Brian: There's generally two types of freelancers that I've met in the wild. There are first those who have just never tried paid ads before. that's getting to be a smaller and smaller group these days.

But generally, they never tried because they're intimidated by it, they're overwhelmed by it, or they just don't think it'll work for them. The second group, which is getting to be an increasingly larger group, are those who have tried, but they just couldn't make it work for them for whatever reason.

So in this episode, I'm breaking down the seven most common reasons why paid ads flop for creative freelancers, especially when you first try these out for yourself and what you need to fix before you ever spend another dollar.

so if you've ever felt like you've wasted money on ads, this one's gonna show you why they didn't work and how to make them work next time.

And if you've never run paid ads before, this is still worth listening to or watching if you're on Spotify, we actually have Spotify video now, so shout out to my Spotify video peeps.

this is still worth listening to or watching because.

It can save you from wasting a ton of money in the future if you ever do try paid ads.

When I first started doing paid ads, I wasted like $10,000 on paid ads before it ever worked out for me. But since then I have spent over a million dollars on ads very profitably to the point where I did the math. And if you look at like the s and p 500, If you look up average returns, you'll see anywhere from like eight to 12% depending on what people factor into returns.

And you'll see some of the, like best people in the world can get like 15, 18 up to 20% a year returns.

Paid ads is more like getting 500% a year or 600% a year or a thousand percent a year on the money you put into it. And I've also coached freelancers through this, being able to land five figure clients from paid ads and even growing past six figures with paid ads being the core of their client acquisition methods.

And while I'm gonna go through all seven things, if you stick around to the end, I'll give you a way that you can actually chat directly with me about paid ads for free. And you can ask me whatever you want. We can dissect why your ads aren't working or ways that we can improve the numbers if they are working, but they're not working great.

Or you can just even figure out if paid ads will even work in your industry, because some industries just may struggle if they try to do this. I will answer all your questions for free.

if you're new here. This is like episode 398, so you've missed out. You've missed out on a lot. There's a lot in our backlog. Poke around in there. But this is the six figure creative podcast. I'm Brian Hood. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who wanna earn more money without selling their sold.

Take a lot of influence from my team who has awide background in a lot of different industries And they've collectively spent like 15, $16 million on ads. I take a lot of influence from other industries like the SaaS industry, software as a service.

So many brilliant minds in that world that we can bring directly into the freelance world. There's lots we can learn from the internet marketing world. There's a lot we can learn from the e-commerce world. I just try to learn from a lot of different sources, from people who are smarter than me, know a lot more than me,

Then bring it to this industry, the creative freelance industry, and distill it down to something that's usable for you. so if that sounds at all interesting, you're in the right place. So I've got seven things that I think are the biggest mistakes that I see when people try to run paid ads and they don't work.

And this is in no particular order, but it's generally most common or least common.

but the first reason why paid ads don't work for people is when there's a lack of credibility. If you think through what paid ads is, is you'reputting your message out in front of a bunch of strangers, and so they're comparing your offer, your ad, you as a person and your services to all the other random strangers they see on the internet The trust barrier is already really high there. It's a lot to get over that trust barrier in order for people to actually trust what you're saying is true to maybe respond to your ad in some sort of way, where they'll click on it, maybe opt in, maybe book a call with you or fill in an inquiry form. But if you have zero credibility, this is an uphill battle, and your credibility is basically just earned through your, your reputation, how you treat your clients,your portfolio of work, how good your work is compared to other people.

Your accolades, if you have any awards or accolades or anything that recognizes you as somebody who is legitimate, the quality of your work as a huge part of this, and you cannot make paid ads work if you have zero reputation. And your portfolio sucks or is just very limited. this is the thing I've seen drag people down again and again and again, where paid ads don't work for 'em because they have absolutely no reputation in the market and their industry. No credibility whatsoever. Their portfolio sucks or their portfolio's solid, but it's very limited.

Your past work. And your reputation has to support the promise you're making with your services. And I've seen people make massive transitions.

To a different offer, a different type of industry, or try to go to something that has more money because they were in a market with broke people or whatever,sort of thing that they try to do.But they try to make this massive shift with zero reputation, zero supporting portfolio. While this can be great to do and very necessary for some people, like if you're in a market where it just doesn't work for you, you have to pivot somewhere else, but you're not gonna get your first clients through paid ads. If you make a massive pivot you don't have the infrastructure, the portfolio, and the reputation

to actually help you in that transition through paid ads.

So our first reason that paid ads may not have worked for you if you tried them was that lack of credibility. And the easiest way of getting around that is actually working with people who already know, like, and trust you to start building that portfolio up.

This is one of the reasons we tend to shy away from freelancers who are just in the very early stages of their careers because there's so many things that can go wrong in those early stages that are outside of what we can actually help with. if you are the type of person who,takes the shortcuts because you're lazy or you want the fast money and you're not taking care of the client for the long term, where you're,okay taking reputation hits, that's gonna show up.

It's gonna show up in a lot of different ways, and you're gonna make our jobs as coaches who you with client acquisition, you're gonna make our jobs impossible because you have damaged your own reputation.

If you have no portfolio, it is hard to get started. If you have no contacts whatsoever, that is Arguably the hardest part to be is the very beginning, but it's also the part where client acquisition isn't generally the issue, which is why, again, we work with freelancers who are already, you know, full-time, or at least they have a strong portfolio and they've been doing this maybe at an agency or something.

but credibility is one of those things that's, almost impossible to mimic.

And we will drag you down through almost everything you try to do with client acquisition. Number two, reason why your paid ads didn't work is a lack of clarity. We talk about what doesn't work with paid ads or really anything in life, but

you've heard me say this quote before, you've heard this from other people out there. If you try to be everything for everyone, you're nothing for no one. What's gonna happen is they're gonna see the ad that's like, Hey, are you a human being and you need any service on Earth? Fill out the form and I'll do anything on earth for you.

If you're a human, I'll do it. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. That'd be funny. If that did work. I should try an ad like that just to see what sort of weirdos I get.

We'll talk about what works, especially with paid ads, and then I'm gonna get to you people that are like, well, I'm a generalist and I make a bunch of money. I'll, I'll slap you down in a second. What works is one clear, desirable thing to one clear avatar. It's like one offer, one avatar. That's basically it with paid ads.

And the thing that trips people up here is two things. One, they don't wanna get sucked into one little, like they don't wanna get pigeonholed. They want the freedom to do a bunch of different things. I'm such a passionate, creative, I have to work on everything, and Ican't get pegged into one little tiny hole.

the argument of like generalist versus specialist generalist is arguably can be more fun because you get to work on a bunch of different things. It's that Enneagram seven in you where you're just like, I wanna try a bunch of new experiences and I don't wanna do the same thing over and over again.

Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up in real life. Generally when you see generalist in the freelancing game, it's because they've built their careers and they've niche stacked after niche stack after niche stackwhere. They might have started in one teeny tiny little area for like five years, and they just crushed it.

And then they built a reputation and a name and a brand. And then they started saying to those clients, what else do you need, Mr. And Mrs. Client? And they're like, well, we also need this other service. And you're like, cool, I can give you that. And they start doing this other service and they crush it and they build up their systems and the processes or hire team or whatever to crush it and that second little service.

And they're like, what else do you need Mr. And Mrs. Client. They're like, I need this third service. And they're like, okay, I can do that. And what you see is like 20 years into the future. you see those big names that are out there and you look at their websites or their Instagrams, or you just hear about them andinterviews or whatever.

The, the 1% freelancers out there,you realize that they're doing like 10 different services. You're like well, if they're doing 10 different services, I'm gonna do 10 different services. Or they're working in 10 different niches and they're like, if they're in 10 different niches or industries, I can be in 10 different industries or niches.

That doesn't work in real life because you didn't earn that. They did. when you're trying to get paid ads to work anyways,

if the person has to employ brain power to understand what it is that you do because you're so convoluted, you can't get a, clear offer out there, then people are gonna tune out. They don't wanna use their brain power when they're just doom scrolling on Instagram or Facebook, So you understand why the one service is probably the best thing to try to advertise when it comes to paid ads. Trying to offer like 15 different services isn't gonna do it. You just need the person that's like, I raised my hand, I need that one thing. Yes, that's me. But you also need an avatar. Call out is what we call it, avatar call out or who are you talking to?

Somebody that,people self identify with because the words you use in your ads really matter. I'm gonna give you an example. If I just call out an ad for a human being like I did a second ago, everyone on earth is a human being. If they're surviving on Instagram, they're a human being,

but no one walks around amongst everyone else in the world and says, ah, I'm a human being and nothing more.

It's a very weak call out. Another one might be woman. Now you've narrowed it down like 50. I'm a woman or I'm a man by gender. That's a little better but not great. Narrow it down a little bit more. Maybe female business owners, that's a little more narrow

And you start to see some like niche communities of like female business, owners that are out there, but it's still not the most powerful call out. Women might identify as a female business owner or they might not.

If you narrow down further, it might be like a female solopreneur, which probably not a great call either, but it gets a little more narrow because business owner could be like, you know, a team of 500 or 5,000. It could be a team of 50, or it could be a team of one, right? A solopreneur is just like, Hey, I'm a solo independent business owner.

I've got maybe creative business, or I have, a brick and mortar business, or I have a flower shop, or I have a,really anything that's a solo business owner. As we get narrow and narrower, now we have female freelancer,

and I'm sticking with the female here just because you'll see in a second you're wondering like, why does Brian keep saying females in here? I'll get to that in a second.

To get more narrow, from freelancer. You could go even down to like creative freelancers, because all freelancing, it's actually a pretty broad market. Any sort of freelance work, I think even technically an Uber driver's, a freelancer or a contractor gets nuanced. now we get down to even more specific maybe brand designers.

That's a call out. That's actually, we use it in our ads. Brand designers. You could even throw the gender in there again if you wanted to, but I'll just stick with the brand designers for now. That's a call out that actually people identify. Are you a brand designer? Yes, I'm a brand designer. Is anyone in the room a brand designer?

Yes, I'm a brand designer. Someone would eagerly raise their hand and say, yes, that's me. We're looking for a brand designer versus we're looking for a human, or we're looking for a business owner. It's not that powerful. I'm a, I guess I'm a business owner, but I am a brand designer. Right. How powerful is that?

Call out to them. Brand designer. Yes. But if you're like, I'm looking for a brand designer in the hospitality industry. Oh wow. I definitely do that. That's even more rare. You see? The more rare it is, the more powerful the call out is and it gets all the way down to like, hey. Is your name y Unique DeCosta.

That's one of our clients. I hope she doesn't, get mad at me for calling her out like this, but she is a human being. She's a woman. She's a female business owner. She's a solopreneur. She's a freelancer. She's a creative freelancer. She's abrand designer in the hospitality industry.

All those things she would identify with. But if in an ad, I was like, is your name Yanique DeCosta? She'd be like, that's really creepy. But you start to see that these are words that they identify with. Do this person self identify with the words you call out with it. The broader it is, the less powerful it is.

The more specific it is, the more powerful it is. And there's obviously gonna be a drop off point where there's,I don't know if any other unique DeCosta out in the world,if I Google her right now.

She owns every one of the top results on Google, so that's a pretty unique name.

But that lack of clarity is what's killing businesses. And just that one example I want you to visualize whether I say, are you a human being who wants to make more money? Somebody's gonna respond to that, but not the type of people I wanna work with. Versus, are you a brand designer who needs more clients are you a woman named Unique DaCosta who wants help with client acquisition or I've done calling her name out specifically.

all right? So that's the second reason your ads didn't work if you tried them and they failed. First was lack of credibility. Second of lack of clarity.The third is like a lack of interest in learning the real skills behind this. The example I like to use is when you use a boosted post, this is like the lazy path versus learning a skill that can keep you fed for life. This is what I call the donate to Zuckerberg button. What happens is Instagram I think is pretty bad at this.

You make a post on Instagram, it gets a certain amount of reach, whether it's good or whether it's bad. Instagram will say, Hey, you can get X more reach if you just put $10 behind it, boost the post, and you're like, yeah, I'll boost the post every now and again. I put $10, $20 behind it. I get some impressions, but I don't really know if it's working or not.

That's the attitude that I see when most people said they tried paid ads is like they just boosted posts with no way of measuring, no understanding, no strategy behind it, and you took the lazy path.

These skills can honestly, they can feed you for life. Whether it's in your own freelance business or you take those skills and use 'em for another business or use it in a future business, gonna launch in the future. The skill of paid ads I have used in multiple industries and multiple businesses, and they've always earned more money than I've spent on it.

In general. I did the math recently, the last time I checked. In general, every time I put a dollar in, I get like six or $7 out and honestly. I can do better than that. And it's also depends on the season, it depends on the business, depends on the funnel as well. And every year we're getting more and more efficient with return on ad spend for what we do because again, I am very interested in learning the actual skills behind making this work.

And if you have that genuine interest, you can start to figure out the game that is being played here.

And so if you learn how to actually set up things properly, instead of using boosted posts, you're using the Ads Manager, which is a more complex platform you can start to make this happen. That said, I've also seen people who do have the interest in it, but they still haven't actually put in the work.

They want to use the Ads manager. They want to take the seriously and run ads the right way, but they, for whatever reason, don't. Actually learn how to do it correctly. So what we'll see is like somebody will run ads and the ads manager versus a boosted post, I'll say, Hey, two thumbs up.

Good, good job for that. But they set it up wrong. the ads platform, especially meta ads, which is predominantly where our ad spend goes it's a very technical platform. It's easy messed up if you don't know what you're doing or if you don't have help from someone that knows what they do.

But the issues that I see are, you've set things up, but you have no pixel. A dataset is what they call it now, but no pixel and no conversion data. That means you're not telling meta what's good or what's bad. Generally, if you set up the pixel correctly, or you're using what's called API integration or cappy, I'm getting way into nerdy stuff here.

You can basically say when this event happens, when someone sees my ad, they click the. they sign up for the thing, that's a good sign. That's what I want. Send me more people like that. Or they saw the ad, they signed up for it, they filled out my inquiry form and they booked a call. Gimme one of those people.

I want the people that booked a call.

And so every time that happens, meta's getting a, a nice reinforcement that this thing is happening. So they're gonna say, oh. we got four or five book calls from this, this ad right here. first of all, we're gonna spend more money behind that ad than the other ads, and we're gonna show it to more people like those four, the book to call, and now five and now six, and now seven and 10, and 15, and 30, and a hundred.

The more conversions you get on that event, the better optimized meta is going to be to sending more people like that to you.

But what happens is people don't do the correct event. They don't do a book call or they don't even do a lead. They'll do some stupid conversion goal, like video views. Show me more people to watch my video or engagement. a positive thing, a good thing to happens to.

Someone engaged in my head, they liked it. They hard it, they thumbs uped it every time that happens. That's telling meta, oh, I want more of that. Show it to more people who like the ad. The problem is that's not a very good conversion goal. You want people who are actually gonna get further down the funnel.

And if you look a holistic view of like, what's an early sign of success to a late sign of success, how does it work? Thing number one is somebody will watch your video. Cool. That's good. That's a good thing to happen. But if they watch the video and don't actually click on it or do anything else and they're gonna drop off, they might watch the video and like it again.

If they just leave from there, it's not a thing that we want, if they don't click the ad, then that's not a good thing. Well, let's say they click the ad next and we're optimizing for clicks, then you're gonna get a whole bunch of people to your landing page, but they won't actually convert.

Not a good thing either. So when they click, they land on the landing page and they're gonna put their email address in to opt in. That's the next kind of funnel. The next thing we could optimize for, we can optimize for leads there. Sometimes that works, sometimes it's enough, sometimes it's not. What's the next thing after that?

They're gonna fill out an inquiry form they're gonna book a call with you and they're gonna hopefully purchase from you. The further down the funnel we get, the better optimization we can do.

But the caveat is we need enough conversion events to happen. Generally, you're not getting a ton of book calls, so we can't necessarily optimize for that at first. So we might do just generally leads. You'll get a lot of leads early on, and that'll be early signs of success. And then we can start to get more inquiries and we can start to optimize for inquiries in further and further down the funnel until ultimately one day you're optimizing for purchases.

Most freelancers will never optimize for purchases. Most freelancers will likely not even optimize for remote calls, although some can, a lot freelancers can't optimize for inquiries submitted because you'll have enough volume, enough numbers for that. And a lot, especially at the start, will just optimize for leads.

But if you don't understand this and you don't know how to troubleshoot this and you don't know what the numbers are, good versus bad, you're gonna end up doing a bunch of dumb stuff.

And if you don't know how to learn this stuff, you've gotta find someone who can teach you this. But that interest in learning the actual skills. Is the thing. I've seen people just ruin them again and again and again. They spend hundreds or thousands of dollars behind paid ads, and yet they have nothing to show for it

'cause they threw money at a problem using a tool that they had no idea how to utilize. And I imagine it's, it's something similar to like, Hey, I wanna build a house, but I've got this stupid house on the way that I need to tear down to build a new house. So I'm gonna rent a giant excavator to demolish the house.

Although I have no idea how to use it, I'm just gonna figure it out. And I can imagine the detriment that would ensue from there.

That's number three. So again, we've got lack of credibility, number one. Lack of clarity is number two, lack of interest in learning the actual skills behind the ads that you want to run. Number four is you have no clear testing process.

testing process is basically like, here's what we do every single time. We do this many ads, we run it for thismany days, or spend this much money on it. Here's the numbers we're looking at and if we don't hit these numbers, we're going to try it one more time. That's the testing method in a nutshell, but there's just no clear testing process whatsoever.

Freelancers generally will just throw up an ad or two, maybe or three if they're smarter and then they don't work and they, you're like, well, I tried paid ads, it didn't work, they don't know whether to use images or reels or. Long form video. what placements to use.

They don't know if they should use carousels,

and usually because you have no idea what numbers you're even looking for, which there'll be more on that in a minute, have no idea what numbers you're looking for. I'm just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, and usually nothing sticks. So the easiest method that I see for running paid ads and testing, a good testing process is we test in batches of three.

The way we do it is we create three ads, all video, 30, 60 seconds. We run the test of three ads. We look at the numbers, and based on those numbers, we figure out what the problem is. We say, oh, this is the issue right here. We see this one thing. An example might be, we call it a hook percentage. What percentage of your people.

Viewed three seconds of your video actually made it to the 15 second portion. What percentage of it if we see below, like 25, 30%, we say that your hook is weak and we just need to go back and update the hook. The rest of the video can say the same. Let's just change the first 15 seconds of the ad. we find the problem, we come up with hypothesis.

Let's try these three hooks that I think will be stronger based on what we're seeing before. You create another batch of three to test and it might just be rerecording the first 15 seconds and then editing it onto you know, the rest of the ads you already had. And then we're gonna run the test, look at the numbers, find the problems, come up with hypothesis, create another three to test until we, what I call, move the dollar down the funnel.

It just means we're putting a dollar in and that dollar's gonna get stuck somewhere. It's gonna fall outta the funnel somewhere in there. And it's gonna be, maybe the hook's bad, maybe the ad is fine, but they're getting the landing page and your landing page sucks. Or your inquiry form has too many questions on it, so they fall off there.

Basically, we're gonna keep going down the funnel until we figure it out. We're gonna tidy it up until the dollar moves down the funnel to the very end, and you get something back. You may put $2 in and get $1 back.meaning you put like $200 in and you get 100 back. Something like that.And eventually you're gonna get.

A dollar in dollar back then, a dollar in $3 back, a dollar in $5 back, a dollar in $10 back, $20 back, $30 back. Some of our clients have more than $30 return on ad spend, but it comes through this exact testing method that I'm talking about. This is essentially the scientific method. This is the thing that's been around for hundreds of years, probably thousands of years.

There was even,

I looked it up and there was like. 1100 BC was the number I saw where was like Egyptian writing, they found some hieroglyphs or something that was like, basically the, the scientific method, early versions of that. So this is a tried and true method that has worked for a very long time.

We're just using it in the ads space. Otherwise, if you're not using this, if you're not using some sort of testing process, you're just burning money.

Paid ads is not a, binary game. It's not like a one or zero. It worked or didn't work. People say like, it didn't work, and I'm like, what didn't work? And they're just like, it, it didn't work. I'm like, what didn't work? Because to make paid ads work, it's generally just looking at what part didn't work and fixing that one thing.

And it's a spectrum. there's like a lot of little things to figure out, but once you tidy up one of those, each one of those issues at a time, you're turning a bunch of different zeros into ones until you get. A full thing that actually works. And then it's not just, does it work?

How well can it work? 'cause for us, over time, we're making every single part of our funnel more and more efficient, which is important because every year ads tend to get more expensive. And so if you're not beating what the market is doing, you're actually hurting yourself. And you can't run paid ads forever Fortunately the bar is relatively low. Most people don't have a great testing process. Most people don't know what they're doing, especially in the markets that a lot of our clients play in. Some are way more competitive, but generally speaking, people dunno what they're doing. So if you have some sort of framework that you're following to actually test things, you're gonna be ahead of 99 5% of people out there.

So that's number four is no clear testing. Process number five, the number five reason your ads didn't work if you tried them before or won't work if you try 'em in the future.

is unrealistic. Budget expectations. Here's what I mean. People trying to land like a $10,000 client I see regularly give up after like a hundred dollars in ad spend. They spend a hundred bucks and they're like, this didn't work for me. What's going on? hundred dollars is like enough for a solid, like one solid test of ads.

Like you're talking about the three launching three ads. If you have a $10,000 client, you would probably wanna spend anywhere from 60 to 70 to a hundred dollars on that set of three ads before you can say whether or not that's a good test or not. So a hundred bucks is enough for one test not to see if the overall strategy will work for you, not to see if the industry will work for you.

It's a test. Here's our progress path. Assuming a client's worth like three to $10,000, Here's generally what we wanna see at each kind of tier in spending. This would be a good one for you when you're thinking through, like if you're trying to do ads on your own.

Here's what I should be seeing back on my,ad spend. After a hundred dollars spent, your first a hundred dollars spent, we generally wanna see three to 15 leads. And this depends on the industry. some industries leads are way cheaper, so you always see like 20, 25 leads on their first hundred dollars.

And some you'll see like one. It really depends on the industry, but I wanna see generally for like in a threeto a $10,000 client, if that's your pricing, three to 15 leads, we wanna see one to five inquiries and maybe one to two book calls. You'll likely have zero book calls in your first a hundred dollars in ad spend, but we might get one to five inquiries that's a really good positive sign after a first a hundred ad spend after your first 500 in ad spend.Leads don't matter at this point. I don't care how many leads you got at that point. We've gotten to $500 and the other signs look okay. The number of leads is largely irrelevant. What I care about at this point, the number I really look at is inquiries. We wanna have five to 25 inquiries. I know that's a wide margin, but this is very industry dependent it depends on what the rest of your metrics look at at this point.

Inquiries, again, are kinda the leading indicator. The things I look for from here is book calls. I wanna see two to eight booked calls. On your first $500 in ad spend and one to four qualified leads, meaning you got two to eight book calls, about 50% of those will be like ideal clients getting a little higher, a little lower than that, but that's really what I wanna see.

So a really good sign if you have that at 500 in ad spend. Some clients, by the way, have spent 500 bucks and landed $8,000, $12,000 worth of clients. They've turned it into like many multiples of what they did. I wouldn't even call them outliers. It happens.commonly enough to $500 where I'd say like it can happen, but I don't want to set the expectation there.

So when I'm trying to set mental expectations for people, $500 in ad spend, you've gotten like one four qualified leads who have booked a call with you and you're excited to talk to those. Remember, this is for like a three to $10,000 client. So if your ads are bringing in qualified leads, they're doing their job.

It's your turn to now just actually close those leads at a thousand dollars. This is where Certain stats just don't matter. Like I don't really care. Number of leads, number of inquiries, even book calls at a thousand dollars Only thing I care about at this point is how many offers made and clients closed.

So at a thousand dollars spent,

If you have anywhere from like two to five offers made, meaning they came through your funnel, they filled out your inquiry form, they booked a call, you looked over it. This is wonderful. You actually had the call. Everything made sense.

You can help them. They can help you. And you're like, cool. I think this is a great fit. Here's my pricing. What do you think? Check yes or no. Anybody remember that song? Think this is How Love Goes. Check Yes or no. Yeah, you remember that song? Anyways, that's kinda how it works on the call. Check yes or no.

If you've said, check yes or no to two to five people, and your clients are worth between three and $10,000,

and ideally, at least some leads who were seriously considering it. They didn't just outright reject you. Ideally, you've maybe even closed a claim at this point.

At this point, things are working well. Because remember, if even it's only $3,000 client and your first thousand dollars of ad spend, and you have two to five serious conversations with offers made and people are strongly considering you, and you can even close one of them for even $3,000, that's a three to one return on ad spend.

It's not great for a service-based business, but it's a wonderful start and if you can shoot for that, it's only up from there. You can make the things more efficient, you can get better at sales. let's just say you made five offers, if you can get your close rate to 40%, that's two closes at three grand.

That's $6,000 at 10 grand, that's $20,000,but that's kind of a good roadmap to shoot for when it comes to ad spend expectations. Yes, it can take longer than that. Yes, it can go way shorter than that too. But if you at least have that sort of like benchmark to look at as you're going through this, it'll allow you to better spend money without having a return yet.

'cause you think about it, it's spending athousand dollars in the void with no real like feedback or knowing. Again, this is assuming you're doing it on your own without having any understanding of what's working or not. That's scary. So if you have, again, these sort of progress points where you're like, okay.

Brian said it. 500 bucks. I should have these numbers. I should have five to 25 inquiries. I'm within that. That's okay. Two to eight book calls. Okay. I got that. One to four qualified leads. Okay. I got two qualified leads. Everything's looking good. I haven't made a buck back yet, but Brian said this is okay.

That's a better place to be than somebody who's like, I spend 500 bucks and they didn't work. Well, it did work. you're moving the dollar down the funnel. It did work. You just didn't understand that it was working. It's like you're in a gold mine blindly. Just chipping away at the rocks, not knowing what you're even looking at, and you just pass by a wonderful gold vein that you just ignored 'cause you didn't know what the hell you were doing.

You gave up.

That leads us to number six. Reason why you paid ads didn't work when you tried them or won't work if you do try them, is lead quality issues.

The reason I said like,that leads or inquiries don't really matter, pass a certain point in your ad spend is because the only thing that really matters is qualified leads. Qualified leads matter most, and a qualified lead, depending on what metric you look at or what platform you look at, who you learning from

The, you just wanna look at is, who I learned from, think Alex Ram Moey, and he learned it from like IBM or some shit Bant, BANT. The lead has the budget to make the purchase. they have the authority to make the decision. They have the need for your services, and they have the timeline that makes sense for, the project.

If you look at the opposite of that, a really unqualified lead is like they don't have a budget. it's like the minority stakeholder of the business that you're trying to work with. So they don't have any decision power. They kind of need your service, but not really.

They're like, eh, we could use it or not. and then the timeline is like, we could maybe use your service like eight months from now or a year from now. That's a great example of an unqualified lead. And again, qualified or unqualified. We try to make it very binary, but it is kind of a spectrum as well, because like they have the budget, they have the authority, they have the need, but the timeline is like six months later, that's still a qualified lead.

And you might be able to get a deposit or something to kinda like book 'em in advance. But that's still a great lead. And I wouldn't discount that just because it's like the timeline's six months from now, just close 'em six months from now. Right. Or budget people like are down on budget all the time.

Like especially in the industry I come from, which is like the music industry. A lot of music producers working with broke bands and they're like, ah, they're broke. They don't have the budget. So they're not qualified. Well, I'm like,they don't have the budget right now. But if you have set like a vision for them that they really want this thing and they have the authority to make the decision, they have the need of your services, like they're talented and they have the timeline where theywant to work with you as soon as possible.

The budget's, the thing that can be solved.it's another one of those, like it might be one or two months. You need to save some extra money on the side. You need to work with 'em on how to actually save. You can put together a savings plan for them where they basically do layaway with you, where they pay you in chunks until it's all paid off and they come to the studio for you.

There's ways around this, so just because one of these things is missing doesn't mean it's an unqualified lead. It just means that you don't know how to actually close those people.

And we'll talk more about that in a second. 'cause I kind of got ahead of myself here. That's more of a sales problem, which we'll talk about. But once you know what a qualified lead is, you've determined what those factors are.

What we see time and time again with the clients that we work with is they still make this mistake. They know what a qualified lead is, but they start optimizing for what,is like the cheapest leads. So we had a client who was getting $7 book calls. That means for every a hundred dollars spent, he was getting 14 booked calls on his calendar.

But the problem was he had a high no-show rate, meaning likethe percentage of people who actually showed up for those, discovery calls was very low. And he had a low conversion rate on those calls. So when they did show he wasn't converting those either. And the reason why he was getting so many of those is because his messaging was targeting low quality leads.

So this client who's in like the rap hip hop industry again, work with a lot of music producers out there. And that's already inherently tough industry. 'cause there's a lot of people that are, like on the beginner side, they have a lot of aspirations, but they have no, execution power to back it.

They want something, but they're not willing to put in the work, which again, we see this a lot in the freelance world too. But the issue with his ads was he was, creating ads that were appealingto goals and motivations that only beginners really have.

And I forget the exact hooks, but maybe something to the effect of like.

You know, if you're a rap and hip hop artist and you want label quality music or something like that, you know, here's what I can do to help. Again, that's very broad strokes, probably something like that. And like if you're a very beginner, of course you want label quality work. You don't want to put the budget behind it.

You don't wanna have to put the work into it to do those things, but you want. So what we did instead was just create better two things. One was a better inquiry form so we could actually better weed out those like tire kickers, the people who are not serious. So putting some questions in there that would basically like, call it a honeypot.

It's like a question that only a beginner would answer this way. And then questions that only an advanced person would answer this way. So better inquiry form to weed out, low quality leads and then also.

Better messaging. But before we get into the messaging side, I wanna talk about lead filtering because sometimes if you have enough leads coming in the door, you don't even have to change your messaging. You can just have whatever the ad is. It was bringing in $7 book calls when sometimes we can get quality from the quantity.

So in these numbers, like when a client's worth like four or $5,000 and you're getting book calls for $7, you can reject a lot of leads.

Or better yet, you can even filter those out so that it never even access your calendar. So like things you can do, like put logic into your forms. So have to answer this question this way. It just gets sent to a thank you page. Thanks for filling out the form. I'll reach out with next steps versus going to your book calendar.

You can protect your calendar that way through just basic logic and forms. And what can happen is, instead of $77 book calls, we're getting $70 book calls. That means only one outta 10 leads are getting through to your calendar. And if that's the case, a $70 book call from someone's who qualified is still wonderful.

$70 book call. Even if you rejected, you kicked off half of those on your calendar. That's still $140 per qualified lead. If you have a 70% show rate,

that means it's $200 to get somebody to show up on a call. if you can close. Even 30% of those, that's 666 can't make that up. $666 to close a client. And again, if that client's worth five grand, that's a 7.5 return on ad spend. That means you put $1 in and got seven and a half dollars back. That's a funnel that actually works.

But we can do better than that because not only can you filter like that, you can also create messaging on the front end that targets more serious musicians or whatever your client niche is. I'm just using musicians in this example because $7 book calls is insane, and I've no only ever seen this in the music world.

In the business world, it's gonna be quite a bit more.

so if your clients are businesses, please don't expect to get $7 book calls. But what we did was just create messaging that targets the more serious musicians. so ad hooks that are targeting problems or targeting goals that only serious musicians would have.

And again, I don't have the specific examples here, but I just kind of brainstorm a couple before this episode. These are not great, but you kinda get the gist of it. So like, think about what kind of problem would only be experienced by somebody who's successful. Well, your ad hook might be something like once you cross a hundred thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, your mix has to sound like 1 million a month or you'll never get there. It's a much higher bar and what I still will bring in like bottom of the barrel leads, most likely because those people aspire to get to a million a month or a hundred thousand monthly listeners. It's also gonna appeal to those people who got to that higher level.

Yeah, I'm at a hundred thousand a month, I need to get to a million. That's their next goal. ' cause usually it's in like,

tens like that, it might go from 10,000 to a hundred thousand to a million is like the appeal that they're going for.

But once you get the lead quality issue sorted out, you've essentially made the paid ads, game work, The whole point of paid ads is to turn strangers into conversations. People that are on your Excel calendar,you're having conversations with them,

you're making an offer to them because you can help them and they need your help.

And if that happens, paid ads work for you. But there's a seventh issue here The seventh reason why paid ads didn't work for you when you tried them.That is worth talking about and that is sales problems Selling to strangers is like a completely different game. If you're selling with people who already know, like, and trust you, that is like so easy.It's what they call in sales world. It's like lay down leads.It's like you don't have to fight for it, you don't have to struggle with it.

They just lay down, you take their money and that's it. it's the easy sell in the world, and that's what most freelancers are used to.

And so when you see like freelancers bragging, like, oh, I,close like 60, 70, 80, 90% of people who inquire for my services, to me. I close like 80%. I saw somebody bragging about a 90% close rate. Not only are you way undercharging, if that's the case. Generally what I see is maybe you're closing 80, 90%, but your counter's like a third of the way full, so you still have a bunch of open counter space.

And so if that's you, you can't just do lay down leads for the rest of your life. You have to learn how to turn strangers into clients if you ever want to break outta that referral dependency. And the referral dependency is what keeps people in that feast or famine cycle because you don't control when someone's referred to you. You can control how much you're spinning on ads, how many batches of tests you're running, what sort of lead qualities you're getting, how we can optimize the lead quality.

But like I said, once ads are bringing in qualified leads to you, your lack of close clients is not an ads issue. It is a hundred percent a sales issue because the ads are doing their job.

And this is what we do with clients. We'll review their sales calls, and we've seen this again and again. One of our clients was on our ROI guarantee. Soone of the guarantees we have in our coaching program is if you don't make at least $10,000 worth of new clients from, what we do with you, then we'll keep coaching you for free until you hit that number, until you hit $10,000 in new clients.

one of our clients that we had on that ROI guarantee I won't name the name, He has given us permission to use his name, but not probably related to this, so I won't use his name. he was on the ROI guarantee because he wasn't getting clients and, all the numbers looked great.

Everything looked great. He just wasn't getting clients we were trying to figure this out. This was one of our earlier clients, so we hadn't really figured out the sales problem side of things yet until we started reviewing his calls and we realized, when we reviewed one of his call replays we quickly realized he was sabotaging his own sales.

What he was doing was an okay discovery process. So he is like uncovering their needs and basically doing like a diagnosis, but on the prescription side of things, basically prescribing how we could help. He was shooting himself in the foot.

It was horrible. So what he would do is he'd get to the part where it's like offering his services and instead of saying, okay, you have all these problems, or you have all these goals that you want, all these things, I've diagnosed this. Does that sound right? Yes, it does. Cool. Here's how I can help.

Instead of saying, here's what I think makes the most sense for you, based on all that, we'll do X, Y, and Z, and the result will be, A, B, and C. Does that sound like something you're interested in? Yes, it is. Okay. Here's the price. Boom. Again, very abridged sales process here, but you get the gist.

That's what it should be. Diagnose. You figure out what the pain is or the goals are. you shape your offer to match their needs. And then just see, before price is mentioned, just see if it even fits what they're looking for. Instead of that, what it would do is like, here's all the things.

Am I understanding your situation correctly? Cool. We've diagnosed your problem. So here's what we can do. Mr. And Mrs. Client, I can give you package A and it'll include all these things and it'll be this exact price. Or we can do package B and it'll include all these things plus these three more things, and it'll be this price that's like 50% more, or we can do package three.

And it's like all these things plus six more things and it'll be twice as much. Which one of those three packages do you want? And they'll say, woo, I don't know. Can you think about it? Can you send this to me? And they'll say, sure. And then get off the call. And that would be their sales process. As soon as we realized that he was doing that, we just course corrected him on his sales process on fixing those sorts of things.

Magically he closed like 30, $40,000 worth of projects, quit his day. Job rode off into the sunset. So sales problems can hold you back from paid ads working or not working, but it's gonna be different for everybody. Like I said earlier at the beginning of this episode, I'm doing a free paid ads q and a on January 22nd at 1:00 PM That should be if I, this episode's coming out when I think it is.

It should be just be in a couple days.

You can go to six figure creative.com/ads. That's a ds,

that should take you to the registration page for this. be at 1:00 PM it'll be live only. Not gonna do replay for this. So if you want your questions answered on, do paid ads work for me? How do I know if I'm ready for paid ads or, here's what I tried, it didn't work.

What do you think, Brian?

Or Will this even work in my niche? Or just anything else? Anything that came up while you're listening to this episode or watching this episode that you're like, I would love to pick your brain on this. Just register for that. And I'll answer whatever questions you have for me. It's not gonna be, shouldn't be a huge group of people.

And if it is, if I see a lot of people registering, what I'll do is I'll reach out, to people who register and ask to submit questions ahead of time. And then that way I can go through the questions and organize 'em ahead of time and kind of group 'em together for the most popular ones. but I'll stick around as long as needed to answer any questions that you have.

Again, that's January 22nd at 1:00 PM Central Standard Time. Just go to six figure creative.com/ads to register for that and we can chat things over for you. So that's all I got for you today. Thanks so much for listening to the six Figure Creative Podcast, and I'll see you, hopefully this Thursday at 1:00 PM Central Standard Time if you go register for that.

Otherwise, I'll see you next week. Peace.

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