Secret #9 Fill Your Funnel with Paid Ads (Buying Your Way in)
6 Min. Read Sep 5, 2025 #Traffic Secrets
What is Your Advertising Budget?
If your have a funnel that is break even or profitable, then you don’t have an advertising budget.
You’ll keep running ads for as long as it stays profitable. If, for some reason, you lost money on a test, you will turn off the ads, rework the funnel, and then test again with another small budget. Never put very much of your money at risk at any given time, so with each new funnel, you set up a few ads, give it a small test budget, and see what happens. The funnels that flop are sent back to the drawing board to get reworked, and the funnels that work are scaled to see how much money you can profitably spend.
Prospecting Ads VS. Retargeting Ads
Prospecting ads are the act of reaching out into the networks to find cold traffic or people who aren’t familiar with you or your offers and hook them long enough to get their attention. After we’ve gotten their attention and gotten them to engage with us (engage could mean they watched, liked, or commented on an ad), then we move them from the ‘prospecting’ pool into the ‘retargeting’ buckets. We then advertise to these people differently and work to warm them up and then get them into our value ladder.
A small percentage people may buy your product immediately after they see your prospecting ads, but the majority of them won’t buy right then. It’s those people who have engaged, but not purchased, who you would put into the retargeting buckets. Once they’re in those buckets, you can warm them up, test other hooks, tell other stories, and remind them of the great offer you’ve made them in order to persuade them to go into your funnel.
Prospecting ads are the most expensive, but they are vital for two reasons. First, it’s through prospecting that you find out who is actually responding to your ads so your targeting becomes more on point (which brings your costs down). Second, it’s prospecting that fills your retargeting buckets. If you stop prospecting, you’ll soon find yourself with no one to retarget to.
Don’t be surprised if you spend 80 percent of your advertising budget and it only generates 20 percent of your results. The purpose is to fill all your retargeting audiences (which include your social followings and lists). It’s from these new followers and retargeting audiences that you’ll often see 80 percent of your results while only using 20 percent of your budget.
Step #1 Create Lots of Prospecting Ads to “Hook” Your Dream Customers
When you’re thinking about prospecting ads, you’re looking at a huge ocean of people—all who need your product or service but all who have a different reason why. If you try to create just one great hook, it may last for a while and grab the people who are looking for that hook, but it will dry up very fast. You’ve got to become prolific at creating ads. The phone in your pocket will become your ad-making, creative-generating, hook-developing machine. Everywhere you go, you should be looking for opportunities to record a pitch for your offers that you can then turn into ads.
Targeting for Prospecting Ads
Dream 100: The best place to start is your Dream 100 list for that platform. You can target people who have an interest in a certain thought leader, brand, or celebrity. You’ll find many of your Dream 100’s followers targetable this way in the Ads Manager of that platform.
Ideal customer avatar: Second on your targeting list is your ideal customer avatar. Think about their interests, their age, their career, their home life, and anything else you can identify. Most ad platforms will allow you to get pretty specific on who you show your ads to.
Overlapping sections of multiple audiences: Some ad networks let you get more specific in targeting your audiences by layering on multiple criteria and then just targeting the overlapping sections. Think of three overlapping circles, each representing one of the audiences above and then imagine a center area where they all overlap. This center area represents the sweet spot where your dream customer is most likely to be.
Algorithms: Once you have a few hundred people engaging with your posts, clicking through to your funnels, and becoming leads and buyers, you’ve generated a pool of data. So is the platform, similar people range will be targeted, and you’ll decide which bucket to use as the source for your advertising efforts.
Step #2: Use A Retargeting Funnel to Create Customers
Unlike prospecting ads where you should make new creative as often as possible, with your retargeting campaigns, you’re focusing on creating them once and it lasts forever. As you move people through the retargeting buckets, you could use the same three closes you learned about earlier: starting with emotion, then moving to logic, and ending with fear (urgency/scarcity). That is how you can pull people into action throughout each retargeting campaign.
In order to implement retargeting, you have to place a pixel (a block of tracking code) on your sales funnel. This is a simple copy/paste procedure that allows the network to see how far along the customer journey your viewer got. This is important for two reasons. First, it provides feedback for you on what’s working and what’s not (what’s converting these prospects into traffic that you own and what isn’t) so you can pivot in either your targeting or your messaging. Second, the pixel is what allows you to put viewers into the different audience categories, so you’ll know when to put specific ads in front of them.
Audience Types and Goals of Effective Retargeting
Engaged → Sell the click: The people watched, liked, or commented on an prospecting ad are worth some continued ad dollars but not too much or for too long. You may run an retargeting ad to this audience for up to five days. If they haven’t visited your landing page by that point, just let them fall out of the audience and return to the prospecting pools from whence they came. To this type of audience, the goal is to sells the click.
Landed → Sell the opt-in or purchase: The second audience is the people who clicked through and landed on your page. These people take a bigger commitment, left the platform, and visited your sales funnel but they didn’t take any further action. You many run an ad to this audience for up to seven days, trying to get them to come back and the goal is to sells the opt-in or purchase. Again, if they don’t opt in or buy within seven days, just let them fall out of this audience.
Owned → Sell the next step: The third type of audience you’ll want to have is made up of those who did take your lead magnet and those who purchased. These people have made a large commitment and have entrusted you with email addresses and credit card numbers in exchange for your goods. This is the traffic that you now own, and it becomes very useful and lucrative in many different ways. Not only are they now on your follow-up funnel sequences, but they’re also prime candidates for seeing ads for your next offer or an offer one step up the value ladder. To this audience, you goal is to either offer another front-end product or walk them up the next step on your value ladder.