Yelyzaveta Didenko is a marketing specialist, founder, and expert in AI-driven growth. In this exclusive interview, she lets us in on the secret of running Meta ads on a shoestring budget. We met with her on an October day to explore the latest trends in Meta ad campaigns for the rest of 2023.

What made you believe that effective Meta advertising is possible on a budget as small as $20 per day?

Running Meta ads on a small budget and achieving satisfactory results is completely doable. What’s critical, however, is testing, and, more importantly, optimizing. It’s something I’ve learned in my own startup (a recruitment company based in the Netherlands) and from a few influencer-driven campaigns where the jury is still out on the verdict of what to do next. But one thing I’ve taken away from those experiences: If you’re paying for ads, you’re better off paying $20 a day than not paying at all, because that $20? It’s likely to net you actual conversions.

How do you define a truly result-oriented ad campaign?

When creating Meta ads, one might spend less time making sure they work and more time making sure they are good. But what’s the difference? The difference is in the outcome. A good ad could be a great ad if it had a better hook; it could earn a few clicks if it had a clearer call-to-action. When my startup made ads, we almost always sent people to a call-to-action form of some kind, a lead-gen action. For the ads I wrote for the recruitment company, I learned to highlight immediate opportunities and valuable benefits because those are the hooks that make people take action.

In general, the ads for recruitment not only received more views but also more clicks, due to the fact that the actual creatives were more relevant to the target audience. When the actual audience comprehends what the ad implies for them personally, that comprehension tends to translate into greater clicks and conversions.

Why is audience relevance so critical when creating ad content?

A content ingredient that is truly effective for Meta ads is one that resonates with your audience at a deep level. Almost every ad needs to capture attention and inspire engagement to have even a hope of performing decently. But what does this mean? It means that if you want an ad to do well, it should straightforwardly address the needs (or the wants) that the viewer has stated or not stated. For us, this was a revelation. In the past, we created ads with deep, meaningful messages. In reality, when it comes to engaging your potential customers with your ads, you’re much better off keeping things simple and, yes, even superficial.

When we created the visuals for these ads, we found that we could come very close to being creepy-realistic. In fact, it was rather unnerving how lifelike the images could get. In the end, those visuals turned out to be significant factors in delivering decent ad performance.

How did you approach budget optimization for the recruitment company’s campaigns?

During my work on campaigns for my startup, I promptly learned that keeping a daily budget of $20 requires not just paying close attention to the account but also some solid platform knowledge to target and hit the right audience. Audience relevancy is critical. Every dollar in the ad pool must work hard to find people who are truly interested in what’s being offered.

In Meta Ads Manager, we set up a precise tracking and reporting structure that enabled us to watch the essential metrics very closely. And when I say “essential metrics,” I mean the ones that, with the help of a little common sense, let you know whether an ad campaign is on the right track or not. You know, like click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per lead. The usual suspects.

What types of ad formats did you find most effective for lead generation?

Lead form ads on Meta have worked well for service-oriented companies, especially recruitment firms, like ours. For these traditional but effective ads, I picked clear, simple words for both the ad copy and lead form itself. The ads, positioned to appeal to job seekers, asked only for a few basic but necessary pieces of info to yield an adequate lead. We ran the ads in the Netherlands.

I like the way lead forms on Meta can seem so basic and uncomplicated while potentially doing such a good job of sifting through and capturing interested job seekers. Directly connecting the call-to-action button to the short, user-friendly forms was an effective tactic.

Could you share your experience with more creative approaches like influencer campaigns?

There were times when I attempted more inventive Meta promotional tactics, such as collaborating with influencers. Rather than directing traffic to a landing page or website, I experimented with sending prospects directly to WhatsApp Messenger to converse with the influencer. In some locations, this performed exceptionally well. I received superb, instant, and real-time replies, and it seemed like a far more customized engagement than what usually occurs when people view an ad online and subsequently visit a landing page.

Nevertheless, when I attempted this identical strategy with another client in the Netherlands, it flopped. The audience there did not respond positively to the influencer-led ad. They much preferred to be directed to a clearly labeled landing page containing a straightforward offer and nothing more mysterious than that. Out of this experience, I learned a couple of lessons. One is about the importance of cultural and demographic nuances.

What are your key takeaways for marketers looking to achieve high conversion rates on limited budgets?

What I learned from these campaigns is that a low daily budget doesn’t have to mean low conversion rates. I believe and have seen in practice that a “results-oriented mindset” combined with “strategic budget planning” and “smart ad creatives” can do quite the opposite. Push for more conversions, pull in new leads, and overall, be engaged in a “clear campaign objective” and a “laser focus” on desired outcomes that makes this impossibility seem possible. These are the sorts of approaches that yield solid results.

Conversely, if you consistently keep an eye on performance metrics and fine-tune your ad content to align perfectly with the needs of your audience, then you’re on the path to the kind of absurdly “low-budget high-impact” wins we are here to dissect.

Similarly, lead form ads can work as both a super-direct means of pushing audiences to convert and a super-simple way of achieving that push. They do all of this, of course, without cluttering up the user journey with needless extra complexity.