How To Make More Money With Ads

MONEY
Why Running Ads Without a Good Brand is Useless

At some point in your freelancing career, you’ve probably lost money running ads.

In 2018, I remember using Instagram and boosting some of my posts, and it felt like I was making big business moves. Finally I could see my early retirement in the near future. While it was fun seeing all the data and analytics rolling in, I had no idea what to do with it. People in surrounding states were seeing what I was posting, and they were clicking on my profile…

But nothing was happening.

Luckily I was just a broke college student, so I truly didn’t have any more money that I could dump into my posts, or else I would have lost all that money too.

The truth is, running ads is essentially just cold outreach. Whenever you try to get ahold of complete strangers and convince them to spend money on you, it’s not going to be the most effective. In most cases, out of 100 people, it’s a success if you get 3-4 clients out of it.

_{(Recently I have been trying new email outreach strategies that have helped me get roughly 50% better responses, I’ll share more on that in another newsletter.)}

So this is why we spoke with Peyton Helm on our podcast last week. Peyton is a wedding business coach, but his strategies apply to any freelance filmmaker.

If you want to get better results from ads, here is what you need to know:

1. Before spending money on ads, invest first in creating a brand that is attractive. You can’t be cold-pitching your services for Cadillac prices, and have a brand that looks like a Ford. Since these are people who are clicking on a random ad, they need to be sold on your brand within just a few seconds of landing on your social media or website.

2. Once you have a solid brand, hire an ad coach. Most of us are not as analytical and logical as we are creative. And the thing with ads is that they are ever-evolving. Ads now are much different than they were in 2018, and if you have not been in the space, you are going to waste a lot of time and money trying to catch up. By the time you are all caught up, odds are it will have already evolved again, and the cycle repeats.

3. Spend money to make money. This one is a tough one for a lot of us. In the freelance world, it’s feast or famine, and boy do we remember those famines. Yet every successful business owner that started their business in the age of social media seems to have one mantra in common: outspend your competitors. Whether you have a 2:1 or a 10:1 ROA (call us please and let us know your secrets), this can be seen as an unlimited ad spend budget. That extra money that you make can just go right back into your marketing spend so that it’s never coming out of your own pocket.

If you want to hear the whole episode in which Peyton talks about ads, you can listen to it on Spotify or watch it on YouTube.

And if you want to reach out to Peyton to potentially hire him as an ad coach, let him know that you came from us (Not getting paid to promote this, we truly have seen him get great results)

HOW TO
How To Film First Looks || FX3 Impressions

In case you have missed it, we made the full switch to Sony roughly two months ago.

Here is what we love about the FX3:

1. The sharpness. While we loved the Canon C70, the image was just a little too soft for our liking. We grew our brands on the Canon 1DXii, which has incredible sharpness and color straight out of camera. So maybe it was us not knowing exactly what we wanted, but when we swtiched to the C70, we found that we craved that sharpness. Especially since now we often have to crop in for vertical reels 🙃

2. The build quality. True story, both Jake and myself dropped our C70’s when we had them… Never incredibly hard, but we both had to send in our cameras to get them fixed each time. It was actually a bit ridiculous. A $6,000 fragile camera. The Sony FX3 is built like a tank. It doesn’t make me happy to say that it has been dropped really hard, and it works like nothing happened to it 😅

3. Lightweight. We are more run and gun, and we like it when nothing gets in our way of speed. The FX3 is nice and compact and easy to carry around pretty much anywhere. Plus, after a long wedding day, your back and shoulders aren’t destroyed.

What we miss from the C70? The built-in ND filters.

FOR FILMMAKERS
Flash Sale On All Our Digital Assets

Today is a really special day for the team at Runaway Vows, and you will see why very soon (Jake’s Instagram)

To celebrate, we posted our entire storefront at 50% off

The code will be automatically applied at checkout

This is our second ever biggest sale, so if you have been waiting to buy our SFX Pack, or our Transition Light Leak Pack, this is the time.