Episode #094: If I Had $1000 to Spend On Ads Here's What I'd Do...
If I Had $1000 to Spend On Ads Here's What I'd Do...
In this week's episode of the podcast, I'm breaking down EXACTLY what I would do if I had $1,000 to spend on ads in 90 days.
The goal? Generate 200-300 new leads and create a profitable return.
This step-by-step breakdown shows you how to structure your quarters and ad spend spend for maximum impact, even on a limited budget.
When you tune in you're going to...
Learn how to execute a proper 2-3 day testing phase (and why skipping this costs you more in the long run)
Discover why listbuilding is the center of my strategy - including tripwire setup that generates revenue while you build your audience
Understand why the "dollar in, dollar out" mentality is killing your results (and how to think quarterly instead)
If you've been hesitating to run ads because you're unsure how to allocate your budget or afraid of wasting money, this episode gives you a clear roadmap to follow.
Listen now to transform your advertising approach and create sustainable growth, even with just $10 a day (about $1,000 a quarter) to spend!
Link Mentioned
Full Transcript:
[00:00:00]:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 94. And in this episode, we're talking about what I would do if I had just a thousand dollars to spend on Facebook ads, what that would look like, how I'd break it down, what the timeline would be, and more. So if you are looking to get into ads and have a limited budget over the next quarter, or even if you have an unlimited budget but wanna know how to break down your spend, this episode is for you, so stay tuned. Hey. Hey. Hey. Not your average online marketers. Welcome to another episode of the podcast.
[00:00:36]:
Now I am very excited for this week's episode because it's kind of a little bit of a thought experiment. And I love doing these episodes. Because I think so often we, you know, hear episodes from myself or from other people that's like, here's what I've done or here's what I've achieved. And you might kinda be at a point in your business where you're like, okay, that's great, but I'm not quite there yet or I'm doing something slightly different or you just kinda wanna know, like, well, what would you do in my position? And so I'm recording this episode as a little bit of a thought experiment, which is, like, my favorite type of episode to record because it's kind of like a, well, what would you do type thing. And what I'm really looking at through the lens of this episode is if I had a thousand dollars to spend on Facebook and Instagram ads over a quarter, just to clarify, because the reason I am doing over a quarter is if you have listened to the show before, you know I recommend, like, $10-15 a day on Facebook ads is a good place to be in, like, a perpetuity kind of in evergreen. And so that breaks down to about a thousand dollars a quarter. And so I'm kind of creating this episode from the headspace of if I was spending about $10 a day on ads, here's how I would do it. Right? So just to kinda set the stage, there are some, like, parameters, if you will, for the thought experiment. And those parameters are that I have, number one, a thousand dollars to test on ads.
[00:01:58]:
I have ninety days to spend that thousand dollars. My goal is at least 200-300 new leads and profitability. And then the last goal is kind of, like, not necessarily a goal, but more of a rule for the experiment is I want it to be able to be broken down by percentages. So if you wanted to spend more, you could, and it would still be a relevant kind of experiment. Right? So let's get into it. Let's get into how I would spend a thousand dollars over a quarter. So first thing I think would be helpful is to kind of break down the types or categories, if you will, of ads that I would be running. So the first category would be testing.
[00:02:41]:
And I think it's super important to understand. I've talked about this on the show before, but I'll talk about it to anyone, anytime who's willing to listen is you need to be testing your ads before you, like, throw a ton of money into them. You need to, like, split test copy and creative and audiences. And so part of my budget would be spent on testing to identify what ads are actually going to get the results. The second category that I would be putting money into is list building and lead generation. You guys know if you've listened to this show before that I'm all about that list building life. So, of course, part of my strategy is gonna be growing an email list, which brings us to our third category, launching.
[00:03:23]:
So just because I grow the list doesn't mean I'm gonna generate sales, though. We'll talk about where I may along the way. I'm also gonna launch to the list of emails that I'm growing and anyone that I've grown organically along the way. Finally, I'm gonna wanna do retargeting. And specifically, retargeting of my launch to get people who went through whatever I did, a webinar, a challenge video series, we'll talk about that, with retargeting ads to buy a paid product from me. So those are the categories. Now I think it's also helpful to kind of understand the time line because I said I wanted to be able to do it in about ninety days. So here's how that shakes out.
[00:04:03]:
The first two to three days of your ninety days is gonna be testing. Right? That's the initial part where you're testing what ad, what creative, what copy, what audiences are going to work the best for me. The second set set, of the timeline or the second step, I should say, of the timeline is 30-45 days of list building lead generation ads. And so during that time, I would be running ads just to get people to join my list with some additional things kind of, like, bolted in, if you will. Then I'd spend 20-30 days launching a paid offer. In that launch period, the last five to seven days would also include my retargeting. So that that's that's, like, the high level process. I think what would be helpful is to like really dig into each of these steps.
[00:04:51]:
So first step is testing. Right? Before you go out there and you're like, oh, you know, I'm just gonna run a ton of money into ads, you know, it's all subjective. Right? You might be like, this is not a ton of money. You might be like, this is a lot of money, And that's okay. There's no right or wrong. But the first step is you want to see what works in terms of getting people to join your email list. So I would create a few different images, probably two to four that promote my freebie, and and I would create two sets of copy that promote my freebie. And then the way that we set up Facebook ads is we actually split test.
[00:05:28]:
So within Facebook ads, you can say, I'm gonna give Facebook multiple sets of copy, multiple sets of creative, and I'm gonna let them kind of run a little bit of spend to each one to see what's gonna get the best cost per lead. Okay? Now my goal would be to get lead cost between $2-3. Right? And you might be like, that's really high, that's really low. That's typically what we're seeing around the cost per lead in, like, a relatively busy, I would say, niche. So if you're in, like, marketing or a more like, a niche that has a lot of people in it, if you will, like other people marketing products, $2-3 is a pretty sweet spot right now as of, like, April 2025. So my goal is to get leads for $2-3, and what I'm doing is testing initially. Now I'll talk more about this a little bit later, but we actually walk you through the split testing process inside our Facebook and Instagram Ads for Listbuilding Bootcamp, which I'm hosting live April 28 through May 2, 2025. If you wanna join in and go through this process, that's, like, a huge part of the boot camp.
[00:06:33]:
So I'll talk more about that in a little bit, but I just wanted you to know if you're like, okay. This sounds great. How do I actually do it? I'll kind of share a resource with you towards the end of how you can do it. But just understand that what you are essentially doing is creating multiple images, multiple sets of copy, and then you're spending two or three days to identify which of those is gonna get the best cost per lead with our goal being a $2-3 cost per lead. Now the budget on that is gonna be about a hundred dollars. Okay? Now I know that this is daunting. I understand that if you've never run ads before. You might be like, oh my gosh.
[00:07:10]:
I'm gonna spend a hundred dollars in two or three days. The short answer is, yeah. Yeah. That is what I would recommend. However, and in addition to that, it's not always and forever. Right? It's not like you're doing that every week or even every month. You're doing that once every few months, maybe once a quarter to kind of identify what's actually gonna get the engagement. Right? The point of this is so many people I talk to, they go, like, oh, I'm just gonna, you know, just start at the $10 a day.
[00:07:41]:
What I will tell you is that if you skip the testing process, you skip that hundred dollars on testing, you'll spend more money over time running a bunch of different ads trying to find what works instead of just quickly letting Facebook split test and get you the data on what's gonna work the best. So we're now about three days in. You've got your copy and your creative. You kind of figured out what's working. The next period is gonna be the lead generation period. Now what I like to do is run ads to a freebie. I'm a huge proponent of just always have ads running to your freebie because here's the thing. If your list is growing, generally speaking, your business is growing.
[00:08:20]:
And really what I mean by that is if you whether you have an automated webinar or you do live launches or you just have an email sequence, if you're not bringing new people in the door all the time, you're going to either fatigue your audience or you're just not making offers to people. Right? Because if there's no one new coming in, like, who is seeing your offers? That's just something to think about. Right? So we run lead generation ads, and there's two things that I would do in this particular case with my lead generation ads to really make sure that I'm setting myself up for the most profitability on the long run of these ads. So over 30-45 days, I'm gonna spend about $600 or 60% of my budget. And so I'm gonna spend $60 or 60% of my budget. My budget for these ads would be about $600 or about 60% of the overall budget. And what I would be doing is I'd be running them for about 30-45 days. I would also on the ads, I would set up a tripwire.
[00:09:34]:
And a tripwire is just a fancy internet marketing term, not even that fancy, but it's just a term of, like, when someone opts into your list, they're immediately made on the thank you page an offer to buy something low ticket. And in our business, our low ticket offer generates about $45 per customer. It's called an average order value, because we have the base product, an order bump, and an upsell. But on average, someone spends about $45. My goal would be that 2% of people who join my email list pay that $45. Then I would also have an email follow-up sequence for everyone who joins the list but doesn't buy the tripwire to give them another opportunity to buy the tripwire. And what I my goal with that would be another 1% of buyers from the list. So in total, I would be looking to make about six sales of the $45 value.
[00:10:37]:
And so at this point, I've now over 30-45 days, I've spent $600, which means I would have generated 200-300 leads at that $2-3 cost per lead, which is my goal. Just for the sake of this conversation, we're gonna say that we're spending $2.50 per lead, which is right in the middle, and we've generated 240 leads at this point. So with those 2% buying and about 1% on the follow-up, we would generate about $270 in revenue up to this point. Now I think it's really important that we step back because there's probably a part of you going like, okay. Wait. So we spent a hundred dollars on testing, 60% of our budget on lead generation, that's $700, but the revenue is only $270 at this point. That is true. When you are starting with Facebook ads, I would recommend don't get caught in the trap of trying to build this perfectly high converting operational funnel right off the rip.
[00:11:34]:
It's not that you can't. It's that it's uncommon that right from the jump, you're gonna see incredible results with an automated funnel. What I'm gonna recommend and what I would do if I had a thousand bucks is I'd actually kind of, like, front load my spend. You know, I've spent $700 up to the 48 day mark, and I essentially, you might be like, you don't have a lot of revenue to show for that. No. But I have, from my testing period, about 30-40 leads, and I have about 200-250 leads that have come from the lead generation. So I'm sitting great at about 250 leads on my list and $200, and and $270 in revenue generated. But now, here's where I think it gets really cool.
[00:12:21]:
After about forty five, fifty days, I'm gonna go into launch. And a launch, whether you do a webinar, a challenge, a video series, honestly, it does not matter. I mean, I shouldn't say it doesn't matter. There's nuance to each one, but, ultimately, my goal is that 3% of people that come into my launch, whether it's webinar, challenge, or video series, ultimately buy my product. Now for the sake of this thought experience, we're gonna say my offer price point is $397. Where did I come up with that? We have a $397 offer, and it converts a little higher than 3% on live promos. So that's where I'm kind of coming up with these numbers. Right? So I would spend 20-30 days, and I would spend about $200 or 20% of the budget on a launch.
[00:13:11]:
Now with that launch budget, what I would be doing is I'd be putting $200 specifically into getting people to sign up. I'm just gonna say webinar going forward. Obviously, you could do a challenge or a video series, but just to keep the recording clean and the process clean, we're gonna pretend I'm doing a webinar. So I would spend about $200 getting people to register for my webinar. Now here's the thing to understand. Webinar and live launch leads are typically a little more expensive. So I would be expecting 30-50 new leads coming through, on that $200 budget, which if you're doing the math is, like, $4-6 per lead for a webinar including, super important, retargeting all the people that join my list in the last 45 days. So I've been doing all this list building.
[00:13:58]:
Now I'm also gonna run ads to all the people that joined my list to come to my launch. And I'm also, super important, gonna be emailing and posting organically to get people to come to my launch. Because my goal would be about 150-250 sign ups. Right? The sweet spot would be about 200 people coming into the launch. And so if you're kinda doing the numbers on that, you might be like, well, hang on. How are you getting 200 people in the launch if you're only having 50 come from ads? The other 150 is gonna come from organic social media and from the 250 people that I had join my email list. I wanna try and get about half of them to come to the launch. So I want about 50 from new ads, about 75 from the email list, plus any organic and existing audience that I have.
[00:14:46]:
And so my goal, like I said, would be 150-200 sign ups. K? Where that puts us in terms of actual, like, sales is if we get 150 people signed up, we're gonna generate about four or five sales. We're gonna say four just to keep the math nice and clean. You generate about $1,600 in sales. If you got to six sales or a 3% conversion on 200, you generate about $2,400. Okay? So you're looking at, at this point, through the launch, you recoup all your ad spend and have some profitability. Plus, don't forget about that $270 in revenue that you generated leading up to this. Right? So, essentially, you're looking at and I'm kind of rounding the numbers just to keep them easy to work with.
[00:15:36]:
$1900-2650 in revenue as a result of your ads and your first 45, now 75-90 days of advertising. Here's the thing. One part that we didn't go too deep on that I think is super important is if you've done the math, you're like, okay. So you spent a hundred dollars on testing, $600 on lead gen, $200 on launch, but there's still a hundred dollars left. Correct. At the end of the launch, towards the end of the launch, when I'm kind of starting to wrap things up, my cart is open and people can still buy. I would also spend a hundred dollars to run ads to everyone who registered for my webinar to buy my $397 product. So what that means is that people who register for my webinar but haven't actually bought the thing yet are going to get an ad that's, like, don't wait.
[00:16:34]:
Cart is closing. Bonuses are expiring. You know, whatever I'm using for my launch mechanism, they're gonna get an ad on that that's just going to remind them to buy. And, really, that'll be 5-7 days total, but it's part of the 20-30 day launch window by nature. And so what has now happened, if you kind of zoom out on the whole, is you did a short sprint to test your ads and see what would work. You then grew your list consistently for a month to a month and a half. You then spent about a month launching, and within that launch, you retargeted your leads. And at the end of the day, you've about 2-2.5x your ad spend.
[00:17:11]:
I think there's something really important to talk about here that I don't wanna skim over, and that is that you might be like, well, yeah, but that means I have to spend a thousand over ninety days to get the results. And the short answer is, yeah. You do. I think we have been sold in the online marketing space this kind of dream of, like, oh, you can just set up a funnel, spend a dollar on ads, and get $2 out. I call this the dollar in dollar out mentality, and it doesn't really work the way it used to anymore. So if you're going, well, I wanna put a dollar in and get $2 out and I wanna do it in one week's time, you're probably not gonna see incredible results, you know. The the reality is there was a great article published in The Atlantic about the trust recession. And I think it's so apropos and so relevant to what we're seeing in the online marketing space.
[00:17:58]:
It's like, people are not blindly buying $400 courses from a sixty minute webinar that they signed up for on a random Tuesday because they implicitly trust you in thirty, forty, fifty, sixty minutes. Right? People and your audience need to feel a connection to you, your offer, your process in order to buy from you. And so what we've really done here is we've said, yeah. Look at your business on the quarter. If you're looking at your ad spend day to day versus month to month or week to week, it's not gonna be as powerful, to be honest. What I want you to think about is you have done so much if you followed this over the course of ninety days. You found copy and creative, which means you're working on your messaging, that works with your audience. You've built an email list, in this case of 200-300 new subscribers.
[00:18:51]:
You've generated six sales of a of a $397 course. And you might be like, well, what about the other, you know, 250-300 people who didn't buy it? Exactly. They're now on your list. And in that same vein as that trust recession, you have the opportunity to speak to these people, nurture these people, communicate with these people, tell them the value of your content and your process, and continue to nurture them so that the next time you launch, your launch is even bigger because you also profited about a thousand dollars. So I would take, you know, 25-50% of that thousand dollars and I'd put it back into advertising. So now your next quarter isn't a thousand dollars in ad spend, it's maybe $1250 or $1500, And all of the numbers start to bump up. Because it starts to step ladder over time. I was talking to someone who was doing an interview with me, and they kinda said, like, how much do you spend on ads a day? And to be honest, we spent $200 a day to $250 a day on Facebook ads to grow our email list pretty much every day. And they were like, oh my gosh.
[00:19:55]:
That's, like, $8,000 a month, if you're doing that. $6000-8,000 a month. And I was, like, yeah. It absolutely is, but we didn't start there. Right? We started at $5, $10, $20 a day. And then just like I told you, we'd every quarter, we just step it up a little bit, step it up a little bit, step it up a little bit. Because you can always scale with intention and scale with time. But the thing that I wanna really impress from this episode is that notice I wasn't like, okay, week two of Facebook ads, you're tripling your money.
[00:20:26]:
I think that is kind of the dream that has and and continues to be sold online and, like, it's not how our business runs. It's not how I see a lot of client businesses run. And when I see clients get stuck in that mentality, it's detrimental because they're so focused on trying to get the front end revenue that they forget about the long term benefit of avenue, revenue and benefit of advertising. They forget about the longevity of their business and they get so focused in on, I've gotta dollar in dollar out that they forget about all the other benefits of growing an audience. So I hope you got massive value from this episode. Super quick recap. Hundred dollars on testing, 60% of your budget on lead gen, 20% of your budget on launch lead gen, 10% of your budget per quarter on retargeting launches. Spend 2-3 days testing, 30-40 days growing the list, 20-30 days launching.
[00:21:17]:
And in that launch, spend 5-7 days with your cart open and retargeting. Now if you enjoyed this episode and you're like, this is great and I wanna get started, I want you to know that we have our Facebook and Instagram Ads for Listbuilding Bootcamp coming up April 28 through May 2. And in that boot camp, we're gonna cover a big part of this, which is that first 2-3 day testing period and show you how to manage your lead generation ads for that 30-45 days after. So if you want to grow your email list consistently and you're like, yeah. Absolutely. I wanna grow my list consistently and you see the value in running list building ads based on what we talked about today, what we're gonna do is over the course of five days, we're gonna walk you step by step through everything you need to do to write ads, create ads, set them up in the ads manager, understand how to read the results, monitor and manage them, and then let them run ongoing so you have a system that grows your list every single day with Facebook and Instagram ads. So it's $25 to join. You can go to theadsbootcamp.com.
[00:22:25]:
Again, that's theadsbootcamp.com, and you can save your spot for April 28 through May 2. And here's what I'll tell you. We typically see if you follow along and you act on this with the testing period and your first few days of advertising, most people generate 50-100 new leads to their list. And so if you're listening to this and you think, yeah, it's worth it to test ads to get 50-100 new people engaging with my email list and engaging with my content, then head over to theadsbootcamp.com. Save your seat. We'd love to have you. We are gonna create such an amazing experience, and we wanna support you in getting your ads up and running. Now if you enjoyed this show, thank you so much.
[00:23:06]:
Don't be afraid to leave a review over on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And if you want a copy of the show notes, you can head to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap094. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap094 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 94. We'll have a copy of the show the show notes, the transcripts, the time stamps, all that good stuff, links that I mentioned, links to that boot camp. And like I said, I always love hearing from you guys. So don't hesitate to DM me over on Instagram too, @zachspuckler. I love hearing from you. I love knowing what you think about the show.
[00:23:47]:
And yeah. It's like, if you were gonna spend a thousand dollars, this is what I would do. I hope you find massive value from it. And yeah, that's the show. That's it. We're good. I hope you got value. And until next time, stay not so average.
