Paid Ads for Dealflow

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by a searcher from Purdue University
in Chicago, IL, USA

3yrs ago

Paid Ads for Dealflow

Hey All -

Has anyone experimented with or run successful paid media campaigns to owners/brokers for deal flow?

Most seem to be heavily invested in outreach - email, LI, mailers, etc. I haven't seen a lot of talk of paid ads and I'm curious about any previous experience.

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reply by a searcher 3yrs ago
from Oklahoma State University in Wichita, KS, USA

Good question, thanks for posting. To date, I have been focusing on proprietary outreach which is highly targeted and expensive (time) per shot but effective (~80% success in an initial screening call).

Sharing an idea, if you or other searchers use Google products they offer a $500 credit if you spend $500 in ads. I would be willing to pool/invest $500 into a general Ad campaign that is coordinated to cast a broader net with a search theme to see what the results are which are then shared with the group investing in the campaign.

Two expected outcomes:

1. Test the effectiveness of the medium
2. Possibly receive interesting leads that are of value to the group and or could be brockerd on the Searchfunder platform

With 10 participants the total ad campaign would be $10k (10 x $500 x 2), which should be big enough for the experiment.

reply by a searcher 3yrs ago
from University of Massachusetts Amherst in Sydney NSW, Australia

Yes, I ran some ads on FB at first, targeting small business owners. Unfortunately there's no option for other business owners, so the responses I received from A$300 (about USD$200) ad spend were from a handful of very small businesses.

I ran some targeted LinkedIn ads too but didn't get much out of it. Frequency was climbing above 3x so I paused the campaign. It was really nice to be able to target very specific roles / industries / geographies, and I suspect it could work in the US where you have over 10x our Australian market size.

Happy to chat and give you more detail. And I'd love to hear about your results!