Solved: How to Warm Up Ads Before Full Budget Spend?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on your question about 'warming up' your Meta ads and driving purchases through Instagram messages. It's a common question, and honestly, a lot of the advice you see floating around online can be quite misleading and end up costing small businesses a lot of money for very little return.

I’ve taken a look at what you're trying to achieve and put together a fairly detailed breakdown of how I'd approach this. It covers not just the "warming up" part, but the whole process from understanding your customer to building a campaign that actually generates sales. There's a fair bit to get through, but I think you'll find it helpful.

Let's talk about "warming up" your ads...

First off, let's tackle this idea of "warming up" an ad account. It’s one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? Most people think it means you have to spend money on campaigns that don't have a direct sales goal, like running an awareness or engagement campaign first, to 'teach' the algorithm about your business before you ask it to find you customers.

Tbh, this is probably the single biggest and most expensive mistake I see people make. It sounds logical, but it's based on a complete misunderstanding of how the Meta algorithm actually works. When you set a campaign objective, you are giving Meta's algorithm a very specific, very literal command.

If you choose the "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" objective, you are telling it: "Find me the largest number of people, who will see my ad, for the absolute lowest possible price." The algorithm is incredibly good at its job, so it does exactly that. It goes out and finds all the people within your target audience who are passive scrollers. The ones who never click, never engage, and almost certainly never buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. No other advertiser is bidding for them, because they're not valuable from a commercial perspective. You are effectivly paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

Running an "Engagement" campaign is slightly better, but still flawed. You're telling the algorithm: "Find me people who like and comment a lot." So it finds them. But people who like posts are not necessarily people who buy things. You'll get a lot of vanity metrics – likes, comments, maybe some shares – which can feel good, but you'll look at your bank account at the end of the month and wonder where the actual sales are. It's a trap many fall into.

The real way to "warm up" your ad account and your Meta Pixel is to feed it the right kind of data from day one. You want to teach it what a real customer looks like, not what a window shopper looks like. And you do that by telling it exactly what you want it to find.

You need to tell Meta exactly what you want...

This leads directly to the most important decision you'll make when setting up your campaign: the objective. Since your goal is to get purchases through Instagram messages, your campaign objective should reflect that as closely as possible. You shouldn't be messing around with Awareness or Traffic or Engagement.

You should be using the "Sales" objective. Within that, you can specify that you want conversions to happen via "Messaging Apps". This tells the algorithm your exact goal: "Go find me people in my target audience who are not only likely to see my ad, but are also likely to click the 'Send Message' button, start a conversation, and ultimately make a purchase."

This is the proper way to warm up your account. Every time someone messages you and you have a valuable conversation, or even better, they make a purchase, the Meta Pixel (which is the bit of code that tracks actions) learns a little bit more about the kind of person who becomes your customer. It learns their demographics, their interests, their online behaviours. Over time, it gets smarter and smarter at finding more people just like them, at a lower cost. You start by giving it high-quality data, and it repays you by finding high-quality users.

By starting with a sales-focused objective, you might find that your initial costs are higher than they would be for an awareness campaign. You won't get thousands of cheap impressions. But the people you do reach will be infinitely more valuable. You are fishing in a pond full of potential buyers, not a vast ocean of passive scrollers. This is the entire foundation of a successful paid ad strategy, and something we have to fix in almost every new client account we take on. It is fundemental.

We need to figure out who we're actually talking to...

Okay, so we've established we need to run a Sales campaign aimed at getting messages. The next question is, who are we showing these ads to? A lot of business owners will say something like, "women aged 25-45 who are interested in fashion and live in the UK." That's a start, but it's far too generic. It tells you nothing of real value and leads to bland, forgettable ads that speak to no one.

You need to forget the sterile, demographic-based profile for a moment. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a problem state. It's a nightmare. For a B2B company, that might be a literal career-threatening nightmare. For a small B2C business like yours, it's more likely a deep frustration, a nagging desire, or an urgent need.

You need to become an expert in that specific problem. Let's imagine you sell custom, hand-painted pet portraits.
-> Your customer isn't just a "pet owner".
-> The problem isn't "I don't have a picture of my dog".
-> The real, emotional problem is: "My phone is full of blurry, average photos of the pet I adore. I'm terrified I won't have a truly special, beautiful keepsake to remember them by when they're gone. I see other people with these amazing custom artworks and feel a pang of envy. I want something that truly captures my pet's unique personailty, not some generic print from a big shop."

Do you see the difference? Now we're not selling a product; we're selling the solution to a fear and the fulfilment of a desire. We're selling a treasured memory, a conversation starter, a way to honour a beloved family member. When you understand your customer on this level, everything else becomes easier: your ad copy writes itself, you know what kind of images to use, and you know exactly what interests to target.

So before you spend a single pound on ads, take some time to do this work. What is the deep, emotional reason someone would buy from you? What frustration are you solving? What dream are you fulfilling? Write it down. This is the blueprint for your entire strategy.

I'd start building your audiences like this...

Once you know the *problem* you're solving, you can start to think about where to find the people who have that problem. This is where we build out your audience structure within Meta. I usually prioritise audiences based on how 'warm' they are, meaning how familiar they are with your business. For a new account, you'll be starting with cold audiences, but it's good to have the full structure in mind.

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Cold Audiences

These are people who have never heard of you before. This is where you'll start spending your budget to gather data and bring new people into your world. The key here is to use Detailed Targeting based on the ICP work we just did.

You don't want to target just "dogs" or "cats". That's far too broad. You want to layer interests to find your nightmare-havers. Thinking about our pet portrait example, you'd target people who are not just interested in "Dogs" but also in things that suggest they spend a lot of money and emotion on their pets. Things like:

• -> Specific high-end pet food brands (e.g., Orijen, Acana)
• -> Subscription boxes for pets (e.g., BarkBox)
• -> Pet insurance companies
• -> Pages for popular 'dogfluencers'
• -> Interests like "Etsy", "Not on the High Street", or "Handmade Goods" which indicate an appreciation for customised, unique products.

You're looking for the crossover. People who love their pets AND love buying special, unique things. I often see people making the mistake of targeting something huge and unrelated like "Amazon". That interest includes millions of people, but the vast majority won't be your ideal customer. You want to aim for interests that are much more likely to contain your target audience than not.

I've put a little table below showing a sample audience structure you could test for this hypothetical pet portrait business. You'd create a seperate ad set for each to see which performs best.

2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Warm Audiences (Retargeting)

Once you've been running ads for a little while and getting some traffic and engagement, you can start retargeting. These are people who have shown some interest but haven't bought yet. They are a goldmine. These audiences will almost always give you a better return on your investment than cold audiences.

You can create Custom Audiences of people who have:

• -> Engaged with your Instagram profile in the last 30/60/90 days
• -> Watched a certain percentage (e.g., 50%) of one of your video ads
• -> Sent you a message before
• -> Visited your website (if you have one)

You'd run separate ads to this group, often with a slightly different message. They already know who you are, so you can be more direct, maybe show them some customer testimonials or a behind-the-scenes look at your process.

3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Hot Audiences

These are people on the verge of buying. For an e-commerce store, this would be people who added a product to their cart but didn't check out. In your case, it could be people who started a message thread with you, asked for a price, but then went quiet. You can retarget them with a gentle reminder or a special offer to get them over the line.

4. Lookalike Audiences

This is where it gets really powerful. Once you have enough data (you need at least 100 people in a source audience, but more is much better), you can ask Meta to create a "Lookalike" audience. You can give it a list of your past purchasers, and it will go and find millions of other people in your target country who share similar characteristics. A Lookalike audience of your best customers is often the highest-performing cold audience you can build.

The priority for creating lookalikes is always based on the most valuable action. So a lookalike of purchasers is better than a lookalike of people who messaged you, which is better than a lookalike of people who just liked a post. You work your way up the value chain.

You probably should work out how much a customer is worth...

This all sounds great, but it brings up a critical question: how much should you actually be paying for a customer? If you don't know the answer to this, you're flying blind. You might turn off a campaign that's getting you message conversations for £15 each, thinking it's too expensive, when in reality it could be incredibly profitable.

The key is to understand your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire course of their relationship with you. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Message go?" but "How high a cost can I afford to acquire a great customer?"

Let's run through a quick, simplified calculation. You'll need to plug in your own numbers, but this shows the principle.

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month? This is tricky for non-subscription businesses, so let's reframe it. What's your average order value (AOV)? Let's say it's £80. How many times does a typical customer buy from you over their 'lifetime' (let's say 2 years)? Let's say it's 1.5 times. So your total revenue per customer is £80 * 1.5 = £120. Over 24 months, your monthly ARPA is £120 / 24 = £5.

2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue, after accounting for your materials, shipping, etc.? Let's say it's 70%.

3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? This is the hardest to calculate. A simple way is to estimate the average customer lifetime in months. We said 2 years, so 24 months. The churn rate is 1 / 24 = 4.17%, or 0.0417.

Now, we can use the formula:

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

LTV = (£5 * 0.70) / 0.0417

LTV = £3.50 / 0.0417 = £83.93

So, in this hypothetical example, every new customer you acquire is worth about £84 in profit to your business over their lifetime. Now we can work out what you can afford to spend to get them. A healthy ratio for a growing business is a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). This means you can afford to spend up to £84 / 3 = £28 to acquire a single new customer.

Now let's say your sales process (from the first message to the final sale) converts 1 in 4 qualified conversations into a paying customer. That means you can afford to pay up to £28 / 4 = £7 per qualified messaging conversation.

Suddenly, that £5 or £6 Cost Per Message you might be seeing from your ads doesn't seem so bad, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of trying to get the cheapest possible clicks and allows you to focus on acquiring high-value customers, profitably.

Your ads need to speak to their problem...

Now that we know who we're talking to and what they're worth, we need to craft the actual ad. The ad's job is to grab the attention of your ideal customer in the noisy Instagram feed and get them to take action. The best way to do this is to speak directly to the 'nightmare' we identified earlier.

There are a couple of classic copywriting frameworks that work really well for this. You don't sell the features; you sell the transformation.

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)

You state the problem, you poke at it to make the feeling more intense, and then you present your product as the solution.

Example for our pet portrait business:

(Image/Video: A stunning, characterful pet portrait next to a blurry phone photo)

Problem: Is your camera roll filled with hundreds of photos of your pet, but none that truly do them justice?

Agitate: Don't let those precious memories get lost in your phone. A generic canvas print from a big store will never capture the unique spark in their eyes or their quirky personality.

Solve: We create stunning, hand-painted digital portraits from your favourite photos that you'll treasure for a lifetime. Turn a simple photo into a work of art. DM us your favourite pic for a free, no-obligation mock-up!

2. Before-After-Bridge (BAB)

You paint a picture of their world 'before' your product, then the ideal world 'after' your product, and position your product as the bridge to get them there.

Example:

(Image/Video: A carousel ad showing a 'before' plain wall and an 'after' wall with the portrait as a centerpiece)

Before: Your living room wall is... fine. Maybe there's a generic print you bought because you needed to fill the space. It doesn't really feel like 'you'.

After: Imagine a vibrant, one-of-a-kind portrait of your furry best friend hanging proudly on your wall. It's the first thing guests compliment you on and it makes you smile every time you see it.

Bridge: Our artists are the bridge that turns that 'before' into an 'after'. DM us to see how we can transform your favourite photo into a masterpiece.

Notice how both examples end with a very clear, low-friction Call to Action (CTA). This is just as important as the ad copy itself.

You'll need an offer that actually works...

This brings us to the final, and perhaps most critical, piece of the puzzle: your offer. Your offer isn't just your product. It's the entire package of what you're asking someone to do and what they get in return.

The reason why so many B2B campaigns fail is the "Request a Demo" button. It's an arrogant CTA. It's high-friction (I have to book a meeting and get sold to) and low-value (I get nothing tangible right now). The equivalent for a small B2C business is a vague CTA like "DM to order" or "Shop now". It's asking for a big commitment upfront from someone who is still unsure.

Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value. It needs to solve a small, real problem for free to earn you the right to solve the whole thing. It needs to be easy and risk-free.

For your business, instead of a blunt "DM to buy", your offer in the ad should be something that provides instant value and starts a conversation naturally. Things like:

• -> "DM us your favourite pet photo for a free digital mock-up to see what it would look like as a portrait." (This is brilliant - it gives them value, shows them the end result, and gets them invested in the process).
• -> "DM us the word 'PORTRAIT15' to get a 15% discount code for your first order." (A direct incentive).
• -> "Not sure which photo would work best? DM us and our artists will help you choose the perfect one for free." (Offers free expert advice).

These offers change the dynamic. You're no longer a seller asking for money; you're a helpful expert offering a taster of your value. It lowers the barrier to starting a conversation, and once the conversation is started, your passion for your work and the quality of your product can do the rest. This shift from "selling" to "helping" is fundemental to making ads work, especially in a conversational setting like Instagram DMs.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know that was a lot to take in, so I've summarised the main points into a table for you. This is the strategic framework I would use to build and scale your advertising efforts.