In the digital marketing world, paid advertising is how you can expand your reach by getting more eyes on your business, enhance brand visibility, and drive conversions. Most solo entrepreneurs are working with limited budget so every dollar counts and $1000 is barely anything from a digital marketing perspective. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore effective strategies to maximize your investment and set the stage for successful campaigns.
Table of Content
- Pre-Requisites to Running Paid Ads
- Selecting the Right Platforms
- Google Ads: A Versatile Choice
- Meta Ads: Maximizing Engagement
- Managing Your Budget Between Platforms
- Crafting Compelling Ad Content
- Choose the Right Campaign Strategies
- Google Ads Campaign Objectives
- Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives
- Optimizing Landing Pages
- Setting Realistic Goals and Budget Allocation
- Monitoring and Adjusting Your Campaigns
- Don't Touch Anything!
- Leveraging Remarketing
- Exploring Additional Platforms
- The Power of SEO in Conjunction with Paid Ads
- Final Thoughts
Pre-Requisites to Running Paid Ads
Before you spend $1 on your business, you must make sure you've done each of these-
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Built an online presence where your business looks professional and you have conveyed the problem you solve and the service you offer.
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Have a clear action that you want your customers to do that will turn them into a qualified lead.
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Have an understanding of where your audience congregates online and what they want to know.
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Leveraged your network and asked everyone you know to help your find customers.
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Set up accounts for the platforms you with to advertise on (more on this soon).
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Set up data tracking tools on your website and platforms
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Have an understanding of how much a customer is worth to you.
Once you have those boxes checked, you're ready to start.
Selecting the Right Platforms
With $1000, it's essential to choose platforms that offer the best return on investment. Consider platforms like Google Ads, Meta, as they offer sophisticated targeting options and a wide reach.
Google Ads: A Versatile Choice
Google ads are best for businesses that are offering a service that people need.
Google Ads should be a cornerstone of your strategy. Start by targeting high-intent keywords relevant to your business. These are terms that potential customers use when they are close to making a purchase decision. Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords with a high search volume but moderate competition, ensuring your ads reach the right audience without exhausting your budget quickly.
Google has a few shortcomings like the inability to narrow down your audience based on specific data points like gender or age so you will want to choose services
Meta Ads: Maximizing Engagement
Ads on Facebook and Instagram are best for businesses that offer services that people want.
Facebook and Instagram offer unparalleled audience targeting options. You can narrow your audience by interests, demographics, regions, and more. Although it's a good idea to narrow your audience, there's no point in narrowing it so far that it affects the potential success of your campaign.
Example
| Good | Bad |
| Targeting ads for anti-wrinkle treatments at people over 35 years old. | Excluding people who don't have university degrees for expensive treatments because you don't think they'll be able to afford it. |
Facebook Ads Manager will tell you if it is too narrow and almost every piece of advice they provide is spot on.
Use these platforms for brand awareness and engagement with your ideal persona. Instagram, being a highly visual platform, is perfect for creating eye-catching ads that tell your brand’s story.
Managing Your Budget Between Platforms
Whether your service is on a want or need basis, you will want to run ads on both of these platforms and start by splitting your budget by a 70-30 split. You will want to adapt your budget based on whichever platform is bringing the most traffic to your website.
Bear in mind, when you first run ads on Google, they will match your $500 budget by giving you an additional $500 credit. So it may be in your best interest to spend at least $500 on your Google ads to make the most of your ad spend budget.
Crafting Compelling Ad Content
Your ad content, including visuals and copy, should be engaging and relevant. Use high-quality videos, and write clear, concise ad copy that includes a strong call-to-action (CTA). Test different versions of your ads (A/B testing) to determine what resonates best with your audience. These platforms give you the option to run multiple captions and let them optimize the copy. The main aspect to be aware of is that there's no possible redundancy between your lines of copy including headlines and captions as there will be multiple combinations.
Choose the Right Campaign Strategies
Here are the different campaign types for each platform.
Google Ads Campaign Objectives
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Search Campaigns: Aimed at showing text ads on Google search result pages. Ideal for capturing demand when users are actively searching for products or services related to your business.
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Display Campaigns: Focuses on showing visual ads across Google's Display Network, including websites, apps, and Google-owned properties. Useful for building brand awareness and reaching a broad audience.
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Shopping Campaigns: Designed for e-commerce businesses to promote their online and local inventory, boost traffic to the website or local store, and find better-qualified leads by displaying product listings.
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Video Campaigns: Allows you to show video ads on YouTube and across Google's Display Network. These are effective for increasing brand awareness, market reach, and engagement.
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App Campaigns: Aimed at promoting mobile apps across Google's entire suite of advertising channels. It encourages app installations and engagement.
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Performance Max Campaigns: A goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. It’s designed to complement keyword-based Search campaigns to help find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.
Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives
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Brand Awareness: Increases awareness of your brand by reaching people more likely to be interested in it. This objective is for when you want to show your ad to people who are more likely to recall it.
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Reach: Maximizes the number of people who see your ad and how often they see it. This objective is useful for targeting a broad audience to maximize exposure.
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Traffic: Drives people to a destination such as a website, app, or Facebook Messenger conversation. Choose this objective when you want to get people to your site.
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Engagement: Increases engagement on your Facebook post or page. Engagement includes likes, comments, shares, event responses, and offer claims.
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App Installs: Directs users to the app store where they can download your mobile app.
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Video Views: Promotes videos to raise awareness about your brand or product. This objective is for when you have a video that you want to be seen by a large audience to increase brand awareness.
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Lead Generation: Collects lead information from people interested in your product or service. Leads can be collected with a lead form that’s filled out on Facebook.
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Messages: Encourages people to contact your business using Facebook Messenger. This is useful for generating leads, answering questions, or offering support.
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Conversions: Encourages people to take a specific action on your website, such as subscribing to a newsletter or making a purchase. This objective requires the Facebook pixel to be installed on your website.
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Catalog Sales: Displays items from your catalog based on your target audience. Ideal for e-commerce sites with a large number of products.
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Store Traffic: Drives customers to physical stores. This is best for businesses with multiple locations and aims to reach people nearby.
The campaigns you need to focus on are
Meta (First $100-200)
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Brand Awareness
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Traffic
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Engagement
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Video Views (if you have great videos)
Google (entire budget)
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Traffic
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Search
Meta (after first 1-2 weeks)
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Increase traffic spend by 50% with best results
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Lead generation (messaging, instant forms, phone calls, whatsapp messaging)
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Messaging (messenger, direct message or whatsapp)
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Conversions (to website)
Not all campaigns are equal and some require at least $50 daily spend before you can see results.
If you can't spend a daily amount for more than 2 weeks, you shouldn't run that campaign.
Campaigns take time before the algorithm can optimize their performance. If your client is worth less than $100, conversion campaigns to your website could cost you more than you make. In these cases, certain campaign objectives should be avoided altogether.
The goal of running ads is to get leads. If you can't get leads, you need to adjust your audience, creative, messaging, and campaign strategy.
Optimizing Landing Pages
Ensure your ads lead to optimized landing pages. These pages should be relevant to the ad content, load quickly, and provide a seamless user experience.
Setting Realistic Goals and Budget Allocation
Set clear, measurable goals for your campaign. Let's assume a client is worth $500 to your business. Your goal for your campaign budget should be to convert a new client for under $50 ad spend. So if you spend $15 per messaging inquiry and you get 3 of them and one of them turns into a full fee-paying client, then the campaign is working as it should.
Whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, or sales. Allocate your budget based on these goals. For instance, if brand awareness is your goal, platforms like Facebook and Instagram might take a larger share of your budget.
Monitoring and Adjusting Your Campaigns
Constant monitoring is key to the success of your campaigns. Use analytics tools to track performance metrics like click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and cost per conversion. Be prepared to adjust your strategies based on these insights.
When you know how much you'd like to spend for each metric for success, you can start adding automated rules to increase and decrease your budget based on performance.
Don't Touch Anything!
When your campaigns are in the learning phase, especially on Meta, adjusting your ad spend or audience will make the algorithm have to start from scratch to optimize your ads. You are better off setting up some rules to automate the change in ad spend.
Leveraging Remarketing
Remarketing is an effective way to reach people who have previously interacted with your brand. Use a portion of your budget for remarketing campaigns on Google Ads and Facebook to improve conversion rates and reinforce brand recall. Remarketing is great for promos and holiday seasons as the cost for reaching cold audiences increases when everyone starts to spend more.
Exploring Additional Platforms
If your initial campaigns are successful and you still have budget left, consider exploring other platforms like TikTok (for young millennials and Gen-Z), LinkedIn (for B2B businesses) or Pinterest (for visual, lifestyle-related products). You will want to have a strong presence on these platforms so people realize you're a real person.
It is generally cheaper to get more awareness on TikTok than Instagram.
The Power of SEO in Conjunction with Paid Ads
While focusing on paid ads, don’t neglect Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A well-rounded strategy that combines SEO and paid advertising can significantly increase your online visibility and drive sustainable long-term traffic.
What this means is that you need to start establishing yourself as an authority on the services you offer and pain points that you deal with and use those words to write content that you post regularly.
Final Thoughts
Starting with a $1000 budget for paid advertising is not much but if you use it right, it can open doors for your growth and brand exposure. By carefully selecting platforms, understanding your audience, creating compelling content, and continually optimizing your campaigns, you can effectively leverage your initial investment. Remember, the key is not just to spend money but to spend it wisely.
