Joshua Nelson argues that expensive ads alone won't grow a digital marketing agency. He uses a plumbing and HVAC client as an example: broad Facebook ads generated mostly low-quality leads, with only 2-3% matching their target of million-dollar companies. A balanced strategy needs clear targeting, content, cold outreach, and strategic ad spend.
Chapters
Why expensive ads aren't always worth it. If you're gonna grow and scale your digital marketing agency, you need to have a well-rounded strategy, very clear audience, putting out content, doing cold outreach, running ads at some level. But if all you're doing is running ads, what we found was, all right, your client is a million-dollar-plus plumbing and HVAC company that runs a true business, that has a dispatch team, has trucks, has the capacity to manage our services and get the leads and convert them into sales. If all we did was run Facebook ads, we'd get a bunch of noise. We'd get a bunch of plumbing technicians, one-man operators, people thinking about starting a plumbing company, and maybe 2 or 2 or 3% of the leads we would generate would be those larger companies that we want to do business. That's targeting those specific industry groups, those people that you want to do business. On its own, very hard to get expensive ads to work in your favor.