Udit, the co-founder of PitchGround, recently started sharing his insights on running Facebook Ads.
He spends dozens of hours a week and thousands of Dollars a day managing PitchGround Ads and has done so for years.
Paid ads are one of the major acquisition channels for Pitchground. Udit has mastered them so well that he can handle hundreds of ad variations per campaign and reduce lead acquisition costs to a few dollars or even cents.
In fact, we urged him to create these video series to share his knowledge.
In this video, Udit shares his insights on getting started on Ads by asking businesses if they’re actually ready to do it.
Do you have some branding?
If you’re brand new, chances are you should not start running ads.
If you run a campaign and someone lands on your site, they won’t see any testimonials, social proof, use cases, or anything that evokes authority or trust.
Think like a user instead of a marketer.
What if you landed on a new page with no content, reputation, logo, nothing but a sales pitch, would you trust them? Most new visitors may churn, even wondering if your business is legit.
What you can do, instead, is reaching out to your inner circle; family, friends, customers, and, in general, people who trust you and give them your product for free so they can give the word on it.
Do you have enough budget?
Do you have at least $1,000 a month to spend on ads?
While advertising costs vary across industries—e-commerce and entertainment may see cheaper CPM, while software and B2B clicks may cost dozens of Dollars—your conversion rates at their best will be ranging from 1% to 5%.
Results beyond this threshold are not typical.
Without enough budget, you don’t have room to get enough data to optimize your current efforts, and the lack of such statistical significance will end up in inconsistent results that you cannot scale.
PitchGround audience is mainly digital businesses and startups from all over the world. In our context, we think of high lead acquisition costs and lots of competition willing to pay whatever it takes to grow fast.
We sell software whose average ticket may range from $60 to thousands of Dollars.
As such, Udit’s advice doesn’t apply to all businesses.
- If your niche is different, like, for example, restaurants or local businesses, you can start with lower budgets.
- Dennis Yu, a Facebook Marketer expert, advocates for his one-dollar-a-day strategy.
- Once, I needed to show the company, we didn’t have enough budget to run ads in the US, and I experimented with the same ads in Latinamerica, where ads costs are dramatically lower. With the same budget, we could get way more results.
What Udit suggests instead is to trying other marketing tactics before jumping into paid ads. Think of affiliate marketing, events, influencers, content or virality.
Do you have the skills to run ads?
Make sure to learn about paid ads. Fortunately, there are tons of channels, courses, and webinars that teach paid advertisement.
PitchGround, for instance, has tons of blog posts, webinars, and videos teaching businesses how to grow.
So you’d better learn the basics of advertising and then try to spend $5-20 just for the sake of learning to understand how they work.
You may think of outsourcing such a task with an agency, though.
The issue with agencies is that they split their attention across many clients and unless you have enough budget—according to Udit, $5,000/mo—you won’t get enough attention or energy, leading to inefficient results; paying too much for too little.
Can you hire a good designer and copywriter?
To run ads on Google or Facebook, you only need to put money.
But to make people click your ads, you need them to trust you and persuade them.
Having a good creative, i.e., the ad increases the chances of not people to see but to click on your ads, and such difference is done with great design and copywriting.
Do you have the backend and automation set up already?
The buying process is complicated. Just to give you an idea, for B2B, it may vary from days to months, depending on the ticket and industry.
If you’re in a highly competitive market, the illusion of bumping on ads and waiting for leads to come is unusual or misleading.
I know companies that run Lead Ads every day with tiny budgets and get leads consistently on Facebook. But their business is generally for local audiences.
If you’re trying to reach higher tickets or bigger businesses, you may face these scenarios when running ads:
Having enough budget to spend on Google Ads so you can reach businesses that are already looking for your product and just then can expect actual intent and chances to convert immediately. This scenario in B2B is that for Tier 1 countries, you’re willing to spend from $5 to $50, just per click, or even more.
If you don’t have such a budget, you’d rather spend more on content, workflows, email automation, and any tool that makes your work easier and customer’s experience more personalized.
If you want to see some examples of automation worth trying, take a look at these blog posts:
- +10 Automation ideas with Zapier to take your Agency to the Next Level
- How SaaS Brands Can Collect Feedback—and the Right Tools To Do It
- 7 Ways to collect leads besides old-school forms
- 9 Hubspot+Zapier marketing automation examples
Since you’re here
If you liked what you’ve read, follow our new series on online advertising, marketing automation, and analytics. Here is one of our latest sessions where we answer all your questions about digital marketing:
