I Wasted R350,000 on Online Ads so you don't have to - Here's What I Learned!

My background is digital marketing. I worked for multiple award-winning digital agencies and looked after some big clients, like FNB, South African Tourism, Chivas, Vodacom and more. So when I started my entrepreneurial journey I thought this was going to be easy. I got this. I've done it multiple times for my clients, why not for myself.

Like many marketers, I set out my digital marketing plan with what I knew: create good creative, focus on benefits, and spend big on popular platforms. I found the channels where I thought my audience was. I spent significant money. The creative was well-designed and loved by people.

After 3 months I had... nothing. Not one click or even a customer who was interested.

This failure became the foundation of something much bigger. And after such an expensive lesson, I realized I needed to learn more. I picked up some books, like "$100M Leads" and "Predictable Revenue," and discovered something critical: I realised that a small business owner as well as a medium size business has limited resources when it comes to time and money. And small changes make a big difference in this world if it is tracked and measured.

Here are the three most important lessons I learned:

Know Your Customer (Really Know Them)

After wasting 350,000 ZAR advertising to "everyone with an online business," we discovered a three-step process that transformed our marketing:

First, we looked at who was already buying from us and succeeding with our product. Not who we wanted to sell to, but who was actually pulling out their credit card. We analyzed our current customer base and found a clear pattern: male business owners with physical stores who also sell online.

Next, we developed 10 specific questions to qualify potential customers:

• How long have they been in business?
• Are they the decision maker?
• Have they tried managing Google Ads themselves?
• What city are they based in?
• What's their attitude toward AI and technology?
• Have they worked with marketing agencies before?
• Do they have both physical and online presence?
• What's their monthly marketing budget?
• How many employees do they have?
• Do they understand the difference between traffic and conversion?

Finally, we created our "80% rule": if a prospect answered yes to 8 out of these 10 questions, they were our ideal customer. This simple framework helped us stop wasting money on the wrong audiences and start finding more customers like our best ones.

Build a Proper Funnel

Let me share something important: nobody buys on first encounter (or as I like to say, "No one will sleep with you on your first date"). This means getting customers isn't about running one ad - you need to get people to see your business multiple times before they trust you.

Here's exactly how we did it with our limited budget:

First, we used Google Search ads and Facebook to get people to visit our website. But just getting them to visit once wasn't enough - we needed them to come back. So we set up Google to retarget the customers who were already on our website. You can do this today using the “customer match” list.?

Then we needed to figure out if these visitors were the right customers for us. We started by calling everyone who shared their email and number and asked them our 10 questions. Once we saw this worked, we built an online form that did the same job. This way, we could focus our time on people who were most likely to buy our service.

The result? When these filtered potential customers showed up for their demo, half of them became paying customers. That's a huge improvement from when we were wasting money trying to sell to everyone.

Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier: don't expect hundreds of calls just because you're running ads. Focus on getting the right people to know about you, give them time to trust you, and make sure they're a good fit before trying to sell to them.

Test, Measure, Adjust

Instead of jumping in with big budgets, we began with small tests on each marketing channel. First, we discovered our limit on Google Search with SEO - at R20,000 spend, we started seeing fewer people converting from demos. This was our first benchmark.

Then we tested combining channels. After many experiments, we found our sweet spot: for every R100 we spent, R60 went to Google and R40 to Facebook. This combination brought us the most customers. But here's the interesting part - when we tried increasing spending on either channel, our results actually got worse, not better.

This taught us something important: when you hit a ceiling with your current channels, it's time to add a new one rather than pushing more money into what's already maxed out.

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These lessons led us to improve our conversion rate from 0.09% to 4% - but more importantly, they helped us build a repeatable system for getting customers. Let me know in the comments which of these lessons resonates most with your business experience.

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