This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings, friends and listeners. Welcome back to Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. New episode for you today. Well, actually there's a new episode every day, but here's today's.
And from time to time I've mentioned Facebook ads. This is a tool that a lot of people use to generate interest, drive people to their products. And because Facebook ads are so popular, there is a whole industry of Facebook ad consultants, people who manage campaigns for businesses. Today I'll tell you about one of them who makes an extra $1,800 a month, focusing specifically on doing Facebook ads for healthcare providers. Now this is a great market because medical professionals operate high value practices.
Not only high value, but also expensive. But they don't usually know much about bringing people in the door because they are physicians. They've spent a long time specializing in their skills, building this expertise, but they often need help with marketing. So naturally there's an opportunity there, at least for the right person. Today I'll tell you about one of those people who produced stellar results for an orthodontist in Utah and is also building up a significant side income for himself along the way.
That story right after this. [Music]
Today's story comes from Seth Allerton in Utah. By day, Seth is a manager for a consulting firm, specializing in employee organization and leadership development. Seth assists in bringing in leads through inbound marketing. And in addition to the part-time graphic design work that he's done for about five years now, he spends his evenings providing marketing services for healthcare providers, focusing mostly on Facebook ads.
Now he comes to this second profession honestly, Seth has three brothers and two brothers in law in medicine. He watched them all push through years of medical school while being married with children. He said they spent so much time and energy studying to pass the board exams that they had no time to learn anything at all about business, let alone marketing. And meanwhile, at his day job, Seth had acquired the skills of managing Google AdWords and Facebook ad campaigns. He saw a clear need for these local healthcare professionals, so he began approaching ones he knew about their online marketing.
As he predicted, none of them were doing digital marketing at all and most of them had no idea what he was even talking about. They typically turned him down outright or were at least skeptical. So he offered to work for free in order to gain their trust and prove that he could help their business. Now a quick disclaimer, the results I'm gonna tell you about in this campaign are not necessarily typical. Doesn't happen all the time with Facebook ads like this or probably not even most of the time.
But keep in mind, as I said, that medical services tend to be expensive and orthodontics, in particular braces for children, are definitely expensive. So Seth approached a number of orthodontists and one of them took him up on his offer to work for free for a month, they spent under $500 in the month of February offering a $400 off coupon for braces. This campaign brought in 13 new patients. Now if you have ever paid for braces yourself or if you had braces and somebody else paid for them, you may already realize that this is a lot of money. The average cost was more than $5,000 so that one campaign brought in approximately $65,000 in new revenue.
Spend $500, get $65,000. Now of course there's a lot of overhead there as well, braces are not a digital product, there's a wholesale cost, you have to maintain the office, you have to pay the staff, et cetera. But this is an existing orthodontics practice, they're already in this business. So whatever the profit margin is, we could probably say conservatively that this $500 campaign brought in at least $10,000 to $15,000 in profit, if not much more. Now it's also not just a matter of popping up the Facebook ad and then going away.
Seth designed a process. He says that the magic is not just in offering a coupon but using it as a lead magnet and sending traffic to a landing page that captures personal information. Now that was a little bit jargony so let's break it down. In marketing language, the lead magnet is just that thing that attracts customers. They see the ad for the coupon, $400 off, oh that's interesting, and they go to a landing page which is a one page simple website that's designed for the sole purpose of capturing someone's email address or phone number or other means of contact.
Now then once someone fills out the form in exchange for the coupon, this is really cool. The front desk of the orthodontics office gets a notification and they call that person within five or 10 minutes to schedule an appointment. So just imagine how effective that is. You fill out this form and then five minutes later someone's calling you to schedule your appointment. It makes for very high conversion.
Needless to say, the orthodontist was like, "Okay, you're hired." For his next experiment, Seth targeted an audience of around 150,000 people in three surrounding zip codes. Facebook makes it very easy to do that. You basically put that variable in, they'll do the rest. He changed some of the variables. He made the coupon $1,200.
Then he tried making the coupon $600 just to see how people would respond. Now at the end of the month, this campaign generated 33 leads. So 33 people who were qualified in the market for braces and had selected to receive that coupon. About a third of those leads became customers and then factoring in the larger discount, the orthodontist was earning an average of $3,200 per customer. So that was a bit more than $30,000 in response to the second campaign.
And once again, those phone calls, those very quick follow-up calls were critical to making sure this was a success. Seth says that he knows how to do this very well. It is something he can replicate elsewhere, but one of his biggest challenges is getting new clients to trust him and give him a chance. He says in Utah, there's a culture of people wanting everything done for free or for cheap. And a lot of people who could really benefit from advertising don't want to pay for it.
Now the startup costs for Seth's business, this Facebook ad consulting. He paid just $100 a month for a landing page software provider, and then $70 a month for Adobe Creative Cloud software. After he does that month-long free trial, he charges $800 to $1,000 a month for his services, which of course doesn't include the Facebook ad spend. He now has two paying clients and brings in an additional $1,800 a month on top of his day job. His goal is to get 10 paying clients, each paying $700 to $1,200 a month while maintaining the day job.
And he says if he lands 10 to 15 paying clients, he could quit his job and take his agency full time, which would give him a better lifestyle and more time to spend with his family. He says right now one of his greatest challenges is juggling his side hustle with the day job and his family. When he comes home from work at night, he spends time with his kids. And then once they go to bed about 8.30, he goes back to work on his side hustle. So eventually he would love the option to do this full time.
But first, just like we saw in yesterday's story, he wants to make absolutely certain that this works for him. [Music]
So I thought this was a fun case study, both in using Facebook ads to generate interest and income for an existing business, as well as showing you a bit about how this world of Facebook ads consulting works. If you would like to experiment with Facebook ads, you can do so by spending as little as $10. And that's great, it's fun. You can learn a lot by doing that.
I definitely recommend you don't spend a lot of money until you both know what you're doing and you're sure that you're getting the result you want. Now that's for your own business, but if you're doing this for a customer or a client, then obviously the same is true as well. You wanna make sure that they're getting a good result so that they're happy, they'll continue to pay you, and hopefully they'll refer you to other clients. There are a lot of people doing this in different ways. I will include some resources on the show notes page for you.
That is at sidehustleschool.com/144. You can also leave a comment or question for the show on the Hustle Hotline at 8449 Hustle. Remember all this week, I would love to hear what your side hustle idea is or what you're working on. We're gonna share a bunch of listening responses next week. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.
Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
