What I Learned Running Paid Ads

This past week, I’ve been filming a lot of ads. Yup, ads - something I never thought I’d be doing. Paid media, Facebook ads - featuring my face. 

A little bit of context - we hired a Head of Growth at Paired (my overseas recruiting company) and one of the main initiatives we are launching is paid media.

We spent 2.5 years growing the company completely organically, using word of mouth, referrals, and social media. Since we’ve basically capped out at about 100k per month in revenue from organic, now we know we need to tackle paid media. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to really scale the company.

I wanted to talk about some of the things I’ve learned thus far in this paid media initiative - hopefully it can help you guys out in whatever business you’re building.

1. Paid media is all about testing

We are testing out a lot of creatives. The cool thing is that our ad creatives are not too hard to produce. In fact, it seems as if most “under-produced” ads are outperforming high production value ads.

For videos, we are doing a lot of selfie videos just talking to the phone camera. My founder and I are just giving context, our offer, and connecting it to the audience. A cool trick is recording a bunch of different hooks, and AB testing those. Simply replace all the hooks one by one, keep the same body, and you can also experiment with different call to actions.

For example - 3 different hooks, paired with 1 body, and 3 different CTAs would result in 9 variations.

We’re also experimenting with static ads. Low production pictures (e.g. of a post it note) as well as text message conversation screenshots. Lots of random stuff like that. You really have no idea what is going to resonate and perform well until you try it.

2. Don’t try to do it yourself

You should absolutely learn the fundamentals, but there is no way a beginner is going to crush it without a lot of failed ad spend. 

Hire an agency, hire a key person with ad experience within your business - doesn’t matter. This is the shortcut and I highly recommend you guys do this instead of trying to run it yourself.

3. Be patient

It’s really a numbers game, and a math game. ROAS and all these metrics help make informed decisions about which ones to pump. But the unfortunate thing is that with ad fatigue and changing markets, what works today won’t work forever. So it’s like a constant battle of ad variations and coming up with new concepts.

We haven’t even fully launched yet and I’m already feeling impatient! I know this paid media game is a long road to get right, but I’m excited for the results.

And a quick note before I forget - make sure you have enough money to test ads. You’ll burn lots of money at the beginning so keep that in mind. Over time the algorithm will get smarter and be able to optimize for your desired outcome and audience.

Business is super like being in school for the rest of your life. I feel like a student every single day and that isn’t me just saying it for this article. Every time I go to sleep, I think to myself woah I learned some cool shit today.

P.S. Paired has room to take on a couple new clients this week. If you’re looking to hire overseas talent, you know where to find us: www.paired.so