“I’m ready to grow, so I think it’s time to run ads.”

Hold on there, partner!

At Wingfire Media, we talk to a lot of people who would like to see their businesses grow through paid outreach, and the reality is that, while they may be ready to see their businesses grow, they aren’t always ready to start scaling massively through paid outreach.

Checklist for Scaling Through Paid Outreach

Before you start spending big bucks to get those eyeballs, you should probably meet all of the following criteria:

☑️ You’re already spending $100+ per day on ads – profitably.

Wait…what? Yup. You need to already be spending money on ads. Most of the time, it would be a huge mistake to just start pouring $1k+ per day on ads, funnels, and offers that haven’t been market-tested at all. Start with a lower budget, and that will help us to test and see if this will work or not. If you aren’t spending and recovering money already, don’t expect to scale up quickly just yet.

☑️ You have big enough audiences to scale into.

Sometimes, we have people come to us and say things like this:

“I was spending $50 per day on ads, and it was working! But then I tried to scale up…and even though I was spending more money, my revenue stayed the same!”

That’s because you can’t simply throw more money at it and expect it to work. There needs to be a bigger audience that correlates with that increase in ad spend. As a general rule of thumb, to profitably spend $500 per day on ads, you will need to have an audience of about 2 million people. So if you want to spend $1k per day on ads, you will need to find an audience of 2 million more people.

☑️ You are able to invest in testing and data gathering.

We say “invest” because that’s how you need to look at it. Your ad spend can bring tremendous growth to your business, but it likely won’t happen immediately. Scaling works when you are able to test, gather the data you need, and take action based on what you have learned. Of course, when you test, you will find things that work and things that don’t work. If you can’t afford to have some things not work at first, you shouldn’t be running ads.

To make your campaigns work, you will need to test offers, creatives, audiences, copy, funnels, and other things. In this way, marketing through paid traffic is a highly scientific thing: everything starts as an experiment, and we decide where to continue putting our money based on what actually works according to the numbers. But of course, all of this requires you to have a certain resilience in the face of ads that don’t pay off, so if you are desperate to get sales immediately, this probably isn’t the direction you want to go just yet.

☑️ Your business is actually able to handle scaling.

Entrepreneurs generally want to see their businesses grow, but their businesses aren’t always necessarily able to handle that growth. There are at least two ways in which you need to make sure your business is ready to scale before you start spending those big ad bucks:

  • Systems and processes. Your business should feel less like a job that you own and more like a machine that you own. This means you need to make sure that you build the systems, processes, and resources to handle more clients. Too many small businesses start off well but then crash and burn because they are great at marketing and sales but don’t deliver for their clients because their operations can’t handle growth.
  • Back-end. It is not enough to beef up your front-end marketing like ad spend if your back-end is not in place to make use of that investment. This means you need to have a solid sales funnel, email campaigns, and sales processes that make use of the front-end marketing that you are doing such that it actually turns into clients.

Don’t buy seeds if you don’t have soil.

☑️ You understand that scaling will be a commitment of both time and money.

Scaling means testing, analyzing, tweaking, optimizing, analyzing, and testing again. This means that you will need to spend both time and money to make something work. No one should approach an ad campaign with the assumption that it will meet all expectations immediately. It takes a lot of effort to find what works and to make it work.

☑️ You’re prepared to build a team or outsource the work.

Even if your business is prepared to bring on the initial influx of clients, what happens after that? You may be prepared for 5-10 additional clients, but are you prepared for 20-30 more clients?

The reality is that massive growth requires help. We already mentioned that you need to have systems and processes in place in order to grow. Once those systems and processes are in place, you should be able to bring on new team members who can be trained to use those systems and processes to do the work that needs to be done to deliver value to your clients.

Next Steps

If you are reading over this list and realizing that you don’t meet all of the requirements to start scaling with ads, don’t lose heart! Plenty of successful businesses were in your position in the past. The next step for you isn’t to forget about paid outreach altogether: the next step for you is to get to the point where you can check off every item of this list!

And if you do check off every item of the list…great! In that case, the next step for you to take is to talk with us about how we can help get you started with the ad campaign that will launch you into the next stage of growth for your business.