What Ads Really Cost: The Payroll-Savvy Way to Get New Students Every Month

You want to be well known in your town. You want more bodies in the room, because a full class is more fun to teach. You want a predictable way to grow your membership instead of waiting on referrals. And you want fresh faces, because you have been rotating through the same people for a while now.

Paid ads are the growth lever that changes all of that. Money is what stops most studio owners from pulling it.

So this is the money episode. In week three of our month on paid advertising, I break down what running ads yourself really costs your yoga or Pilates studio, including the version you think is free. We run the hours, the skill decay, the cost per lead, and the four hurdles that drain your budget before a single new student walks in. The question was never whether you are smart enough to learn Meta ads. You are. The question is whether you can afford to keep being your own ads department.

TIMESTAMPED OUTLINE

• [00:00] What every studio owner tells me they want
• [03:01] Why the Studio CEO Ads Agency exists
• [05:57] The four blockers: budget, knowledge, "I'll do it myself," time
• [09:23] Five hours a week is six full work weeks a year
• [11:45] Why ads knowledge expires and your sales skills do not
• [14:53] Where do-it-yourself starts draining your budget
• [17:30] The lead that went cold and the winning ad you broke
• [19:45] You are the talent: how CEOs divide labor
• [21:11] $15 leads versus $200 leads
• [24:48] Why $5K agencies do not fit a studio payroll
• [27:48] The runway of warm leads you are burning through
• [29:18] Your next step, and why this window is closing

KEY TAKEAWAYS

✓ The real question is not "can I afford an agency," it is "can I afford to keep being my own ads department."
✓ Five hours a week on ads is 250 hours a year, six full work weeks in ads manager, priced at your CEO rate.
✓ Boosting a post does not reach new people. It shows your post to the audience you already have.
✓ At $15 per lead, $1,000 brings 67 people in the door. At $200 per lead, it brings five.
✓ Every business runs on a runway of warm leads, and it shortens every month you skip cold traffic.

PULL QUOTES

"Not what does an ad cost, but what did the whole machine cost, including the version that you think is free."
"You don't have six work weeks a year at your CEO rate to be an ads manager for 20 minutes on a Thursday."
"Not one thing on this list is about intelligence. It's a full-time attention problem happening to a part-time attention owner."
"Everything else you're doing will not matter if new students stop finding you."
"You are the talent. Your students and your team need you way more than the ads dashboard does."

FAQs

1. How many hours a week does it take to run your own studio ads?Owners running their own digital marketing report three to ten hours a week, roughly 250 hours a year at five hours. Professionals spend far more, with one media buyer describing 12-hour days in peak season.
2. Does boosting an Instagram post count as running ads?
   No. Boosting shows your post to your existing followers instead of the cold audience you need. That is why owners try it, see no new students, and write off ads entirely.
3. What is a good cost per lead for a yoga or Pilates studio?
   It varies by market. Jackie has clients paying $1 per lead online, $5 on Google, and $15 in studio markets. Unmanaged accounts can climb to $200 per lead.
4. Why do my ads stop working after I change them?
   Every change to the offer, audience, creative, or landing page resets the platform's learning phase. Excited owners break winning ads by improving them.
5. What does ads management cost for a studio?
   Many agencies start near $5,000 a month plus a $5,000 minimum spend. The Studio CEO Ads Agency is $1,000 a month with no minimum spend.
6. How do I apply for the Studio CEO Ads Agency?
   Head to the website, click Studio CEO Ads Agency, and fill out the two-minute application. Strong fits get a call with Jackie before maternity leave begins in September.

Work with Jackie Murphy

• Say Hi on Instagram @studioceoofficial
• Join The Studio CEO Program: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/studioceo-new
• The Studio CEO Ads Agency: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/agency

Free Workshop

• Your Next 100 Students Free Workshop: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/next100og

Transcript

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The Growth Lever Called Ads

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I would bet money on what you want for your business. Because after opening multiple studios and growing an online business plus coaching hundreds of owners, I hear the same things again and again. You want to be well known, especially in your town, people recognizing you because you reach so many students. You want more bodies in your room because a full class is more fun to teach. You want a predictable way to grow your membership without feeling like you have to hustle or wait for referrals to come in. You want fresh faces because you might feel like you've tapped your current audience out and you're rotating through the same people. These are not quiet wants. They loop in your mind daily when you're thinking about expansion, on the drive home, when you're staring at the schedule. And there's one growth lever that changes it all ads. And the biggest thing stopping most of you is money. So today is the money episode. We're gonna do the math the way a CEO does it, not what does an ad cost, but what did the whole machine cost, including the version that you think is free. Because by the end of today, I want you to see that having a savvy team manage your ads is honestly the best final decision that you can make in your marketing. Let's get into it.

Meet Jackie And Studio CEO

SPEAKER_00 1:49

If you are ready to show up with passion, take your business seriously, and scale to new heights without earning out, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Jackie Murphy, an award-winning certified business coach with over 12 years of experience inside the yoga industry. I have seen firsthand what it takes to build a profitable and scalable business. Join me as we dive into strategies, insights, and real-world advice that will help you grow your revenue, build a thriving team, and create a business that serves you as much as you serve your students. It's time to embrace your inner CEO and make more money without working more. This is just the beginning. Hello and welcome back to the Studio CEO podcast. We are in week three of our month all about paid ads. And this is the money conversation.

Why The Ads Agency Exists

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Now, listen, my friends, I did not start a coaching business with the idea of running an ads agency as well. Our studio CEO ads agency was born out of an offer that I used to have for private one-to-one clients. Not only would I coach them, consult on their business, and help them become a leader, I also would help them run and eventually just totally run their ads for them. Over time, this got so much demand that it required us to pivot and open an agency in order to better serve the businesses that wanted our help. Now, let me be specific and clear about those types of businesses. This is not an ads agency to sell products. I'm not gonna help you get a water bottle up on every single page so that people click through to buy. But what I have expertise in, what I've nailed over 15 years, is running ads specifically to bring in new students, either as leads or through your intro offer, and then help you convert more of those students into members or into teacher training purchases, retreat purchases. This is what I am really good at when it comes to ads. So I want to invite you that if you're listening to these episodes and you're like, man, I would love to have ads running and I would love to have a team with experience who's done this for 15 years, that is us. And today we're gonna dive into the money behind it of why it might actually be the best financial decision for your business so that you can start to see the cost of trying to do it on your own versus hiring our ads agency and our specific ads agency to help you run your ads. One thing we have to frame before we talk about any numbers is this idea of are you smart enough to learn how to run Meta or Google Ads? Absolutely. I hold all of you in such high regard. If you're listening to this podcast, if you're learning how to grow a business, if you're in the process of being an entrepreneur, that shows me that you have what it takes. So this isn't about whether or not you can do it or could do it. This is a question that is solely about what is going to grow your business the most. Is your time best spent in the meta ads dashboard? You want to hold on to that question because we're gonna come back to it again and again throughout this episode.

Four Reasons Owners Avoid Ads

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Let's name first what's stopping you from hiring an ad agency or really pouring money into marketing through paid advertising. Because I watch the same four things stop owners for years, and truly, like they will tell me the same thing for years and years and years. And the number one thing that stops people is budget. You're not sure the ads will work, quote unquote. So that you're not sure that they'll fit into your business's budget. This has to be flipped because this isn't something that if it fits, we do it. You have to have a way to use paid advertising to grow your business. We have to make the budget for it. The second thing that stops people is knowledge. And this can be that, like, if you truly don't have any experience with the platforms, you can do the wrong thing. For example, I've talked to so many people where they tell me, well, Jackie, I've boosted a post before because Instagram makes it incredibly easy to boost a post. Do you want to boost this? Put some money behind it. But what you don't know is that boosting a post doesn't reach any new followers. It just shows it to more of your current people, which is not what you need ads for. And so this really will hold you back because you might try paid advertising and it doesn't work. And so then you write off the real version, the real thing. The third thing that holds people back is this belief that you'll do it yourself. I hear this so often because I get it, you guys are busy. The day-to-day of your business keeps you with a very full schedule. And so there's this idea that like, I haven't gotten around to ads yet. I know I need to pour more time into ads. I know I need to do this. So once XYZ happens, once fall comes, once my kids go back to school, once I perfect my schedule, once I figure out a way to squeeze more out of the 24 hours in a day, then I'll learn ads eventually. And they start to be pushed and pushed and pushed. And finally, the last thing that holds you back is just time itself, because ads are never going to feel urgent. The way that a class that needs a sub today feels urgent. The studio needs cleaning, the client services inbox needs to be responded to. You need to hire your next person. That can be urgent. And ads are important, but not necessarily urgent. And this is one of the things that I want you to shift as leader of your business that you're spending less time on things that are urgent and more time on things that are important. Underneath all four of these things is one core belief. Doing it myself or having someone in my company do it is cheaper and better for my business. So we're gonna run the math on that belief because I want you making this decision from the objective data, not from a feeling that could be time scarcity, money scarcity, knowledge scarcity.

The Hidden Cost Of Your Time

SPEAKER_00 9:23

So, first, the hours. Like how many hours a week do you actually need to spend on ads for them to perform well? There was a study that was done that found that owners running their own digital marketing spend somewhere between three and 10 hours a week on it. So we could call it five hours a week conservatively. That's 250 hours a year, a full six work weeks inside ads manager. You probably wouldn't say I have six weeks out of this year to only be focused on our advertising and our marketing. And here's the thing: that's the version of paid advertising that is what fits. If a professional is running your ads and running your digital marketing, they are spending way more time doing it than you ever could because they have the time. That's their whole focus. A media buyer who he wrote this article about spending $100 million on ads in his career. He wrote an article about what it takes to do the job right, quote unquote, in his mind. In his highest spend seasons, he worked 12 hours a day and checked the ad account every 40 to 60 minutes. I'm not suggesting that you need to go from three hours a week to 12 hours a day, but I want to showcase this difference here because I think we think, oh, ads is something that I can just fit in when there's extra time. And what I'm trying to show you is this actually needs to be on your schedule for at least one hour or two hours a day so that you're really focused on making the most of the spin that you are doing and the money that you are putting into it. So let's run your math. Let's say you have you decide you're gonna do five weekly hours of advertising, paid advertising. That means creating new videos, creating Canva graphics, tweaking those in the dashboard, looking at how they're doing, optimizing, turning on, turning off. If you're doing that for five hours a week, I want you to multiply that by what an hour of your time is worth. And I don't mean your teaching rate, I mean your CEO owner rate, the value of you spending an hour on work that only you can do. For most of you, that number should be really high because your revenue goal is really high. You don't have six work weeks in the entire year at your CEO expensive rate to be an ads manager for 20 minutes on a Thursday because that's what you think is free. It's actually costing you money. The second thing I want you to consider is the skill itself because ads is different from other skills that you may have in business. You can learn inside the studio CEO program the outline of how to have a sales conversation, what question to ask, what to say, when to say it. And that doesn't really change over time. Ads knowledge is different, it doesn't keep this. Isn't like learning how to sequence a class or safely teach modifications to child's pose. The platform, this is all ads platforms, they reinvent themselves constantly. The entire targeting game has flipped in the last few years, specifically in the last like two years, than what it used to be. And so if you're learning ads and then using the playbook for years and years and years and years, and you're using outdated knowledge to attract people, what worked then isn't gonna work anymore. So essentially, like what you master this August is going to need to be updated by winter. Professionals who do this as their job stay current because it is their whole job. Like it is my job to know what's going on with these platforms so that I can best help my clients. For you, staying current would be a second job on top of the one you already have. You just don't have the time to do that. So it really flips the question of this episode. It's really not like, can I afford to hire an agency to help with ads? It's really, can I afford to keep being my own ads department? Or can I afford that, you know, my best teacher is also now running my ads? Can I actually afford that in my business? And let me break down what I see from my C and then let's talk about the way that I set up our agency to be a smarter way to run your ads.

How DIY Ads Waste Budget

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Number one, where do it yourself starts to drain your budget. And this is what I have seen with multiple businesses again and again and again. Usually someone will come in and they know that they can boost a post on Instagram. It's the easiest button. Meta wants you to let them run the ad for you. Meta wants to put you on a subscription so that they can run the ad for you. The ad is uselessly used as a term right now because they're just showing your post to more people. And so if you've spent money on that and it didn't get you the results that you want, you're gonna think this isn't work, it's not worth it. And some of you are like, okay, I'm gonna really focus. I'm gonna go into ads manager in Meta. I'm not just gonna boost a post, but I'm gonna build a campaign. But when you go to build a campaign in Ads Manager, there are little buttons that you have to know, check this, uncheck this, so that you're not saying, hey, Meta, take my money and run with it. Or there's specific targeting that you have to be able to understand so that you're not reaching a radius of people who aren't ever gonna walk into your studio. We don't want you to spend money or have your ad go to people who will never drive to the studio. Specifically, this actually just happened to a studio that was not running their ad account. This is a studio that I follow on Instagram, and I started to see their ad for their new student offer. And I sent them a message and I said, Hey, just so you know, I don't live near you. I am never going to come to your studio, but you are spending money to get your new student offer in front of me. This is an easy, simple fix and meta, but right now you're wasting money. That can happen so easily. So that is a hard hurdle to get over. How do I actually set up the right campaign in the right way to have the most control over who sees my ad and how much it costs for me to get a new student? Then the next hurdle that you have to jump through is the ads work and you start to get leads. But if those leads aren't responded to in a timely manner or in the right way with the right message, it's almost like you've wasted that budget again. Those leads will start to go cold. And then finally, this is the heartbreaking one, and this is the one that I think is more of a mental game than anything. You are going to figure out a way to make ads work. And you're gonna be like, this is working. I'm spending X, I'm getting new students in the door, and all of a sudden I have the desire to change my intro offer, to change the ad, to turn on a different ad, to run an ad to something else. An owner that is excited, too excited, when it comes to, oh my God, this is working. What should I do next? It's from a genuine place, but doesn't leave the ad alone, changes the offer, fiddles with the audience, changes the landing page design, changes what she's selling in general, is going to reset this learning phase and literally sabotage her own success. You're gonna break the winning ad, essentially. So I want you to notice that not one thing on this list is about intelligence. Every single thing is a full-time attention problem happening to a part-time attention owner or ads manager. That's what you're really paying, it's costing you when you do it yourself. You're gonna end up spending more to acquire a new student and spending more money to get them in the door, spending more time to get them in the door than what it is actually saving you of if you were to hire an agency that knows how to do it the right way. A professionally managed account, specifically from our agency, is gonna skip that whole process because we already know how to set up the ad the right way. We know how to optimize to get the lowest cost per lead. That's always my goal because I I want your money to go as far as we can make it, and how to get you the best return on every ad dollar. And so instead of you having to go through the lessons and learn the hard way, we can just start with what I have seen work for 15 years. What I know will help you bring people into your studio. Now, the second thing I want you to think about is you are the talent, you are the visionary in your business. Your job is to teach, your job is to lead a team, your job is to lead a community. And the only way that you can, because no one else can do that part. That is why your business is so unique and why your students come back. You already know this. This is why you don't try and fix your own HVAC or you don't file your own legal work. You decide which jobs deserve a professional and having someone whose entire job is ads, that is not you failing at marketing. That is you using your intelligence to divide labor in a way that gives you the opportunity to be in your zone of expertise and someone else to be in their zone of expertise. That will get you time back, but it will also help you grow the business. Number three.

Cost Per Lead And Real Benchmarks

SPEAKER_00 21:11

This is something that I have seen time and time again when people are kind of half in ads manager, half out. So let's say that they've either tried to learn it themselves and spent one hour on it a week, or they've said, hey, this person on my team can do ads, so I'm gonna pass it over to them. But that person on the team has many other jobs, doesn't have the expertise. What I have seen time and time again is the cost per lead skyrockets for that business. So, for example, when you are working with our ads agency, our entire job is to get you the lowest cost per lead. That means you're paying right now. I have a client who's paying. $1 for new leads in her business. This is an online yoga business. I have clients who are paying $5 on Google for leads. I have clients who are paying $15 for leads, which is still low for our industry. These are things that you would need to know. What is the industry average for the cost per lead? I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but I do want to teach you this. When you aren't specifically focused and bring the expertise and bring the time and attention that ads need, I have seen that cost per lead go up to $200 per lead. At that point in time, it is not working. You are spending more on bringing someone into the studio than you will for sure make on an intro offer. But even it's going to start to cost you more than what their lifetime value of being a student or member with you would be. And so it's so interesting because we think, okay, the cheaper way for me to do this is to do it myself or hand it off to a team member. But if your cost per lead is super high and you're getting fewer leads, you start to get five leads for $200 each. That's $1,000 you've paid to get five people in the door. Versus if you're paying $15 a lead and you spend $1,000, you've gotten 67 people in the door. That adds up and compounds over time. So when you hire out the expertise, you're skipping paying this super insane rate to bring new students in, which is where people say ads don't work for me. And so this is something that I took into mind when I was creating the ads agency, because not only have I seen the profit and loss statement of my businesses, but I've also seen and worked with hundreds of clients to develop their profit and loss statement and to see the ins and outs of their business. Meaning, I know that when you're running a yoga and Pilates business, your payroll is probably pretty high. What should I pay my teachers? How do I make them feel well compensated while also having the money to run the business? And so because I've seen that and I know that, I also know that for most businesses, you don't have the wiggle room in your payroll to bring on an ads agency that's $5,000 a month, which is where a lot of agencies start for their management. And not only do they

A More Realistic Agency Model

SPEAKER_00 24:48

start there, but then they also require a minimum spend per month of another $5,000. So you're $10K into ads right there. That wasn't gonna work for a lot of the businesses that I see. And I'm not saying that if you're in the place where that makes sense for you, great, that's awesome. But for so many of the businesses that I work with, we're trying to get you to be more profitable and lower your payroll expense while obviously paying your team really well. And so I set up the studio CEO agency to be savvy, where it's $1,000 a month for us to run your ads for you. That is unheard of. I have literally never heard of a different of an agency doing it for that rate. Because I want you to be like, this fits. This isn't gonna break my profit. And this makes sense for my business to have this expertise so that I can not overspend when it comes to bringing a new student in, so I can skip the trial and error, so I can skip the time. It literally is designed to bring you an ROI. And not only that, the other thing that I decided to do for this agency, and this could all change and I could be saying something different in a year, but right now, the other thing I've decided to do is not have a minimum spend requirement, which is different than most agencies because for ads to work well, typically, you do need to be putting a consistent amount of money behind them. But I know that August can be a hard month profit-wise. And January, you might have more of a budget. And so I'm never gonna tell you, oh, you have to spend X for this to work. What I am gonna say is, what are you comfortable with? What do you want to spend? Here are my recommendations. Here's what I would do if I were you. Like I will tell you what I think it should be, but at the end of the day, I want you in control of that lever. I want you feeling confident about your spend for ads. So I'm saying this all to say you investing and expertise in a way that's savvy for your business to bring in new students could never be a bad idea. Even if there's fear that comes up with doing it, even then, because if you know that this is the next right move for you to grow, if you've hit your max with organic marketing, if you can't imagine adding another pop-up class to your schedule, then paid advertising is your next step. And then just one last thing, because I know ads can get pushed and never feel urgent, but here's the truth they are.

The Runway Problem And Urgency

SPEAKER_00 27:48

Every single business is operating on a runway of warm leads. Essentially, if I stopped doing the things to bring in new students today, I have a certain amount of time that my current email list, referrals, walk-ins, people who already know me would keep my business running. And then eventually that runway runs out. And every single month that I'm not bringing cold new people in, that runway gets a little shorter and shorter and shorter. And when it ends, it's so much harder to get the momentum back. The business has nowhere else to go. So it is quite urgent and important to have a way to bring new people into your business, brand new people finding you. It, in my opinion, is one of the top requirements of any business. That selling once a day, and then also really, really strong leadership, taking really, really strong responsibility, like those things will make your business successful. But for this episode, the point here is everything else you're doing will not matter if new students stop coming to you, if they stop finding you. Okay, so let's zoom back out.

Apply Now And Final Takeaway

SPEAKER_00 29:18

You don't have to solve any of this alone. Your action now is small. Scroll to the show notes, head over to our website, click the Studio CEO ads agency, and fill out the application. I have redesigned it, so it will take you less than two minutes. I'll get the information that I need. If I feel like you're a solid fit, which there's specific things that I look for, I will send you a link to book a call with me so that we can look at your actual numbers together. I also want you to feel really confident before adding anyone to your payroll, including us. It has to be a win-win for everybody. So if the honest answer on that call is this is not the right fit, we'll get there. And if the honor, honest answer is yes, where have you been? Let's get started, we will also let you know. And because my maternity leave for our third child will probably start sometime in September, I am taking those final few calls right now. And then I won't be around to take those few calls and walk you through whether the right fit or not. So if this has been sitting on your someday list, if you have been telling yourself down the road I'll hire someone, I can keep doing it for myself for now, or any of those things we talked about today, then now is your best window. All right, my friends. Summary in one line: hiring a savvy ads team, the studio CEO ads agency, could be, and in my opinion, is the best financial decision that you could make in your paid marketing to help you get the lowest cost per lead, use real expertise, and get your time back so that you can spend it in your zone of expertise because you are the talent and your business, your students, your team needs you way more than the ads dashboard does. I'll talk to you in the next episode.