The $5/Day Strategy to Get Agency Customers

Summary

Mike Cooch argues that many agencies don’t have a sales problem—they have a marketing and pipeline problem. Improving a pitch or hiring a salesperson won’t solve an empty funnel if too few qualified prospects know the agency exists. Instead of relying mainly on referrals, networking, or cold calls, agencies should consistently promote useful content and retarget people who engage with it.

The core idea is to treat advertising as a long-term relationship-building system, not a short-term experiment judged by whether it produces customers within 30 days. Agency buyers may take months or years to decide they need help. Repeated exposure to useful content can build familiarity and trust, keeping the agency top of mind when they’re ready to buy.

Recommended Two-Campaign Playbook

1. Promote useful content to a local audience

• Share helpful videos, blog posts, educational social posts, or examples of client work.
• Start with Meta ads and a modest budget of about $5–$10 per day.
• Target a focused local market rather than spreading a small budget nationally. The example uses a 10-mile radius around San Diego.
• Choose the campaign objective based on the content:
  • Traffic to send people to a website page.
  • Engagement or video views for content hosted on Facebook or Instagram.
• Keep the campaign running without an end date. Review it every few weeks, increase spend on content that merits more distribution, or turn off weaker posts.
• Focus on building the agency’s reputation and audience—not necessarily generating an immediate sale.

2. Retarget people who engaged

• Build a retargeting audience from people who watched videos or visited the website.
• Run an always-on campaign to keep the agency visible to this audience. The speaker describes this as a “relationship bridge.”
• Start with a budget of about $10 per day, though a small audience may spend much less initially.
• Optimize for reach and use a frequency cap of two impressions every seven days.
• Keep adding varied content, including customer reviews, case studies, educational posts, and occasional offers.
• Offers can invite prospects to book an appointment, request a free audit or demo, attend a webinar, or download a resource. Balance these with useful content rather than making every ad a direct pitch.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Judging performance too soon: A 30-day test may not reflect the longer agency-services buying cycle.
• Targeting too broadly: A small budget spread across a national market is unlikely to produce enough repeated exposure.
• Making every ad a direct offer: Constant selling can lead prospects to ignore the agency. Demonstrate expertise and provide value as well.
• Turning campaigns on and off: The strategy depends on consistent exposure and a growing retargeting audience.
• Relying only on cold outreach: Cold calls require repeated effort, often produce little response, and don’t build the same accumulating content and audience assets.

Frameworks and Operating Principles

• Marketing-to-sales funnel: Marketing generates attention and interest; sales begins when a prospect raises their hand. Diagnose insufficient qualified conversations as a potential lead-generation issue before changing the pitch or sales team.
• Always-on content-to-retargeting loop: Promote useful content → build an engaged audience → retarget that audience with more value and relevant offers → stay top of mind until prospects are ready.
• Long-term relationship marketing: Aim to be the trusted agency a business owner remembers when a need arises, rather than forcing an immediate decision.
• Assets and automation over time and talent: Build reusable content and advertising audiences that continue to create value, instead of depending entirely on repetitive manual outreach.

Metrics, Targets, and Examples Cited

• Budgets: Approximately $5–$10 per day for local content promotion and about $10 per day to start retargeting. The speaker also describes advertising locally for $5–$20 per day as an alternative to spending time on cold calls.
• Geographic example: A 10-mile radius around San Diego.
• Retargeting frequency: Two impressions per person every seven days.
• Review cadence: Check promoted posts every few weeks; campaigns are intended to remain active.
• Buying-cycle estimate: Agency-service decisions may take months or sometimes years, according to the speaker.
• Speaker’s examples and claims: Cooch says his first ad—offering contractors a free website—generated about $20,000 in regular income. He also says he built businesses with millions of dollars in annual revenue and that his company appeared in the Inc. 5000 for three consecutive years before being sold.
• Kai Stone example: Cooch cites Kai Stone’s reported income of more than $500,000 per month and says advertising was an important factor in his growth.
• Cold-calling comparison: Cooch characterizes cold calling as producing little cumulative value and says 90% or more of calls may yield no results. He later contrasts a cold-calling agency with one facing a 95% rejection rate. These are presented as his claims, not independently verified benchmarks.

Presenters and Sources

Mike Cooch is the presenter and primary source. Kai Stone is referenced as an agency-growth example, and Sean appears briefly in a testimonial praising Cooch’s business-building approach.