How To Run Facebook Ads With SMALL Budget (13X ROAS)

How To Run Facebook Ads With SMALL Budget (13X ROAS)

When I first started my Facebook ads agency, I ran successful Facebook ad campaigns for clients with tiny budgets. Literally $100 per month, that's about $3 per day.

And the good news is you absolutely can succeed with Facebook ads with a small budget. And in this article, I'm going to show you how. So follow the article with us to the end.

How To Run Facebook Ads With SMALL Budget

What a Small Facebook ads Budget Actually Is

So let's start by defining what a small Facebook ads budget actually is. So I would define a small Facebook ads budget as anything less than $3,000 per month. So about $100 per day or less. And a tiny Facebook ads budget is anything less than $600 per month. So $20 per day or less.

Now, like I've already said, you absolutely can succeed with a small Facebook ads budget. You could succeed with a tiny Facebook ads budget. So that's the good news. And actually recommend that a lot of businesses start there. They start with a small budget.

Because your first Facebook ad campaigns might not perform really well out of the gate. It might take a bit of time to work it out, that sometimes happens and it's better to start small.

Start with an amount that's not going to put you or your business in any financial difficultes. And then once you know your campaigns are profitable, you can always scale from there.

There are, however, some things that I'd recommend you do differently or things you really need to focus on when you're operating with a small Facebook ads budget as opposed to a larger budget.

And that's what we're going to run through in this article, those things that you might need to adjust that you really need to focus on if you want success with a small budget.

Tip 1: Copy from what already works well in your niche

So point number one is to copy from what works best in your industry already. When you have a small budget, you don't have a lot of money with which to test. You can't go out and test lots of different ad formats and different creative options and different headline options. You just don't have the money to be able to dedicate to all those different variables to know which works best and which doesn't.

So the way you massively shortcut that is you take a look at what's already working really well in your industry.

Now you can do that with a free tool called the Meta Ads library. You literally Google it. Pop right up. And then you can take a look at any Facebook and Instagram advertisers ads that are currently live, and you can see what ads they're running and how long those ads have been running for.

So I'd recommend you go and check out a number of competitors, find those that are running Facebook and Instagram ads, take a look at the ads that they're running and then a top tip is to analyze in particular the ones that have been running a long time.

So if you find an ad that's been live for three months or six months or longer, the chances are that that ads performing really well. Otherwise that company would have turned off those ads.

So you take a look at those ads that have been live for quite a long time, they're still currently live. You'll be able to see all that information within the Meta Ads library and then you think, okay, why are those ads working? Can we replicate that in our own ads? Can we create ads with a similar style? Can we create ads with the same format? Are they image, are they video? Can we use some of the a similar language in our copy?

You don't want to fully copy those ads. You want to model from them and create your own versions. But that can massively shortcut your path to success because you can basically benefit from all the testing that someone else has done, potentially with a much larger budget and bring that into your ads and have a much higher percentage of your ads working, which is what you need to do with a small budget because like I said, you don't have the budget to go out and do a lot of testing.

And to make this even easier for you, HubSpot, have created a fantastic free resource that contains 50 high performing Facebook ads. Where you can download these Facebook ad examples and find great options to model from. They've included ads from Nike, Hulu, Venmo and so much more.

My favorite part is that it's sorted by industry. To make it really easy to find what you're looking for. I'd strongly recommend you check it out and use it to level up your Facebook ad creative.

Tip 2: Reduce the number of variables

Point number two is to reduce the number of variables. So firstly I'd recommend that you focus on one offer only. Just try and sell the one product or service and recommend that you start by trying to sell what has sold best previously.

If you don't have data on that, you're a brand new business, then go with whichever option you think will sell best, or at least the option that has the best margins. Because obviously the better margins, the more profitable your Facebook ads are going to be if you do manage to sell that product or service.

And that really helps reduce the number of variables and doesn't spread your budget, your small budget, across too many campaigns, too many ad sets, too many ads, because if you do that, you're not going to get enough data, enough conversions on any one of those campaigns, ad sets, etc. For a you to know whether or not they're performing well and B for Meta to be able to optimize, optimize properly.

So really, really important, reduce number of variables. And then when you're just advertising that one offer, make sure that you don't overload meta with too many variables within that one campaign.

So not too many ad sets, not too many ads, really reduce right down. Obviously once it's working and then you're looking to scale, you can expand, you can sell other products, sell other services and things like that.

But do that once you're able to start increasing your budget because your one core offer, your most profitable or your best selling thing, is performing really well.

Tip 3: Trust Meta

What do I mean by that? It means using Advantage Plus shopping campaigns or using Advantage plus audience when using manual campaigns, giving Meta some suggestions around targeting, but ultimately allowing Meta to do what it thinks is best in terms of finding the right audience and doing all the things that it wants to do from an optimization standpoint.

When you have a small budget, you can't afford to be cute or clever or try and think around the system or risk part of that budget on unusual or out there things, something we might do with larger budgets. We think this has a low probability of working, but if it does work, it might work really well.

So it's worth dedicating a small poor portion of our budget and giving this a go. That doesn't work with small budgets. You don't have the budget with which to play. So just go with the recommendations, the Guidelines.

Remember, Meta wants you to get the best ad results possible because they know if you do that you're going to spend more, stick around for longer, etc. So go with their recommendations for the most part, use their systems and try and get all of that on your side.

Tip 4: You Should be willing to spend more on conversions

Now, point number four is that you should be willing to spend more on conversions. Now, a lot of new Facebook advertisers, particularly those operating with small budgets, they have unrealistic expectations of how profitable and how successful their ad campaign should be.

So I've spoken to a lot of Facebook advertisers, relatively new, usually operating with small budgets, and I'll ask them what's your target return on ad spend? Like what do you want to hit from a return on ad spend number that would make your campaigns work and you'd be happy with that. And they'll often say a 10x. So for every dollar they spend on Facebook ads, they want $10 which worth of sales leads, etc.

But that's pretty unrealistic, particularly for a relatively new Facebook ad account without a lot of conversion data, operating with a small budget. So I think you should be willing to be much more aggressive with what you're happy to spend.

To get a new customer, I would personally recommend being quite aggressive and going all the way up to your break even number. That might be a 2x ROAS, that might be a 2.5x ROAS, a 3x ROAS, obviously a lot less than what people typically say when operating with small budgets and they're beginners and that's a 10x roas.

Now what that allow you to do, yes, you won't make as much money from each new customer acquired, but what that allow you to do is scale. And when you're operating with a small budget, it's really important to remember that the results you get aren't forever.

The point of the campaigns and the ads you're running right now is to get them successful, get them to at least break even and allow you to scale.

When you do that, your campaigns are going to generate more conversion data. You'll have more budget to then play with. Meta will be able to optimize your campaigns better. You will likely see an improvement in results. You also start building a larger customer base. You start building a bigger brand because the more people interact with your business, the more brand awareness there is, the more likely there are to be referrals, the more likely there to be word of mouth, the more repeat business you get because you've got a larger customer base.

Now, perhaps you don't want to be quite as aggressive as going all the way to break even in terms of your sort of cost per purchase or your cost per lead. But would you not be happy with a 4x roas? I think you should be with a small budget, I think that's A pretty good outcome. And if you can achieve that, you can then scale. And like I said, you get all those benefits that I've just discussed.

So in general, be braver with your ad spend. See a lower ROAS number than something like a 10x Roas as a success. Because what we're doing right now with a small budget is not trying to make a lot of profit. It's to get us ready to be able to scale and produce better results and build a better, more profitable business.

Tip 5: Brand Awareness doesn't pay the bills

So point number five is no brand awareness. I've heard a lot of small business owners over the years say things like, oh, it's good to spend a bit of money on ads, just sort of get your business out there.

What does that even mean? That's so wishy washy, isn't it? Get your business out there. That's nothing tangible, that's nothing concrete. You're not really measuring any sort of return on investment from that.

It's just a throwaway sentence, but it absolutely dictates some advertisers behavior. They spend a bit of money on an awareness campaign to sort of get their business out there as a small business with a small budget.

If you run an awareness campaign and you're aiming for brand awareness, that's a really good way to just see no results from your marketing efforts. Just literally get no return, no customers, no leads.

I've seen it happen so many times. It's what a lot of new advertisers do, particularly those operating with a small budget. When you're using a small budget, you have to go for what you really want, which is either going to be leads or sales, depending on your business.

You need to set your campaign up for that, you need to craft your ad copy for that. You need to produce creative that is designed to get you that you don't have the budget to mess around with other things.

Brand awareness campaigns are for larger companies, typically those that already have an element of brand awareness and they're looking to multiply that, to refresh it, to keep it going as opposed to build it from scratch.

Now one exception to that is my omnipresent content strategy, which actually does use the awareness campaign objective. It can be very effective with small budgets because you're using it with a small targeted audience. Only works for certain types of businesses. I'll include a link here in case you want to go ahead and check that out for further information.

So that is an exception. But for the vast majority of businesses operating with small budget, they should be going directly for leads, directly for sales, and not trying to run awareness campaigns.

Tip 6: You Facebook Ad Campaign Doesn't Need Daily Updates

Okay, Point number six is to not mess with your Facebook ad campaigns too frequently. Now, one of the most important parts of Facebook advertising and understanding how it works is the learning phase. When you create a new campaign, you set it live, the ad set will go into the learning phase. And that's where matter is running all sorts of experiments to try and get you the best results possible.

So they're working out, who within the target audience should they put the ads in front of? What time of day should they put ads in front of people? How many impressions do people need on average in order to take the action that you want it to take?

So all these various experiments, now during the learning phase, your results are often quite volatile because all these tests are being run.

Now, the learning phase can last varying amounts of times. It depends on conversion volume. But let's say, for example, on average, it's 48 hours within your ad account.

If you are going back into your campaigns and making adjustments and tweaks and things like that, every time you do that, it resets the learning phase. So you restart and you go through that process again. Which means that a lot of I've seen this happen so many different ad accounts.

A lot of Facebook advertisers are making changes at least once every 48 hours to the point where their campaigns can never properly optimize, can never properly get out of the learning phase, and they miss out on the better results and the full optimization that they could have had because they just can't help themselves but tinker and make these changes.

And when, when you're operating with a small budget, it's more difficult for your campaigns to get out of the learning phase anyway, because what meta really needs to learn to optimize is conversions.

And I often get the questions. One of most common questions I get asked is once I create a new Facebook ad and set it live, how long should I leave that before knowing whether it works or not? And there is no set time. And the reason why is because it depends on conversion volume.

So let's say, for example, you're running a campaign in ad account that gets 2,000 purchases a day. Like we have clients that operate with that sort of volume. Well, we can set an ad live and we will know whether or not it's working within a couple of hours.

It'd be really that quick because you get so many conversions, right? Whereas if you're running a campaign in an ad account that gets five conversions a week, it might take you a month to know whether or not a new ad is performing well in comparison to say, previous benchmarks.

So it's absolutely based on conversion volume, not time. When you have a smaller budget, you normally generate less conversions than if you have a larger budget. And therefore it takes longer to get through the learning phase.

And therefore it's really important for you to just leave things alone, let Meta do its thing. Also, make sure that you give your ads, your campaigns longer to assess whether or not they are actually working.

Because of what I just described, it might take a couple of weeks for you to know if this ad is actually producing results. The less you spend less conversions you get, the more you need to expand your timeframes to assess things.

Tip 7: Niche Down

Okay, so point number seven is to niche down. Now, when you're operating with a smaller budget, instead of trying to advertise to your total target market, it's better to pick a specific section of that market and advertise to them instead. Otherwise your ads are just going to get lost in the other ads that are sort of generically targeting the whole market.

Whereas if you pick a small section of your market, you can then tailor your messaging to really speak to those people, which makes it much more likely that they will engage, much more likely that they will then convert.

It's actually one of the advantages that smaller businesses with smaller budgets have is they can go more niche, they can be more specific. Whereas the larger businesses, they need the larger volume of customers, the larger volume of leads, they have to stay more broad, typically.

So really lean into that and take advantage. So I'll give you an example. So my agent agency, my Meta ads agency, now we're big enough to go broad. Like, we work with all different types of business when it comes to running their Facebook and Instagram ads.

But if I was to start all over, I would pick a very specific niche to start with. For example, we could position ourselves as a meta ads agency that specializes in software businesses, SaaS businesses, right?

We could say this is the only types of business we run ads for. We're really specialists at this. We're really good at this. And then tailor all our marketing and the messaging for.

For those people specifically, so that when those people, the people that own SaaS businesses, or, you know, marketing managers for SaaS businesses, they see our advertising, they see our marketing and think these guys are perfect for us because they specialize in specifically what we do.

So when you're operating with a smaller budget, do that. Go for a specific subsection of your market, and then as you scale and as you grow, you can add in other subsections and then eventually be large enough to sort of go broad across your potential total market.

But at the beginning, that's a real, competitive advantage you can have over some of the big boys is like, you know their brand, you don't know us but look, we specialize in you. That's why you should click on our ad, that's why you should buy our product. That's why you should use our service.

Tip 8: Jump on brand new features & strategies

Point number eight is to jump on new features and strategies. So larger companies with bigger budgets, they normally take longer to do things. There's lots of decision maker, it can be really quite slow.

Trust me as an agency that works, we work with all different types of businesses but some of them are very large businesses. It can be quite frustrating the speed with which they operate at. When you're a smaller business operating with a smaller budget that's another competitive advantage.

You can jump on new features, you can jump on new strategies and take advantage of stuff that's going to take the bigger players six months, maybe longer to actually get round to using themselves.