Solved: Consultant Pricing for Facebook Ads & Social Media?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your goals for growing your newsletter with Facebook Ads. It’s a common situation, realising your time is better spent on the product itself rather than getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty of marketing. It's a complex beast, and it's easy to burn through a lot of cash without seeing the results you want if you don't have a solid strategy.

You’ve set some clear goals – 2000 new subscribers and 2000 visitors a month. That's a great starting point because it gives us something concrete to work towards. Below are my thoughts on how you might approach this and what you should be thinking about. I'll try to be as direct as possible, based on my experience running these sorts of campaigns.

First off, we'll need to look at what you can expect cost-wise...

This is probably the most important question to tackle first, because it frames everything else. Your budget for ad spend is going to be the main factor that determines if your goal of 2000 subscribers a month is realistic. The cost of a consultant is one thing, but the ad spend is the fuel for the engine.

The cost per result, like a new subscriber, isn't a fixed number. It varies wildly based on your industry, your targeting, the quality of your ads, your landing page, and even the country you're targeting. For a newsletter signup, which is a relatively quick action for a user, you're looking at a specific type of conversion.

Based on what I've seen across hundreds of campaigns, here’s a rough but realistic breakdown. Let's assume you're targeting what we'd call 'developed countries' (like the UK, US, Canada, Australia etc.) where the traffic is generally higher quality but also more expensive.

-> Cost Per Click (CPC): You're likely to see CPCs somewhere in the £0.50 to £1.50 range. This is the cost for someone to simply click your ad and land on your website.

-> Landing Page Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of those visitors who actually sign up. A decent landing page might convert at 10%, while a really well-optimised one could hit 30% or more. Many new sites start much lower, though.

Now, lets do the maths. This is how you work out your potential Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), or in your case, your cost per subscriber:

Worst-Case Scenario: High CPC (£1.50) / Low Conversion Rate (10%) = £15 per subscriber.

Best-Case Scenario: Low CPC (£0.50) / High Conversion Rate (30%) = £1.67 per subscriber.

So, the range is massive. To get 2000 subscribers a month, your ad spend could be anywhere from around £3,340 (2000 x £1.67) to a staggering £30,000 (2000 x £15). Realistically, you'll probably land somewhere in the middle, especially when you're just starting out. I remember one campaign where we helped a software company focused on events and sports. We got over 45,000 signups at under £2 each, but that was after a lot of optimisation and testing on multiple platforms like Meta, TikTok, and Apple Ads. When you're just starting on Facebook, it's safer to budget for something in the £3-£6 per subscriber range and hope to improve from there.

If you were targeting lower-income, 'developing' countries, the costs would be much lower, maybe £0.33 to £5 per subscriber. But, and this is a big but, the quality of those subscribers is often much, much lower. They are less likely to engage with your emails and almost certainly less likely to ever buy anything from you. For most businesses, it's a false economy. It’s better to pay more for a quality subscriber who is genuinely interested in your product than to get cheap numbers for vanity's sake. We almost always recomend excluding the top 30 lowest income countries because the amount of bot traffic is just too high.

So the first step is to be brutally honest about the ad spend budget. Your goal of 2000 subscribers dictates the budget you’ll need, not the other way around.

I'd say your biggest lever will be getting the targeting right...

This is where most DIY ad campaigns fall apart. Getting your product in front of the right people is more than half the battle. If you get the audience wrong, even the world's best ad and landing page won't get you subscribers at a reasonable cost. It's the absolute foundation of a successful campaign.

When I look at new client accounts, the most common mistake is testing audiences that are way too broad or just not aligned with their ideal customer. Think of it like a funnel:

Top of Funnel (ToFu): These are cold audiences. People who have never heard of you. This is where you'll spend most of your budget to find new subscribers.

Middle of Funnel (MoFu): These are people who have engaged with you in some way but haven't taken the final step (e.g., visited your site but didn't sign up).

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): These are your warmest prospects, people who got close to converting (e.g., started filling out the signup form but got distracted).

For your goal of getting new subscribers, you'll be focused almost entirely on the Top of Funnel. Since your ad account is likely new or has limited data, you should start with Detailed Targeting (interests, behaviours, demographics). Broad targeting can work later, but only once the Meta pixel has thousands of conversion events to learn from. Right now, you need to give it direction.

Picking the right interests is a skill in itself. Let's say your newsletter is about sustainable travel. A common mistake would be to just target the interest "Travel". This is a massive audience of millions of people, including business travellers, people who just went on one holiday five years ago, and people who just dream of travel. It's way too broad. You'll waste a ton of money showing your ad to irrelevant people.

A much better approach would be to think about what your *specific* audience is interested in. What brands do they follow? What magazines do they read? What tools do they use?

-> Instead of "Travel", you could target interests like "Ecotourism", "Sustainable tourism", pages like "G Adventures" or "Intrepid Travel", or magazines like "National Geographic Traveller".

-> You can also use layering. Target people who are interested in "Backpacking" AND are also "Engaged Shoppers". This narrows down the pool to people who are more likely to be your ideal subscriber.

The goal is to find interests that have a high concentration of your ideal customer. Once you start getting subscribers, you can then move onto the more powerful stuff: Lookalike Audiences. You need at least 100 people in a custom audience to create a lookalike, but honestly, you want more like 1,000+ for it to be really effective. You would create a lookalike of your email subscribers, and Facebook will find millions of other people who share similar characteristics. This is usually where you find scale at a good cost.

Here's a rough priority of audiences you should test, in order, as you gather more data:

You'll want to test these audiences systematically. Don't just lump them all into one ad set. You need to know what's working and what isn't so you can turn off the losers and give more budget to the winners. I've worked on campaigns where we got the cost per registration for a B2B software down to just $2.38 by being ruthless with audience testing and optimisation on Meta Ads.

You probably should focus on the ads themselves to lower your costs...

Once you have your targeting dialled in, the next piece of the puzzle is the ad creative (the image/video) and the copy (the text). Your ad has one job: to stop someone scrolling, grab their attention, and persuade them to click. A weak ad will lead to a low Click-Through Rate (CTR) and a high CPC, which kills your overall CPA.

You need to be constantly testing. Never assume you know what will work best. We've had clients who were certain a polished, professional video would be the winner, only to be beaten by a simple, authentic-looking User-Generated Content (UGC) style video shot on a phone. The key is to test different angles, messages, and formats.

Here are a few things to think about for your ad creative:

-> Test formats: Don't just run image ads. Test single images, carousel ads (which are great for showing multiple benefits), and video ads. Video is often the top performer on Meta as it's more engaging.

-> Test hooks: The first 3 seconds of your video or the headline of your image ad are everything. You need to give people a reason to stop. This could be a question, a bold statement, or a clear promise of value.

-> Test messaging: What is the core benefit of your newsletter? Is it saving people time? Making them money? Giving them unique information? Test ads that focus on different benefits. One ad might focus on the logical reasons to subscribe, while another might focus on the emotional outcome.

On the copy side, be clear and direct. Tell people exactly what they are going to get and why they should want it. Use a strong Call To Action (CTA) like "Sign Up Now" or "Get The Newsletter". Don't be vague.

Looking at your ad metrics will tell you where the problem is. If you have a very low CTR (under 1%), it almost definately means your ad creative or copy isn't resonating with the audience you're targeting. Your ad is getting ignored. If your CTR is good (2%+) but your conversion rate is low, then the problem is more likely on your landing page, which is the next crucial step.

You'll need a solid landing page or you're just wasting money...

This is a point that so many people miss. You can have the best targeting and the best ad in the world, but if you send that high-quality traffic to a confusing, slow, or untrustworthy landing page, you will get very few subscribers. All that money you spent on clicks will be wasted. Your website needs to be your best salesperson.

For getting newsletter subscribers, you need a dedicated landing page (sometimes called a squeeze page). Don't just send traffic to your homepage with its dozens of links and distractions. You want to send them to a page with one single goal: get their email address. That's it.

Here’s what a good signup landing page needs:

-> A Killer Headline: This should match the promise you made in your ad and clearly state the main benefit of subscribing.

-> Persuasive Copy: Use bullet points to quickly explain the benefits. What's in it for them? What problems will you solve? Keep it concise and focused. We often use proffessional copywriters for this, especially for SaaS or B2B clients, because good copy can easily double conversion rates.

-> Social Proof: Do you have any testimonials? Have you been featured anywhere? Can you show how many people have already subscribed? This builds trust and reduces friction.

-> A Simple Form: Only ask for what you absolutely need. For a newsletter, that's just the email address. Every extra field you add (like First Name, Last Name) will reduce your conversion rate.

-> A Clear Call-to-Action Button: Make it big, make it a contrasting colour, and use action-oriented text like "Get Instant Access" instead of a boring "Submit".

-> No Distractions: Remove your main website navigation menu, your footer, any sidebars. The only clickable thing on the page should be the signup button.

Just like with your ads, you need to look at the analytics. Where are people dropping off? If you're getting lots of clicks from your ads (so the ad is working) but a very low number of signups, your landing page is the bottleneck. Improving your landing page conversion rate from 5% to 10% has the exact same effect as halving your ad costs. It's often the cheapest and most effective place to make improvements.

We'll also need to structure the campaigns properly for this to work...

Finally, how you organise your campaigns in the Ads Manager is also important for performance and for making sense of the data. A messy structure makes it impossible to know what’s working and to optimise effectively.

I would recomend a simple but effective structure. Have seperate, long-term campaigns for each part of the funnel. For your goal, you'd have:

Campaign 1: ToFu - Prospecting for Subscribers
Objective: Conversions (for signups)
Inside this campaign, you would have multiple Ad Sets. Each Ad Set would target a different audience you want to test.
-> Ad Set 1: Interest Group A (e.g., Ecotourism interests)
-> Ad Set 2: Interest Group B (e.g., Sustainable brand followers)
-> Ad Set 3: Lookalike of Subscribers (once you have enough data)

Campaign 2: MoFu/BoFu - Retargeting
Objective: Conversions (for signups)
Inside this campaign, you'd have ad sets targeting your warm audiences.
-> Ad Set 1: All Website Visitors from last 30 days (excluding existing subscribers)
-> Ad Set 2: People who engaged with your Facebook/Instagram page

Within each ad set, you would then have 3-5 different ads (a mix of images and videos) that you are testing against each other. Meta will automatically show the best-performing ad more often. This structure lets you clearly see which audiences and which creatives are giving you the best cost per subscriber. After a few days (the exact time depends on your spend), you can look at the data, turn off the ad sets and ads that are too expensive, and reallocate the budget to the winners. It's a continous process of testing and refining.

I remember working with a client who sold outdoor equipment. They had everything lumped together and couldn't figure out why their costs were so high. We restructured their account into a proper funnel structure like this, and it was a key part of the strategy that helped them drive 18,000 website visitors at a much better cost using Meta Ads.

I know that's a lot to take in, so I've detailed my main recommendations for you in a table below to give you a clear overview of the plan of attack.

As you can see, getting consistent results from paid advertising isn't just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's a systematic process of understanding your numbers, defining your audience, rigorous testing, and continuous optimisation across the entire funnel, from the ad right through to the landing page. It's part science, part art, and it takes a lot of experience to know which levers to pull and when.

This is where working with a specialist can make a huge difference. While you focus on making your product incredible, a consultant or agency can handle the entire advertising process for you – bringing the expertise, the systems, and the experience from hundreds of other campaigns to get you results faster and more efficiently than going it alone.

I hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpful and gives you a much clearer picture of what's involved. If you'd like to discuss this further and see how we might be able to help you achieve your goals, we'd be happy to offer you a free initial consultation call where we can look at your specific situation in more detail.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh