I’m sure you see many ads for products and services on Meta, Instagram, Google, TikTok, or other social media platforms on a daily basis. So, it’s only reasonable to ask, “If it’s working for them, wouldn’t it work for me? Does paid advertising work for a freelancing business?
Paid advertising can be a fantastic way to get a lot of traffic to your website to promote your freelance business. But it can also be a great way to lose a lot of money.
Did you know that paid advertising is what some people do for their entire job? They do it full-time, and they’re very good at it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to understand paid advertising. But I’m warning you (from experience!) that you can waste a lot of money if you don’t become somewhat proficient in it before you start running ads for your business.
Here we look at what you need to consider before spending money advertising your freelancing services and the best practices for your advertising strategy.
Who Are You Advertising To?
The first question you answer is super important: Who is your audience? If you haven’t fully defined your audience first, you’ll waste a lot of money reaching people you don’t want to reach!
The secondary question to ask yourself is why do you want to advertise to this audience? What is your goal? What action do you want them to take?
Before you even start to write ads or think about what platform you’re going to put them on or how much money you can to spend, you need to think through your entire ad strategy. If you don’t, you’ll just have a generic message that doesn’t resonate with your target audience…or anyone else for that matter.
How Are You Going to Capture Leads?
The next question you need to ask yourself as you develop your strategy is to how are you going to capture the leads that get to your website? Just spending money to send people to your site and hoping they’ll decide to get in contact with you is pointless. Most people will pop over to your site and quickly leave, likely forgetting that they ever visited and never remembering you or your services.
To that end, you want to collect the contact information of the people who visit your site. One effective tactic is to offer some kind of freebie—an e-book, social media infographic, or downloadable video—that your audience wants and is willing to give you their email address to get.
Once you’ve gotten their email addresses, you can email them with follow-up information and offers, thus keeping them on your contact list of prospective clients/customers.
One important point to note: Make sure that this freebie is both valuable to your target audience and it doesn’t devalue what you offer. You don’t want to give away something for free that you should be selling as part of your service!
For example, an e-book about how freelancers can track their invoices would be useful for your fellow freelancers but it wouldn’t be useful for your target audience.
How Will You Collect Emails and Deliver Your Freebie?
Next, you need a method for email collection and freebie delivery. I won’t go too deeply into your software options (we have more information about that topic here), but it needs to be automatic and instantaneous. So, you need an email service provider like MailChimp or Drip to help you do it. We use Drip and love it!
Write Your Own Email Series
You should have a plan for a few emails to automatically deploy after someone downloads your freebie. These emails may include your background and expertise, successes you’ve helped clients achieve, the benefits of working with you as a freelancer, or other relevant topics your target audience will find useful.
Another tactic to consider is an email that directly asks the prospect to set up a free consultation call with you. You want to nurture your prospect and keep them engaged with and interested in you.
Determine Where You Want to Run Your Ads
Next, you’ll need to decide where you want to run your ads. We’ve found that LinkedIn ads are exceptionally expensive and Google ads are complicated for the newer advertiser to quickly master. Meta/Facebook offers different targeting options and you can start running your ads for just a few dollars a day.
There are lots of great resources online for how to set up and run Meta/Facebook ads (from people much more knowledgeable than me), so I won’t bother getting into it here. Just learn as much as you can about how to create ads before you start paying money to run them.
Implement a System for Monitoring Ads
Paid advertising is never a “set-it-and-forget-it” solution. Once you start running ads, you need to be constantly monitoring the ad click-through rate and the number of people who are signing up for your freebie and giving you their contact information.
If you have a low click-through rate (below 2%), your ad isn’t performing very well. If you have a high click-through rate but very few people are signing up for your freebie, your campaign still isn’t succeeding. You’re looking for as high of a click-through rate as possible (from your target audience) and as high of a freebie sign-up rate as possible and you need to tweak your ad and your freebie until you hit that sweet spot.
It’s very easy to set up an ad, start it running, and then forget about it. If you don’t look at the performance for a few weeks, you may dive in and find you spent lots of money with nothing to show for it! It’s critical to make sure you’re tracking your ad results and that the money you spend is yielding client leads.
Start Small Before Scaling
I would also strongly advise you to start with a small daily spend—even as little as $5—and then increase it when you start seeing positive results. It can be very tempting to get excited about the possibilities of paid advertising and want to start by spending $30 or $40 a day. Don’t do it!
That amount may be reasonable eventually if you start to get a great return for your ads. If you’re not, though, that’s a great way to lose $1K a month without making any of it back in new clients. And no one wants to do that!
You may find your target audience is not clicking on your ads and you may need to adjust. It’s very important to pivot as a business owner and not become stuck with one idea. Or you may find it’s not worth your time and other client acquisition tactics are far more effective.
Our final word: Paid advertising can be a great way to get freelancing client leads. However, if you aren’t willing or able to take the time to learn how to run them properly, set up a lead capture system, and check your metrics on a regular basis, it’s far more likely you’ll lose money than make it.
Your Turn
Have you tried paid advertising for your freelancing business? What were your results? Let us know in the comments below!
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