The $3/Day Paid Ads Strategy That Could Change Your Business

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 346

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Recently, we had one of our clients turn $3 a day in ad spend into an extra $140,000 a year in income. And I wanted to take this episode to actually break down what we did with our client to make that happen, so that you can steal that, do it in your own business, and maybe have similar results. Usually when I say something about paid ads, that's where most freelancers' guard comes up. They're hackles raised. They don't want to do this because it's this fear of complexity. It's this fear of maybe wasting money. Typically, they shut down. They avoid it. They don't want to do that. And that leads to this kind of perpetual cycle of doing the same stuff you did yesterday that didn't work today and won't work tomorrow. And so you're in this groundhog's day of hell where everything is the same. There's this dissonance where you know you're good at what you do, but you see other people around you who are not quite at the skill level that you're at, who are doing better than you for some unknown reason. And no matter how good you get at your craft, your famine periods never seem to end and your calendar never gets filled up. I think between you listening and me talking here, we can both agree on something similar, where if you're not booked solid with your ideal clients and you're not doing anything new to fix that, the problem's not going to magically go away. If what you've been doing isn't working, something has to change. That's why I want to bring up this $3 per day strategy.

Because it is something that's low impact, low cost, low downside, high potential upside, it's not that hard to implement. I mean, the worst you can lose is $3 a day. The most you could gain is $140,000 a year or more. And it's just one of those set-it-and-forget-it things. Our client set this up back last summer and hasn't touched it since. It's still running today. Before I get into that, if this is your first time listening to the podcast, hi, I'm Brian. I run the 6 Figure Creative podcast. I've had over a decade of freelancing experience, earning over a million dollars as a freelancer. I've also built six or seven or maybe eight other 6 Figure Income Strains over my lifetime. I spent over $200,000 on courses and coaching, and my goal is to cross-pollinate all the information I've learned from other industries with other freelancers, because the last thing I want is for any industry to be what we call inbred business, which is where you only look to your immediate vicinity for what to do and how to run your business, and you don't get any outside DNA, let's say. And so you end up stagnating, doing what everyone else is doing, and not learning from others. So the point of this podcast is to help you earn more without selling your soul, and we do that by looking outside of our industry for other influences from people who have already solved the problems that we have as freelancers, instead of doing the same thing we've been doing which has not been working, or worse, looking to other people who have been successful despite their best efforts of f***ing that up, which I've seen dozens and dozens of times, people who are amazing at their craft, and despite not doing anything they should be doing, they're still successful. You are not going to be that person. You're likely not the top 0.1% of your craft. And so if you're a, what we call, a blue collar freelancer, we have to do other things that maybe those people don't have to do, and that's okay. We have to run a real business here. And that's why paid ads is a topic that I'm going to talk about a lot this month, starting with this $3 a day strategy here. So I'm going to break down a few different things here. I'm going to talk about the platform, I'm going to talk about the overall strategy, I want to talk about the actual ads themselves, what we're doing with those ads, how we create them, what do we say in them. And the goal is for you to be able to walk away with at least an understanding of how you can do this. If not, enough information to go do it yourself. But the first thing I want to talk about here is what platform should you use here? Because there are TikTok ads, although this is filmed early January, who knows what happens after the deadline that has been given. So this comes out after that. Maybe it's gone, maybe it's not. I think it's probably still around by the time this episode airs, but there's TikTok ads if it's still around. There's YouTube ads, there's Meta, Facebook, Instagram ads. There is probably Twitter ads or X ads, Google ads. There's all sorts of different ads that you can do. So when I'm talking about $3 a day, what platform am I suggesting here? Or can you actually use this on? The only answer really here is Meta ads platform. That is Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. They own a few other properties. And the reason for this is as of the end of 2024, the end of last year, there are 3.29 billion daily active users. That is roughly 40% of the world's population, maybe just under that. 4 billion monthly active users. So that means they're active at least once per month. 3.29 billion of those are active every day, which is utterly insane. It's crazy to me. I hate social media. I spend less than a half an hour per week on all social media combined myself. Most of that's just doing general business stuff on there or DMing with people. I don't want to be the victim of it, but I do want to use it as a tool for my business, and you can too. The product of meta, if you're looking at it from a platform, it's a free platform, you are the product. If you're using meta every day, if you're using Instagram every day, if you're using TikTok every day, you are the product that is being sold. The people who is the customer are people like me who run ads, people like you who could run ads. So I am encouraging you to, instead of being the product, be the buyer, be the person who can use the product, use the tool. Here's why I'm talking about this. Three to four billion people are active on meta-platforms. That means that your clients are on there. Yes, they are on there. 100%. It isn't B2C, it isn't B2B, it isn't even an enterprise. Your clients are on there. It just looks different in every level of business and every level of business to consumer. Where like if you're a music producer, we have a lot of music producers who listen to this podcast, and you're working direct with bands and musicians, that's more like a B2C, business to consumer. Your clients are 100% on Instagram, maybe even Facebook. If you are B2B, where you're working with small media businesses, 10, $15 million a year or less, 100%, they are on meta. If you're looking at larger, 50 million, 100 million plus, even billion dollar businesses, the people who head of the departments, who hire the freelancers sometimes, if that's the way you're trying to go, those people are on meta as well. Although our bread and butter, the people that we work with are doing 15 million a year or less, the clients we're helping our clients get, if you're in B2B. All that to say, your clients are on meta platforms. They're using it off work, they're using it at work, they're using it on the toilet, they're using it at dinner, when they're ignoring their family, staring at their phones, it's being used all the time. Another benefit is that it is a visual or creative platform, meaning if you're creating ads on there, you can make them very visual, very creative, and that is wonderful if you're creative, which is all the people listening to this podcast. You are creative. So you have an advantage, a distinct advantage over a lot of people who are not creative, so you're trying to run ads on there. So the platform is meta. That's the overarching hierarchy here. It's meta, and then I'm gonna talk about the campaign objective we're going to use. I'll talk about the ad side objective, I'll talk about the ad, I'll talk about what we say in the ad. So it's gonna basically filter down all the way from the top to the bottom of what you do here. So the platform's meta. That's what we're doing here. When you're advertising on meta ads platforms, you can put your ads in any platform that meta owns that they currently have inventory for. Usually Instagram or Facebook. I think WhatsApp might have ads at this point. I don't know, but they will eventually if they don't already. So you're creating a campaign in here, and the campaign's objective should be leads. If you're familiar with meta ads, you know about the campaign objectives. If you're unfamiliar, there are six objectives you can choose from when launching a campaign on meta ads platform. There's the awareness campaign. That is where you are trying to get your ad to be shown to as many people as possible, so they're going to maximize the number of impressions an ad gets. There is the traffic objective, and that is where you're trying to get your ad to get as much clicks as possible or as much traffic to your website or app as possible. There's the engagement objective, where meta will try to optimize to get as many engagements on the ad as possible, so the most likes, the most shares, the most comments. There is the leads objective, which is the one we're going to run with here because we're trying to generate leads for you. There is the app promotion objective, which you can ignore unless you're trying to market your actual mobile app of some sort. And then there is the sales objective, which is generally for e-commerce, where you're trying to sell a lower priced product, where you're trying to optimize on dozens of sales per day, which is not generally what you're going to do as a freelancer. So the objective is leads. We're trying to generate leads for you. So far, we have the meta ads platform. That's the top of the hierarchy here. Then there is the campaign we're running. It's going to be the leads objective. Underneath that is what we call an ad set. And that is where we choose our targeting and what we're trying to do. Where we're trying to send people, are we trying to send people to our website, or trying to send people to an app, or trying to send people to a DM. What are we trying to do here? A big change in the strategy from what you may have heard me talk about before, or something that I might do with more advanced people or who have a better infrastructure set up. And that is where we're actually going to not send people to our website here. What we're trying to do here is we're optimizing for DMs, not traffic to our website, not leads or opt-ins or inquiries or any of those things. We're trying to get DMs from people. You can optimize for DMs on Facebook, DMs on Instagram. You can generate chats on WhatsApp, if WhatsApp is big where you're trying to advertise. But this step allows us to skip the whole funnel, skip the whole tech setup, skip the whole technology thing, which slows a lot of people down and really makes this a really fast strategy. That's what my client did. He just set it up for DMs, and the whole goal of the ad is to get them to send him a DM, and he can have a chat conversation through DM, and then turn that into a sales conversation, and then close them. And he did that about 30 something times in a relatively short amount of time, just in a few months period. And again, we're at the ad set level. This is where we choose this in meta ads. Also in the ad set level, we choose our targeting. Who are we trying to reach with this? And in many cases, when you hear me talk about paid ads, we're talking about cold advertising. We're going after a cold audience who's never heard of us. They don't know us, they don't like us, they don't trust us. That's where you really open up the floodgates if you're trying to really scale your business and get a lot of clients. However, the other way of doing it is what we call re-targeting. And that's where we're trying to get people who already know of us, already probably like us, probably already trust us. And those are much easier to close, especially for people who are inexperienced with sales. Because selling to somebody who likes you, who's a warm referral, is infinitely easier than selling to someone who doesn't already know, like, and trust you. There's other things you have to do. You have to be better at selling, more confident. You have to be able to ask hard questions. It is a completely different process. And in this way, we're able to just target people who already know, like, and trust us. So the way we're targeting this ad set is we're just targeting people who have engaged with us on social media. So if you have an Instagram that has an amount of following, people who've liked, who have commented, who have maybe clicked to read more on your Instagram or Facebook posts, things like that, anything that they've engaged with, you can find people who have engaged with your stuff the last day, the last seven days, the last 15 days, up to the last year, 365 days.