Here’s the truth: I was super hyped watching YouTube videos where some gurus dismissed recruitment via Instagram Ads, mainly because they claimed the quality of leads was terrible, especially in Latin American countries.

Being South American myself and having lived in various countries across the continent, I already had an idea of what I would find: hundreds of low-income individuals (bad phones, kitschy house backgrounds) desperately responding to an ad, hoping for a source of dollars to provide some security in an otherwise hostile environment. You can see something similar in the model markets on Telegram, which are flooded with Argentine and Venezuelan women. For context: in Argentina, where there’s a large European genotypic population (Latina models that don’t quite look “Latina” due to a lack of indigenous blood), 55% of the population lives in poverty. To compare, a war-torn country like Ukraine has 29% of its population below the poverty line. In short: poor-quality leads.

I decided to give IGAds a shot and ran a simple campaign in Colombia, and the magic started to happen.

Instagram Ads (IGAds):

– Campaign duration: 3 days
– Money invested: $15.64
– Conversations: 32
– Cost per lead: $0.49
– Conversions: 2
– Setup time: 10 minutes

Hottie Harvester Pro (HHP):

– Campaign duration: 15 days
– Money invested: $105
– Conversations: 19
– Cost per lead: $5.52
– Conversions: 0
– Setup time: Many many hours (maybe 40?)

The metrics speak for themselves. When I say “conversations,” I mean exchanges where the potential model shows interest, and I send them the proposal (sales letter). “Conversions” refers to candidates who completed the form with their information and are ready for a video call interview.

HHP still hasn’t landed a conversion, and the cost per lead is over $5, while Instagram Ads costs are 10 times lower, with 2 conversions already. True, the overall quality of the models coming from HHP is much higher than those from IG Ads, but maybe it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the campaign target. With HHP, I spent a lot of time scraping hashtags and specific accounts to ensure a precise target, something I didn’t do when setting up Instagram Ads… because, honestly, I was just messing around.

Now I’m getting serious about IG Ads and have started refining the targeting. I launched two new campaigns, one in Colombia and another targeting Eastern European countries, focusing on people interested in the same niches I targeted with HHP. This way, I’ll have more data to compare, as the lead quality should theoretically improve.

Will this new strategy work? 
Will I have to eat all my words and theories from the earlier posts about developing strategic resources? 
Stay tuned for all this and more in upcoming posts.

By the way, I’m giving these new campaigns two or three days before I start the rounds of video calls to do the final evaluations of the shortlisted models. Hope to sign my first model next week.