How to run paid ads like a pro 

Advertising is a superpower if you can master it. 

But it’s easy to get stuck at “square one” of running ads online. 

Optimizing for things like views, reach, or even engagement can help propel your message (and your positive emotions) forward, but likes don’t always move your bottom line. 

To do that, you have to go deeper. 

See, the power of paid ads isn’t just in the ability to target who you want to reach. 

It’s in the ability to retarget. 

Let me explain. 

Where it starts 

To build a business, you have to get eyeballs on your offering. 

Online, this means creating content to spread your message. 

Of course, cracking the algorithm of any given platform isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially when you have a business to run and can’t spend hours online every day. 

Therefore, the first reason to run ads is to extend your reach. 

Now, nothing takes the place of creating engagement content that either informs or entertains your audience (ideally, you’ll do both). 

But assuming you’ve made something people actually enjoy, you can throw that content to a wider audience simply by spending a bit of money on ads. 

This allows you to bypass the algorithm of any given platform by leveraging your capital in place of your time. 

So rather than trying to post something like a short-form video every day of the week, you can opt to post one every seven days and use ads to guarantee it gets seen the other six. 

A word of warning though: don’t stop here. 

So many creative people stop pushing at this first level, only to be left wondering why ad dollars aren’t translating into income. 

To do that, we have to keep going. 

Owning your audience 

The single best use case for ads is to generate leads for your business. 

This means collecting email addresses. 

Yes, you can use ads to jump directly to the end and sell things, and this may even be the best option if you’re in a low-trust business, selling small consumer items like water bottles or phone cases. 

But if your business relies on a higher level of trust or has a higher-ticket offering (e.g. service businesses like DuPree X), then you’ll want to build trust with your customers via email rather than jumping straight to the checkout page. 

This is also true for long-term relationship businesses like being a recording artist, author, or thought leader in your space. 

Put simply, long-term customer relationships are best maintained via email, not social media, and ads truly shine in their ability to move people from the latter to the former. 

Hot and cold 

When a group of people has never heard of you before, they are what’s known as a cold audience. 

It is this audience that is primed for finding your organic or boosted content online. 

You need these people to see your posts, not so much because you want that view count to go up (it helps) but because you want to pull them into your warm audience. 

A warm audience is just a fancy way of saying “people who know you exist”. 

There are, of course, varying degrees of warmth here, but once someone has engaged with your content, even one time, they become “retargetable”. 

And this is where the magic happens. 

Using ads, you can serve up an undeniable, free offer in exchange for someone’s email address, giving you the power to nurture that relationship over time, free of charge. 

By pulling these people off of social media, you’re now able to bypass “the algorithm” and directly connect with those most interested in what you have to offer. 

This allows you to consistently serve your potential customers, get critical feedback to help you improve what you do, and deliver valuable offerings to them that allow you to improve their lives while simultaneously growing your business. 

Everybody wins. 

So if you’ve been stuck at Advertising 101 (or sleeping on ads altogether) maybe it’s time to dig a little deeper and start using ads to build your email list so you can take your business to the next level. 

And if you’re not sure where to start, we would love to help you.