Solved: Medium Business Meta Ads Minimum Spend?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your questions about Meta ads. It's good you're asking these things, but I think you might be focusing on the wrong metrics. The questions around minimum spend and how long to wait are common, but they're often symptoms of a much deeper issue that, once fixed, makes the answers to those questions almost irrelevant.

Most campaigns I see fail not because the daily budget was £10 instead of £20, or because an ad was changed on day 5 instead of day 7. They fail because the fundamental strategy is broken. They fail because the offer is weak, the targeting is lazy, and the business doesn't actually know what a customer is worth to them. So instead of giving you a simple number, I'm going to walk you through the framework we use to build profitable campaigns from the ground up. It all starts with knowing your numbers, not guessing at a budget.

We'll need to look at... The Myth of 'Minimum Spend' and The Math That Actually Matters

Let's tackle your first question head-on because it's the most common and the most misleading. There is no "minimum spend." Asking for one is like asking "how long is a peice of string?". A £20/day budget might be a complete waste of money for one business but wildly profitable for another. The question isn't "what's the minimum I should spend?" but rather "how high a cost-per-lead can I afford and still be profitable?"

To answer that, you need to ignore Meta ads for a moment and look at your own business financials. You need to calculate your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This number is the single most important metric for any advertising campaign because it tells you exactly how much you can spend to get a customer. Without it, you're flying blind, turning ads off too early because you're scared of the cost, or letting them run too long and burning cash on unprofitable leads.

The calculation is pretty straightforward. You need three bits of info:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much revenue does a typical customer bring in per month or per year? For a service business, this might be the average project value or monthly retainer.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the direct costs of delivering the service? Don't just guess this.
3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? If you work on a project basis, you can calculate customer lifetime in months (e.g., if a customer does 2 projects with you and each lasts 3 months, their lifetime is 6 months, and the churn is 1/6 or ~16.7%).

The formula looks like this:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let’s run an example for a hypothetical service business, say a marketing agency with monthly retainers.

• ARPA: £1,500 per month
• Gross Margin: 60% (after paying staff/freelancers to deliver the work)
• Monthly Churn: 5% (meaning the average client stays for 20 months)

LTV = (£1,500 * 0.60) / 0.05

LTV = £900 / 0.05 = £18,000

In this scenario, each customer is worth £18,000 in gross margin over their lifetime. Now we have a number to work with. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £6,000 to acquire a single £18,000 customer.

This is where it gets interesting. Now you need to look at your sales process. Let's say you know that you close 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer. That means you can afford to pay up to £600 for a single qualified lead (£6,000 CAC / 10 leads).

Suddenly, the question of a £20/day budget seems a bit silly, doesn't it? If you can afford to pay £600 for a lead, a £100/day budget to try and get one lead a week is a no-brainer investment. You're not spending money; you're buying customers at a profit. This is the mindset shift that separates businesses that succeed with paid ads from those that fail. They stop seeing it as an expense and start seeing it as a predictable growth engine.

To make this tangible for you, I've built a little calculator. Play around with your own numbers. Find out what your LTV is, and then determine what you can truly afford to pay per lead. This number should be your North Star for all your advertising efforts.

I'd say you... should Stop Waiting and Start Measuring

Your second question about waiting 1-2 weeks is another piece of generic advice that can be incredibly damaging. The answer to "how long should I wait?" is not a function of time; it's a function of data and money. Waiting two weeks on an ad set that's spending £100 a day with zero results is madness. You've just burned £1,400. Conversely, turning off an ad set after two days when it's only spent £20 might mean you've killed a potential winner before it had a chance to gather data.

The rule we follow is simple and it’s based on the affordable CPL you just calculated. An ad set should be turned off if it has spent 3x your target CPL without generating a single lead.

Why 3x? It gives the algorithm enough budget to find a conversion while protecting you from catastrophic losses. If your target CPL is £100, you let the ad set spend up to £300. If it gets a lead for, say, £150, you let it keep running to see if the average cost comes down. If it spends £300 and you have nothing to show for it, the audience or creative is clearly not working, and you kill it without emotion. Time is irrelevant. Spend is everything.

This approach requires discipline. You're not "feeling it out" or "giving it a bit longer." You're making cold, hard, data-driven decisions. This is how you avoid the emotional rollercoaster of advertising and build a system for testing that reliably finds winning combinations of creative and targeting.

To make it clearer, here’s a simple decision-making flowchart. This is basically the logic that should run in your head every time you check your campaigns.

You probably should... Fix Your Offer Before You Fix Your Ad

This brings me to your final question: "When should you start seeing conversions?". The honest answer? Immediately, if your offer is good enough. If you're spending money and getting zero conversions, the problem is almost never the ad's colour, the headline, or the daily budget. It's the offer.

This is the number one reason campaigns fail. We've audited hundreds of ad accounts, and the story is always the same: a business is driving traffic to a website with a weak, high-friction call to action like "Contact Us," "Request a Quote," or, the worst offender of all, "Request a Demo."

Think about it from your prospect's perspective. They are a busy professional scrolling through their social media feed. They are not looking for you. Your ad interrupts them. You have about three seconds to grab their attention. Let's say you do. They click. They land on your page, and you ask them to fill out a form to then wait for someone to call them back and try to sell them something. Why on earth would they do that? You haven't provided any value. You've only asked for their time and contact details. This is an arrogant, one-sided request.

To get conversions, you must delete the "Request a Demo" button from your mind. Your offer's only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment of undeniable value, for free, right now. You must solve a small, real problem for them to earn the right to solve the whole thing later. We call this a "foot-in-the-door" offer.

For a service business, this could be:

• A free, automated audit tool (e.g., an SEO agency offering a free site audit that finds the top 3 errors).
• A high-value resource or template (e.g., a law firm offering a free, downloadable Non-Disclosure Agreement template).
• A short, sharp strategy session (e.g., our own offer of a free 20-minute ad account review).
• An interactive calculator or quiz that gives a personalised result (e.g., a financial advisor offering a "Retirement Readiness Score" quiz).

Notice the pattern? All of these are low-friction (quick, easy, no hard sell) and high-value (they get an immediate benefit). This approach fundamentally changes the dynamic. You are no longer a salesman begging for a meeting; you are an expert generously providing value. This builds trust and pre-qualifies your leads far better than any form ever could. The people who use your free tool and find it helpful are the ones who will be most receptive to your paid services. For one B2B service client in the environmental controls industry, we managed to reduce their cost per lead by 84%, and a huge part of that success was moving away from a generic 'contact us' approach to an offer that provided genuine value upfront. The offer is everything.

You'll need... to Target Pain, Not People

Finally, let's talk about targeting. As a service-based business, you have a unique challenge on platforms like Meta. Unlike Google Search, where people are actively looking for a solution to their problem, on Facebook or Instagram, you're interrupting them. This means your targeting and messaging have to be exceptionally relevant.

The biggest mistake businesses make is defining their customer by demographics. "We target small business owners in London" is a useless definition. It tells you nothing about their problems. You need to stop thinking about demographics and start thinking about nightmares. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is not a person; it's a problem state.

What is the specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare that your service solves?

• An IT service provider doesn't sell "managed IT." They sell "the peace of mind that you won't get a ransomware email at 3 AM."
• An accountant doesn't sell "bookkeeping." They sell "the confidence to make growth decisions because your numbers are actually reliable."
• A corporate training company doesn't sell "leadership workshops." They sell "a solution to your best staff quitting because of bad managers."

Once you've identified this nightmare, your entire ad strategy becomes clear. Your ad copy should use the Problem-Agitate-Solve framework. You name the pain, you twist the knife a little by describing the consequences, and then you present your high-value, low-friction offer as the solution.

Your targeting should focus on interests and behaviours that are proxies for this pain. Instead of just "Small Business Owners," you could layer interests like "Business Page Admins" who also have an interest in "QuickBooks" or "Xero" if you're an accountant. You're looking for signals that they are in your target audience and likely experiencing the pain you solve.

And please, for the love of god, do not use the "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign objectives. You are giving Meta explicit instructions to find the cheapest people to show your ad to. These are, by definition, the people least likely to click, engage, or buy anything. Their attention is cheap for a reason. Always, always use a "Leads" or "Sales" (with a conversion objective) campaign. You must train the algorithm to find people who take the action you want them to take, not just people with eyeballs.

Structure your campaigns logically into a funnel:

-> Top of Funnel (ToFu): This is your cold audience. Here you'll test different interest groups, behaviours, and lookalike audiences based on your best existing customers or website visitors. The goal is to introduce them to the problem and your solution (via your free offer).

-> Middle of Funnel (MoFu): This is your warm audience. You'll retarget people who have engaged with your brand but haven't become a lead yet. This includes people who watched a certain percentage of your video ads, visited your website, or engaged with your Facebook/Instagram page. You show them different ads, perhaps testimonials or case studies, to build more trust.

-> Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): This is your hot audience. These are people who have shown strong intent, like visiting your pricing page or starting to fill out your lead form but not finishing. You retarget them with a more direct message, maybe with a sense of urgency, to get them over the line.

This structured approach ensures you're not just throwing ads at a wall and hoping something sticks. You're systematically guiding potential customers through a journey, which is essential for a considered purchase like a business service.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a far more complex answer than "spend £30 a day and wait a week." But the simple answers are usually the wrong ones. True success in paid advertising comes from a robust strategy, not from tweaking daily budgets. I've summarised the core strategic shifts you need to make in the table below.

As you can see, this is a significant shift in thinking. It's moving from being a passive "ad buyer" to an active "system builder." This is the work we do with our clients every day. We don't just manage campaigns; we help them build the entire growth engine, from the financial modeling and offer creation to the ad creative and technical setup.

Implementing all of this on your own can be daunting, especially when you're also trying to run your business. There's a steep learning curve and mistakes can be expensive. If you'd like to have an expert pair of eyes on your business and get a clear, actionable plan tailored to your specific situation, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can dive into your numbers, brainstorm a compelling offer, and map out what a successful campaign would look like for you.

There's no hard sell. Worst case, you walk away with a ton of free advice you can implement yourself. Best case, we find we're a good fit to help you grow.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh