Transcription
In this video, I want to talk about how I managed to start advertising with just a $1 per day budget. I want to discuss why I even thought that I could advertise on such a low budget. I also want to speak to some of you who are considering starting to run paid ads, starting to run digital ads, but you're scared that your budget might not be big enough.
Now, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Davon Thomas, and I am a digital marketer. Well, at least I am right now. I'm a Google Certified digital marketer, and what I do is help business owners run their own ads without marketing agencies and without huge budgets.
The first thing that I want to do before I even get into the video is invite you to my free workshop. It's called "How to Get Your First 100 Leads with Google Ads." You can check it out at the link in the description below, and I'll tell you a little bit more about it towards the end of the video.
So, when I started back in 2016, I honestly didn't think I was going to get any traction with advertising. In fact, I was dead broke in my business. I was looking for clients, and I was kind of so desperate that I ran out of options. It's hard enough starting a business. We need to be honest; most of the time, your family is not supportive, your friends are doing other stuff, they're not really interested, and it's hard to find just people to talk to, let alone clients that are actually going to pay you money for your products and services.
I figured out very early on that instead of posting to social media every single day like a crazy person and getting three likes, which wasn't going to help pay my bills, I realized that advertising, although it might be expensive, is actually a better use of my time. Even if I'm advertising on a small budget, at least I don't have to create content that day. I don't need to DM or spam people. I don't need to send out long emails or cold email people. I'm literally just paying for the ad. The ad is running, and it's talking to people on my behalf.
That was an exciting prospect to me, and the fact that all of this was automated was also helpful. So, what I decided to do was say, "Hey, I've got $1 per day. I've only got $1. I'm going to try this out, and if it sucks, and if it doesn't work out at all, that means I've only lost $1." That's exactly what I decided to do.
Here I was with my little $1 per day budget, and I started running Facebook ads. I got one client from my Facebook ads, and I was so excited because I had this lead in my inbox. I called the lead; it was a guy, and he wanted a logo for his business. I did a logo, and funny story, that client that I got with that Facebook ad in 2016 is still my paying client in my business to this day.
Not only that, but I saw Facebook ads were working, so I said, "Let me try out these Google ads." Google ads were crazy! I was getting, I think, two or three leads every second day with my Google ads. For me, someone with a $1 per day budget, I was like, "This is crazy! This shouldn't be happening."
Okay, clearly I've broken something; there's a glitch in The Matrix because I honestly thought running ads was only for big businesses. I did not think that it was for small to even medium-sized businesses. I didn't even see myself as a small business; I saw myself as a teeny tiny business, and I had all of this impostor syndrome as well on top of it.
But I'm so happy that I started. I am so happy that I started because what that did was open my eyes to understand that these digital marketing platforms are way more democratized than you might think.
Back in the old days, what used to happen is you would take out a newsletter ad or classified ad, and there was a set amount of money that you could spend. That was literally what you had to spend to play in the space. If they said the minimum budget you had to spend was, like, $1,000 a day, that's just what you had to pay.
But with these digital platforms, with Google and Facebook, you can get away with $5 a day easily. You can get away with $10 a day easily, and that $7 a day will actually end up bringing you a client who is interested in your services.
What's crazy about this is a lot of people would tell me, "Yo, but Davon, that worked for you in 2016. You were spending $1 per day in 2016; that would never work now. In fact, the average cost per click is $5 or $6." Well, if that's true, then why are my students still getting results with small budgets?
I have one client; her name is Martin. She's a dog coach, and she's only spending €7 per day. She managed to fully book out her dog coaching business with that €7 per day budget. I've got another client; her name is Gia, a new student in my course. She is spending less than $40 per day, and she got 40 private tutoring student leads in just one day.
Now, let's say not all of these leads are good. Let's say only two of them convert out of the 40 leads she's gotten. That's still more than enough money to cover her advertising costs and make her business profitable. Now imagine if 10 of them say yes to her; now we're talking about a lot of money. Now imagine if almost all of them say yes to her; now we're talking about even more money, and this is just for $40 per day ads.
So, the point that I'm trying to make is if you're holding yourself back from advertising and if you're telling yourself that advertising is only for big businesses and not for small businesses, you are so wrong. Prove me wrong! I want you to go and run a $10 per day Google ad and just come back to me and tell me what the results are.
That's the first thing I want you to know: advertising is not just for big businesses; it is for every size of business. You just have to find the platform that works for you.
The next thing that was holding me back was, "Hey, I didn't have much money." The main thing when I talk to entrepreneurs about advertising and running ads is I always hear, "Davon, I just don't have money. I just don't have the money to do advertising."
It's very weird because it's the people that need advertising the most that are telling me they don't have budgets for advertising. I want to flip the script a little bit and want you to think about something: you don't really need money to advertise your business. All you need to do is make an initial investment to get the first bunch of clients in, and once you get the first bunch of clients in, you're then going to use their money to advertise your business.
So, let's say, for example, you're scared of advertising because it's going to cost you, let's say, $5,000 to get started. All you need to do is spend the $5,000. When you start getting leads back, those leads, if you can close a couple of deals—let's say you make $1,000 per deal—if you can close 10 of the leads, so let's say you get 100 leads, and you only close 10 of them, you've already made the $5,000 to cover your expenses.
Now, the rest of the money is profit; it's yours to do with what you want. Of course, you still have to pay business expenses and things like that, but at least you've covered your marketing costs. If you keep on advertising, you now no longer have to use your money; you can just use the money that's coming into the business, and you can advertise and make more money.
So, the argument is always, "Davon, I don't have money to advertise. Advertising is expensive. I'm going to do SEO." Great! If you hire an SEO company, that's going to cost money. If you have somebody who knows what they're doing, that's going to cost even more money.
And if you have the best SEO on planet Earth, on top of that, the top four search results—those are ads. Those are Google ads. So even if you have an SEO company and you're paying them a million dollars per month, they can only get you underneath the ads. You might as well go for the ads, right?
Or we can think about this a different way. If you're spending money on marketing agencies or social media agencies, or maybe you're even just creating your own content, it's going to take so much time, effort, and energy to create content, and you might only get a couple of views, a couple of likes from friends and family members. Let's face it; they weren't really going to buy anything from you.
Versus if you took that same money—let's just say you took $300 and invested it in ads instead. Those ads don't really need as much time, effort, and attention as creating social media content does.
What happens? This is me, as somebody who creates content on social media, telling you that I would much rather run an ad all year long than create YouTube videos. The only problem with that is if my ads fail for whatever reason, I always have my content as a fallback, and my content is kind of free. Once I make it, it's there; it lasts forever, and it gets me clients.
But if I had an option, if somebody said to me, "Hey, we're going to put you through this challenge to see if you're going to get 100 clients in the next 100 days," and I had the option of running ads or creating content, no brainer! I would definitely run ads. I would run ads all day long because within two weeks, I know I can get my ad in front of 10,000 people, 100,000 people, and I only need a small percentage of those people to actually become leads. I need a smaller percentage of those people to actually buy from me to make that whole process cost-effective.
So, the main question I have for you, if you're watching this video, is— and I want you to tell me that below in the comment section—what's holding you back? What's really holding you back from running advertising? There are so many horror stories out there that I can understand why you might feel reluctant to spend money.
It's also very hard to spend money when you've got no money coming in. But at the end of the day, I believe in taking risks. I think that the more risks you take in business, the better off you are. When you're spending $300 or let's say you're spending $2,000, I doubt that small of an investment is going to sink your entire business.
Now, what we also need to do is talk about just the idea around not advertising or some of the other things that will stop you from advertising. I think one of the major reasons why people don't advertise is they want to operate under the radar. They want to do things in secret; they don't want any spotlight on them.
I've heard this a lot from business owners as well, and I think this has a lot to do with impostor syndrome. So, I'll tell you a little bit about myself, and maybe if this sounds like you, you can relate. I honestly believed my business was not good enough. I believed that we made websites for people, but I didn't believe that my websites were good enough to compete on an international level or even on a national level.
I honestly didn't believe that I could do as good of a job as the major website design agencies. What I was really scared of when I said, "I don't want to advertise; I want to fly under the radar," was I was scared of being found out, of being a fraud. I was scared that some stranger would come into my business, click on my ad, and go, "This is garbage! I absolutely hate these websites! You don't know what you're doing!"
I was scared to death of that because my business is my baby. I've been working on this for years, and I don't want to find out that maybe I'm not as good at making websites as I thought I was. That's really something that held me back. I was thinking to myself, "Man, if I make an ad, this ad is going to show to all of these people, and these people might absolutely hate my business."
Also, ads are pretty annoying when you think about it, so it just doesn't feel like a good move for me. But I'm glad I did. I'm glad I did because I found strangers that valued my business more than my friends and family members. I found people that said, "Davon, your work is amazing! We want to pay for this! We want this! We want this!"
It kind of took all of that impostor syndrome, all of the fear, all of the anxiety, all of those insecurities, and just wiped it away. Till today, when I sit down and think about all of the reasons why I didn't do it, I was like, "Man, the first thing you should have done was just advertise your business. You would have been so much further."
Even to this day, we are still running YouTube ads. We are still running search ads. We are still running Performance Max ads, Google ads. We're still doing it to this day. Why? Because it is a cost-effective exercise, and it's not that time-intensive.
I think a lot of people also tell themselves, "Ah, I'm not a computer guy," or "I'm not really good at Google ads, so what do I want to be near a computer and figure all of this stuff out?" Well, I hate to break this to you, but it's kind of the way of the world.
Back in the days, when you were looking for a haircut, what did you do? You used to ask around, ask a friend, "Is there a barber shop near here?" Or you used to get into a car and drive around, looking for the barber shops in your area. Nobody does that anymore. Everybody takes their phone and Googles "barber shop near me."
Whatever pops up on the top of the search results, that's exactly what they do. They go to those places. Are those places the best? I don't know. Are those places the most efficient? I don't know. Are the prices the best? I don't know. But because they appeared at the top of the search results, people assume that those are their best options.
This is where a lot of business owners struggle because sometimes you do a much better job. I hear this all the time: "Davon, I do such a good job, and my customers just aren't referring me enough." Marketing is not your customers' job; that's your job as a business owner.
It's not your customer's job. Your customer has a job, and that is to run their business. They're not going to do the marketing for your business. You do get that one customer who's always referring people to you, and thank God for those customers. But at the end of the day, if you're going to just rely on that person, it's going to be slim pickings for a long time in your business.
What you want to do is have multiple ways to bring people into your business, and you want to multiply your income. If you say that for every $100,000 you make in business, you're going to take 10% of your money and put it aside—so you're going to take $10,000 and put it towards advertising—eventually, what's going to happen is your top-line revenue will go up.
It'll go up because your business is exactly the same business, but it's interacting with more new people on a daily basis. However, if you say that you're just going to eat all of the money and you're not going to invest anything towards advertising, what eventually happens is you have two or three dry months, and you don't know what to do. You're stressed; you've got bills to pay, you've got staff to pay, you've got stock to buy, and you just don't have any money.
Your only strategy is hope. "I hope somebody refers me. I hope that person who got my quotation says yes. I hope that this happens." Whereas if you have advertising, you can basically guarantee that you're going to wake up the next day, and you're going to have fresh leads in your inbox that want to actually work with you.
Now, is it all sunshine and roses? Definitely not. Marketing agencies—most of them out there—they're sharks. They'll tell you that they spend x amount of dollars, and then when you go check, they did, but they spent it on the most wasteful campaigns possible. Some of them are outsourcing their work, and you'll also find a lot of them out there claiming that they do Facebook ads or Google ads, but they actually have no proof that they've gotten people results in the past.
The reason why I can speak so openly about marketing agencies is I don't run a marketing agency. I teach entrepreneurs how to run their own ads so they can get their own results and be independent.
So maybe what you need to do is, instead of hiring a marketing agency, instead of investing a bunch of money into a company when you don't really know the ad platform, maybe you should just learn a little bit about digital marketing. Learn a little bit about what platform is the best for you to be on, and then you're going to be in such a good position.
What I always tell my students is to start small. If I started off with $1 per day and still got clients, you can start off with $10 per day and still get clients. You can start off with $100 per day and still get clients. You do not need to go out there and spend tens of thousands of dollars, especially when you don't know what you're doing yet.
The time will come when your ads are working, and your leads are affordable, and everything is starting to go well, and all of your different systems are clicking. That's when you want to spend a lot of money on ads. But when you're starting out, all you really need to do is get started. That's it.
So, what I want to do is offer you a way to get started. It's called my 100 Leads Workshop. Basically, what I'm going to do is show you how to get your first 100 affordable, high-quality leads with Google ads. I'm going to talk you through the system that I use to not only get myself results but also get all of my students results.
If you do decide to sign up for this workshop, which is free by the way, I'm going to give you a free course. I'm going to give you a free course for beginners on Google ads, where we'll teach you the dashboard, what you should and shouldn't be doing, and I'll also give you a setup checklist so that you start off your campaign with pro settings.
Now, if that sounds good to you, I want you to click on the link in the description below. What I also want to ask you towards the end of this video is what's holding you back? Why do you feel like advertising is not a good idea for your business?
I am genuinely curious. After doing this for seven years, I've heard a lot, but I want to know from you why you feel like advertising is not good. Or if this video has convinced you to actually start advertising, let me know why you started advertising or why you decided to start advertising.
Anyway, I'll see you in the next video, my friend. Oh, by the way, if you want to watch a video where I speak to a Google ads expert—well, an ex-Google ads employee who's also a Google ads expert—and you want to see us discuss whether small budgets can or can't work in Google ads, I want you to check this video over here.
I will see you next time. Peace!