Dennis Yu's Dollar-a-Day Facebook Ad Strategy

Hi, I'm Lindsay with HubSpot Academy. Today, let's talk about marketing expert Dennis Yu's strategy for Facebook ad success called the dollar a day Facebook ad strategy. What is the dollar a day strategy for Facebook ads success? No one wants to waste money on Facebook ads that don't work. But when you supplement your organic Facebook strategy with an ad strategy that's cost effective and gets more customers in the door, you'll be getting the most out of using Facebook to grow your business. Many of us need to reframe the way we think of Facebook. Facebook isn't so much a social media platform as it is a database filled with billions of active users. One that knows a ton of information about a ton of your target customers. It knows what music they like, which areas they live in, what their income is, and who their friends are. There's an opportunity here to target people with Facebook ads that help slowly associate your brand with value and authority in the industry and then lead them down a path to purchase at their own pace. Facebook is a great place to advertise, and if you know how to target the right people, you might be creating great content. But if you don't know how to target your ideal buyers and lead them toward a purchase at the right pace, then it's going to be really hard to advertise that great content in a cost effective way. That's where the dollar a day strategy comes in. What is the dollar a day strategy? It's a framework created by marketing expert Dennis Yu which which empowers you to get your content in front of a hyper targeted audience and serve them the right content at the right time. Yu has done this dollar a day strategy hundreds of times over the last 10 years and says that for him and for many of his clients, it's a way to drive real business results with Facebook ads in a cost effective way. With the dollar a day strategy, you'll run multiple ads at the same time, each running on a dollar a day of ad spend. Each of these ads will cater to one of three marketing, awareness, engagement, and conversion. So you'll have a few ads running that are awareness ads, a few engagement ads, and a few conversion ads to make sure you're reaching potential buyers who are in different stages of the buyer's journey. With ads in all three of these stages, you'll be able to move people through ad sequences. So starting with awareness, then engagement, then conversion. That way, the first ad they're seeing from you isn't a conversion ad that's trying to get them to buy. Maybe they're not ready to buy. Remember, it's unlikely that people will want to buy from you the first time they see your products. Instead, for every given person, your ad sequences will show an awareness ad first, then an engagement ad, then then a conversion ad. Depending on how engaged the person was with that ad, they might not go through all three steps on the first try. If they don't watch the awareness ad for very long, then you might serve them another awareness ad before retargeting them with an engagement ad to move along with their pace. The beauty of these frequent, lightweight touches is that you aren't bombarding newly targeted Facebook users with a sales message from the start. Instead, you're serving them ads that warm them up to your brand and give them a sense of your story and your values. And then show them more ads over time that work them down the funnel until they finally convert into customers.

If you try to do everything all in one piece of content, to have people understand who you are and what you have to offer and how it's different than everyone, that you're trying to do way too much work and in a single touch. So the key to Facebook is these frequent lightweight touches. So that's many little pieces of content that you're able to sequence together. And each sequence is driven by spending $1 a day. We just audited a Facebook ads campaign this morning where this guy's average CPM cost per thousand impressions on Facebook was something like $60. Absolutely incredibly expensive. It should be down closer to $6. And the reason why is he was using only lookalike audience audiences trying to drive straight to a conversion. Now, by using the dollar a day strategy, by getting a first touch, by getting people to understand who you are, what you stand for before trying to directly sell, you can then use that to remarket into another video that may occur a week later, it may occur 10 minutes later. Whatever Facebook decides is the right time to show that next piece of content.

So especially if you're under budget pressure, the dollar a day strategy can help you harvest the content that's working for you organically and and help it get the most reach and start generating more leads and customers.