How to Run Facebook Ads with $25 a Day
Knowing how to run Facebook Ads on a small budget is not only critical for local businesses, but for anyone looking to generate high-quality leads through paid advertising. A small Facebook Ads budget provides the wireframe that shows us just how to turn a cold audience into a warm audience and a warm audience into leads, all with a simple campaign funnel.
A small budget on Facebook forces you to set up multi-step processes that take time to screen potential leads and drive volume through the top level of your sales funnel. In this article, we’ll show you just how to generate qualified leads and drive more sales volume by spending just $25 a day on Facebook Ads.
TOC
Campaign Objectives
Ad Sets
Ads
Landing Page
Understanding how to run small budget Facebook Ads will help you learn how to effectively nurture leads and can even help improve your content marketing strategies.
Before we start, you should know that a small budget also gives you the opportunity to test different campaign elements and collect data for future campaigns. This allows us to see what works and what doesn’t without having to spend an excessive amount of money.
Now let’s dive into this multi-step process.
Campaign Objectives
With a small budget, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of every single dollar. In order to do that, you can’t throw what little budget you have into hoping for conversions. You have to strategically set up a funnel or strategy that identifies high intent users and pushes them closer to becoming a customer.
You do this by engaging them, providing value, and reminding them of your brand. Those that are most interested will ideally become engaged with your content and find it helpful. This will encourage them to take an action on your ad or learn more. If your desired action is not completed in that moment, you can follow up with them later to remind them of the value you provide and how beneficial your brand is for their lives.
The most cost-effective way to generate high intent engagement is through the traffic objective. This campaign objective will be your first selection. You will also create a second campaign with reach as the objective, which we will go over later on.
Takeaway: Create two campaigns - one traffic and one reach.
Ad Sets
Your traffic campaign will have two ad sets: one warm audience and one cold audience. Here’s how you set that up.
Ad Set 1: Create a lookalike audience from your website traffic, a customer list, or Facebook and Instagram engagement. Note: lookalike audiences work best when there are 1,000 or more members in your audience.
Ad Set 2: Create an audience that has relevant interests, behaviors, and demographics to your ideal customer. Keep in mind that the interests you choose are based on Pages they like on Facebook and not the ads they interact with. Meaning - If you are targeting newlyweds looking to buy a house and you target real estate as an interest, that will limit your audience to newlyweds that like a real estate page on Facebook, not ones that interest with ads for real estate.
Each ad set will receive 40% of your overall ad spend - in this case, $10 a day each.
Your lookalike audience should have around 2,500,000 members in your target audience and your other ad set should have 3,000,000 - 4,000,000.
Your reach campaign will retarget engaged users from your traffic campaign. That means creating and using custom audiences of users that watched at least 25% of your traffic ads, visited your website in the past 30 days, and engaged with your ads on Facebook or Instagram.
This audience will grow over time as more and more users enter the middle level of your sales funnel, but this ad set serves to turn this warm audience into potential customers. This ad set will also receive 20% of your overall ad spend, which in this case is $5 a day.
Ads
Your traffic ads should have one primary objective: engaging potential customers and encouraging them to learn more by providing value.
How you do that: Create a video ad for both ad sets that presents a solution to the problems you know they’re facing. This part requires a little bit of research, but by observing Facebook Groups and the content this audience engages with, you should be able to determine what catches their attention.
For example, if I was targeting local business owners that aren’t getting the most out of their Facebook Ads, I might create a video walking them through how to create an effective Facebook Ads Campaign for just $25 a day. This video might be 5 minutes long or more, but as long as I am providing them with a solution to their relevant problem, they will most likely watch the whole thing and maybe even click the link to learn more.
This video will engage users that are actively interested in the solution that I am providing them with, which adds users to my retargeting audience in case they don’t take action on my ad right in that moment.
The offer that I provide in that ad will also have to be relevant. For example, I could offer free Facebook Audience templates or Facebook Ad templates. Something that will help them achieve the solution explained in the video is what will get results.
If they were interested in the video but didn’t have time to click the call-to-action, they’ll be added to my engaged video viewers audience. If they click the link but fail to enter their email address to receive their free templates, they’ll be added to my website visitors audience. If they don’t watch more than a minute of the video but click on our profile to learn more about us as an agency, they’ll be added to our user engagement audience.
Your reach ad should successfully do two things: re-engage abandoned users and drive your retarget audience to take action.
There are a few ways you can achieve this. You can test out a static image ad and a video ad to see which one produces the most link clicks. If you use a video ad, I recommend making it shorter (less than 60 seconds). Use this ad to summarize the benefits of your previous offer.
For example, my retargeting ad could be a video of me walking through my active results from one of my campaigns or a static image of metrics from one of my campaigns. A testimonial might even work in this scenario as well.
I can talk about how the templates are copy and paste, so it’s virtually no effort on your end. All you have to do is copy and paste these done-for-you templates to start seeing sales or leads increase.
Your retargeting ad(s) should remind previously engaged users of your brand and of your offer. They’ll run across your ad and hopefully be reminded to click on your ad and finish claiming your offer.
Takeaways: Use video ads that are 3+ minutes long for your traffic campaign and make your offer enticing and relevant. Show your audience how they can achieve the solution explained on your video ad by just clicking your call-to-action. Use you reach ads to summarize and highlight the benefits of your solutions and encourage your retargeted audience to finish taking action.
Landing Page
Something we didn’t mention before but is just as important (and even more so with a small budget) for converting users is your landing page. The first thing users see after they click on your ad will determine whether or not they complete your desired action.
If your landing page takes too long to load or your headline or content doesn’t make sense with your ad, users will leave faster than you can say, “but wait, there’s more.”
Your landing page must highlight the next steps each user has to take to receive your offer. The headline has to provide a seamless transition from your ad and your landing page should leave no room for confusion as to how each user can claim your offer.
For example, if I want people who see my ad to submit their email address to receive their free templates, my headline should mention the free templates and a benefit of them, followed by a call-to-action button for users to claim their free templates. I could also add some subtext around the CTA button about how great the templates are or how to use them. When the user clicks the button, all they have to do from there is submit their email and check their inbox for their free templates.
If your headline doesn’t make sense, imagery is unappealing, color scheme is off-brand, or your CTA is not clear and concise, you will lose a good majority of your potential customers. Optimizing your landing page is vital for driving results and you can learn more about landing page best practices by doing some quick research online.
