Should you say free in your Facebook and Instagram ad copy?

Well, the quick answer is yes, and the slightly longer answer is it depends.

And the slightly longer answer that I've discovered in my five-ish years of doing Facebook and Instagram ads is that it depends.

But basically, yes, and this is going to be an ultra short.

Now, basically yes, because when I show ads on behalf of clients for their free lead magnets,

we're usually showing those ads to a cold audience, an audience that has not entered their

business ecosphere, never encountered a video, does not follow them on social media,

hasn't been to their website, so on and so forth.

And people automatically assume the worst. As in people that don't know, you just assume that

you're trying to rip them off or charge them for something, right? So we do put free in the ad copy.

And if you don't like the word free, that's fine, use something like gift or complimentary or no cost.

But this is what I've been doing and it works quite well.

Now, if you're skeptical, you can always spend money testing what happens to your opt-in, or I should say, testing what happens to your cost per lead if you don't put free inside of the ad copy. Just test.

Same ad copy, same visuals, but one version of ad copy doesn't have the word free and the other one

does. And then after five or six days of running those Facebook and Instagram ads, you will know

what your cost per lead is.

Now, what if we are trying to attract a higher quality lead magnet opt-in?

Because nobody wants freebie seekers and tire kickers and folks who weren't actually

planning on working with you or paying you for your expertise anyway on the email list. And guess what?

That's just part of the name of the game. Part of the name of the game? Yeah, we're just going to

stick with that of online marketing is when you have a lead magnet, you end up getting quite a few

of those folks. But this is why you invest time and money into developing your email nurture

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