Thoughts on using Meta ads to get clients? I have a couple grand to invest and most of my target customers are on Facebook.
I think you could use Meta ads to get clients, but I'll be honest — I've never been very good or successful with ads myself, which is part of why I pushed toward outbound instead; outbound just makes more sense to me. That said, plenty of people are crushing it with inbound in our niche, so it's absolutely doable — it just comes down to your specific technical implementation.
No, for the same reasons I've mentioned before — ads don't really make sense at small budgets. It typically takes something like 10x that budget just to begin to tell whether a campaign is actually working or total garbage.
Do I think running Meta ads for AI automation works? Absolutely. We have a lot of people that have done that and they've had success with it. I'm not a pro, so it's hard for me to tell you exactly how I would approach it or what I would do. But obviously you need to lead with a guarantee, just like you do with cold email. You need to lead with something that is aligned with what the customer wants and then also gives them virtually zero risk in saying yes to you. The key is you offer an insane guarantee up front, and then all you really do is verify whether or not they're the sort of company that you think could feasibly hit the guarantee on a call. This allows you to blow up your top of funnel, get a ton of people on calls, get your sales team nice and busy, and then later on you just get to only work with a small subset of people that you think could actually deliver. Why is that so smart? Because again, big top of funnel for a very small cost at the back end. And then you also get to learn a lot more about what your niche is, because you're doing things on a grassroots basis — kind of like how I'm responding to all these questions.
I’ve run paid Facebook ads for AI offers and seen a very high cost per acquisition—around $1,500 per lead—so the campaign isn’t profitable right now. I’m going to keep testing and optimizing the ads to bring the CAC down, but for now it’s not a recommended primary channel unless you can significantly improve targeting or offer.
Definitely go with cold email marketing. With $150 you can run a cold‑email campaign for about 2–3 months (roughly 60–75 days) sending around 300 emails per day, which gives you many shots at landing a paying client. Facebook ads at that budget are ineffective—you’d need roughly 10× the spend just to begin to understand whether the campaign is working, making it a poor choice for lead generation when funds are limited.