How Much Should I Budget For An Ad Campaign?
This comes up quite often with people I’m talking to and even with clients from time to time.
The answer to this isn’t an easy one, but I will give you a few different scenarios and you can choose which fits your situation.
Are you testing or is your audience, message, and campaign proven?
This is the first consideration. If you have a proven campaign that includes the audience and message move to the next section, if not this is for you.
When you’re testing you have to understand that you’re going to spend money and you may not get the results you want. You will get results, but they may not be what you expected. This means that your testing budget could be lost.
Only test with money you are willing to invest and maybe not see a return for some time.
This is why you need a marketing budget. There is no guarantee of results. No matter who you work with or how often you’ve done this, at times you’re going to create ads and campaigns that don’t work.
I recommend a testing budget of $15 per day, per ad set you want to test. This way you’ll get the data you need to make changes or scale in 3 to 5 days.
That’s only $45 to $75 and that doesn’t sound too bad.
However, if you’re going to test 5 ad sets you’re now talking $225 to $375 in testing costs in less than a week.
Then you take the ones not working create new ads and do it again, and again, and again if needed.
Successful businesses take action, get results, and make adjustments and do it again until they find what works and then they push the ads and campaigns that work.
Test budget $15 a day per ad set.
Your Overall Budget
If you have a proven campaign that’s working, start adding money to it until your numbers start to decline to the point it’s not profitable.
You do have to keep your total budget in mind. After all, you don’t want to spend your entire month’s or even your quarterly budget in the first week or two and then have nothing to spend on marketing for several weeks or even a few months.
You want to be steady and consistent. As you implement your marketing system your results will continue to grow based on what you did each month.
This morning I was reviewing a client’s account and we had over 500,000 views in the last 30 days of one of the videos.
That was in addition to the month before where we did the same.
Every month we have more people to target who know us, and it’s growing by 500,000 per month.
Our results have been getting better every month.
Base your spend on your Budget.
The size of your audience.
This can be a limiting factor to your scaling on Facebook.
If you’re marketing in a specific geographic area you’re limited by how many people are in the area.
If you only have 100,000 to market to, that’s all there is.
On the other hand, if you have a nationwide audience that has 10 or 20 million people you can spend significantly more.
Your ability to fund your growth.
When I bring this up with clients and prospects they look at me kind of funny.
But it’s possible to profitably outgrow how much cash you have.
Imagine you are spending $5,000 a month and your ads are making all the numbers you asked for. Your leads and sales are all where you want.
However, let’s say it takes 8 weeks to make the 5k back. You’re having to fund 5000 in extra costs. No big deal for many businesses.
Then you decide to step up your ad spend. You’re now spending $20,000 a month. Your numbers are still good and it’s taking the same 8 weeks to earn your money back.
The difference is you’re now funding 20K instead of 5k.
Let’s assume you can handle it and you decide to expand. Everything is looking good and it’s so easy, so you decide to go to $100,000 a month in ad spend.
Now as you spend more sometimes your numbers get a bit worse. Facebook can only find so many of your ideal clients and then moves to those almost ideal
In this case, your numbers are still where you want them but they aren’t buying as fast. It’s taking you 10 weeks now to earn your money back.
That means you’re now funding $150,000 in costs for your ads.
You can see this can add up to a substantial amount and if you have a plan for it then it all works out. But if you skip this step you could profitably go broke.
Your ability to handle more business.
This also sounds silly to many clients when I talk to them about this but . . .
There is a significant difference in running a business doing 100k a year vs 1 million a year vs 10 million or more a year.
As your business grows you need to add more team members and train them.
You need systems to make sure everyone is working together and doing what needs to be done.
And, you may need inventory and increased shipping ability and . . .
As you can see there is a lot to scaling your business and getting the leads and sales is only one part.
A big part, really, because without the leads and sales you don’t need the rest, but if the growth comes too quickly you may also have issues that can harm your business long term.
As you can see there is not a blanket answer to how much one should spend.
You have to look at your situation and see what you’re willing to invest in marketing, and then test it.
Get some sales and then grow from there in a controlled way.
Have a great day!
Brian
P.S. For an in-depth look at a complete Facebook marketing system sign up for my FREE Masterclass on Facebook marketing: Go Social Experts Facebook Marketing Masterclass. This Free course is a 5-day video series with a video each day, going into depth about each step needed to create a profitable Facebook marketing machine.