for fun, but these are gonna have to be extra just messing around. Again, my a huge goal this year is to clear up time, create more free space for myself. So I'm gonna have that, and then I can post random shit on threads on TikTok. But I'm not going in with a strategy. Remember whenever I'm adding something new in, we're just trying random shit. And then as far as ads go, I have six live launches on the calendar spaced out strategically. And then in between those launches, I am going to be running my Evergreen funnels, specifically the low ticket mini course. So based on my live launch schedule, I created a full calendar and Airtable for all of 2026 where it shows when to start marketing for my live workshops. When to market the open cart period after the live workshop and then when to market done-for-you services in between. So I don't use ads to market my done-for-you services. I use it to promote free low ticket hometown advantage. And then I get a lot of people that trickle into done for you from that. But they need to know that it exists and that we offer it. So I have it in the calendar in cycles. So all year long we're only promoting three things. Why did I say that? Like that? Promoting, we're only promoting three things. A live workshop for my launch open cart period. During the big promotion after the launch, and then done for you services. And so when Melissa's going to write my content first, she's gonna reference the podcast episode from the week, and then she's going to look at the calendar and see what are we promoting. Of course, I pre-planned the podcast content to match up with what we're promoting as well. But even if I missed a podcast episode for the week, she could go in the calendar. She could go in the calendar and see, okay, we're promoting a live free workshop for these next couple weeks. Let me go to a different podcast episode and put together a carousel or a reel and say, sign up for the workshop. She always knows what we're promoting, and then she has the podcast content for ideas on what to talk about as far as amount of content adds. The goal is that they're gonna be going all the time. Stay tuned for how much I end up spending, because my goal is to spend as much as physically and profitably possible. So I will take you along the ride for the scaling journey there, and then four to eight Facebook and Instagram posts per week. Melissa's gonna be doing four. A big goal of mine is to level up my personal brand this year. I talked about it in some other episodes. Where I'm talking about my 20 20, 25 reflections in 2026 goals, but I need more people who follow me and who are on my email list to be converting into my programs and offers. And part of that is a personal brand level up. So I'm gonna be posting those myself, and those are fun for me. Today is actually January 6th, so I'm pre-recording this quite a bit ahead of time again, because of the new process that we're. Working on as a team. If you go on my Instagram and go back to around this time, end of December, beginning of January, I went crazy over the Christmas break posting personal brand type content, and it was so fun and I've been getting a lot of compliments, which I really appreciate. So I'm gonna keep up with that. That type of content's so easy for me to put together. I don't have to think about it. I just say something that comes into my brain or share something behind the scenes like this, versus when I'm sharing about ads, specifically educational content around ads or my own takes around ads. I really have to. Step back and think about the best way to package it so that I don't bring forward what my business coach calls the curse of the expert, where I just start talking in ads speak, and all of my audiences eyes glaze over because they don't have a clue what I'm saying. So that kind of content takes a lot more energy from me to write, and that's what I'm outsourcing. Okay. And then we're also gonna do two emails a week. One that is promoting the podcast and then another that's promoting whatever offer we're promoting at that time through the calendar. And then I have two podcasts a week on my goals here. I'm already starting to second guess that one, but we're just gonna roll with it for now. We're just gonna try it, see what happens. My actual thought on the system is that I will batch record two podcast episodes in one sitting about a week and a half out of when they will air. That gives Melissa a week and a half to then create the content. Write the emails, create carousels, and for me to give a glance over and make sure that everything sounds great. Right after I get done with this podcast episode, I'm actually recording a full on training for her. I sat in the bath. I joke that I feel like I spent half a million dollars on my bathtub because that's basically what our house costs, and I really just wanted it because of the bathtub. And let me tell you, the investment is paying off.'cause I use that thing every single day. I was sitting in there and I was just brain dumping into my notes app, using voice to text. All the things that I think about that I do when I'm writing content. All the places I go to look for inspiration, how I use data to come up with ideas. Little nuances about things that I write, like formatting emails to make sure they're extra readable, how I create carousels fast, all of that stuff. I brain dumped it into a notes app. And then had chap GPT organize it into buckets for me and create a guide on how to write my content. And that's all put together. I'm just going to record and show her actual examples of things and talk through the guide. So really for 2026, I am doubling down on what I did in 2025. I'm not adding anything new. I'm really just making more time to make what I did in 2025 be even better. So outsourcing the organic content, I'm outsourcing a lot more things in the business this year. And then being able to pump out more podcast episodes and more ads. Podcast and ads. Let's go baby. I am so excited to have time and space and have fun with my marketing this year. But that being said, I wanna share this last little thought. If you are thinking, I do not have time for this now. I don't want to outsource my writing. I don't wanna outsource all these things. I don't even know how to get started. I don't have time. I want you to think about this. I see creating a marketing strategy and implementing that marketing strategy a lot like self care. Here's what I need. Do. I feel like I have all the time in the world to make and prepare healthy meals for myself and my family to work out to meditate. To go to therapy, all these things. No, I don't. But do I do it anyway because I want to take care of myself and I wanna be the best version of me. Yes. Now, there's some of you out there that are doing the same. You're really focusing on taking care of yourself because you cannot have a thriving business without a thriving business owner. But then there's some of you who don't do those things because again, you feel like you don't have time. And guess what? You then also suffer the consequences of having not a lot of energy, feeling sluggish, not being able to show up as your best self because you're not energized. You are not nourished properly. I see committing to a marketing strategy the same way, but for business, it's one of those things that you have to do first so that the rest can fall into play so that you can trust yourself To do, what you said you're gonna do. To show up for yourself and to talk about your business so your business can grow. I think about that all the time. When people tell me, I don't have time to post. I don't have time to send an email. I don't have time to learn ads, then you don't have time to nourish and grow and energize your business. Just like working out, preparing healthy meals. It's one of those things that we feel like we don't have time for, but if we're serious about creating our best life, we do it. That's how I feel about marketing. But translate it to the health and the life of your business. You have to make time for it. And since you have to make time for it, you may as well make it fun, right? And you may as well invest and find strategies that work well for you, because that makes it a lot more fun when you're making sales. That being said, I am promoting my dumb for you services right now. And I have really two exciting ways you can get me and my team to do your ads for you. One is our monthly retainer services. This is for businesses doing four or five, 600 k and above who are ready to just have ads as a part of their strategy to get to a million or higher. And they're ready to bring in a team of experts, a small team, that you are going to have one specific ad manager assigned to you. You're gonna have me as the overseer of the strategy. We get things done and we get them done fast, and we use data to drive our decisions and create new ads and present new ideas to you so that you don't have to be the innovator. You don't have to be the doer. Okay. This is for somebody who really wants a full on expert team coming into their business and taking over that side. I have a link in my bio to a link in my bio. This is an Instagram. I have a link in my description to book a call to talk about if those services are right for you and when we can get started. The second way you can work with me, I feel like I need a drum roll for this. It's a brand new offer. It's called Ready, set, launch. Okay. And this offer is for you if you're not exactly ready. For monthly retainer services, but you wanna get ads up and you want someone to get your ads up for you. ReadySet launch is a VIP week type offer. So what happens is you'll book a call with me on a Monday so spaces are limited'cause we're only gonna take one person a week to start. And then by the next Monday you will have an ad campaign up and running, and for the rest of the month you can be in Slack with me and my team and we will consult you and support you in managing and optimizing your ads on your own. So you get this full strategic mind that I just talked you through on this episode. You get my team writing your ad copy, doing your ad creatives. We also can use your own creatives that you bring to the table if you would like. You get us launching your ads in Ads Manager, you get a full Loom video from us explaining how to do simple things that you might want to do, change your budget, turn ads on and off, change out creatives, all of that fun stuff. And then you get to ask us any question at any time. Get a response within 24 hours. As your ads are running for the rest of the month, the investment for this is$1,400. I'm taking six people at this price before it goes up. I have a feeling this is gonna sell out quick. if you have any questions about it, please send an email support@nicoleeldridgemedia.com. Send me a DM on Instagram. The link to learn even more about the offer and book. It is in the description. It's also in my bio on Instagram. It's on my website. Let's get you in. Let's get you booked. Let's get your ads up and running.