Advertising is one of the fastest, most effective ways to grow an online business today.
If you have a digital product or something for sale, one of the best things you can do is launch an advertising campaign that gets your message in front of the right people.
BUT if it were that easy, all businesses would be ultra successes, right?
Maybe you’ve had doubts about not knowing what to expect when getting started with advertising, took a few bad swings, and struck out before finding success?
Don’t worry, I’ve seen countless businesses struggle with the exact same scenario.
That’s why I want to talk about what you can EXPECT when getting started with paid advertising, what to FOCUS on in the beginning, and the MINDSET shifts you need to have to reframe the way you think about advertising your business to ultimately find success.
If you’re ready to start hitting home runs, let’s step up to bat.
Table of Contents
#1 In the Beginning We’re Just “Buying Data”
One of the first things I tell my clients when they are just starting their advertising campaigns is, we’re just “buying data.“
The game just started, we’re getting warmed up, and we’re not expecting a home run with sales rolling in super fast. All we want to do at this point is buy data from the marketplace.
In this beginning stage, we want to put together your offer with messaging you think will resonate with your target audiences, and get it out on the field in front of those audiences so we can collect information and find out, was our hypothesis correct?
It’s like a science experiment, where we can ask ourselves questions and look in the data for answers on whether the message resonates with a particular audience strong enough to potentially be a profitable campaign.
The goal is to get out on the field and find winners and losers in the data, shifting our mindset from expectations of immediate success to strategically playing the game.
One of the most valuable things about online advertising today is that you have the visibility and data to see what’s going on down to the smallest specificities.
By the time you’ve spent 2-3 thousand dollars, you’ll have a gold mine of valuable information about how your messaging is resonating with certain audiences so you can start to make iterations to optimize your campaigns.
#2 Ads Get Attention But Offers Grow Businesses
You can’t make up for a bad offer if it’s just not compelling, no matter how much time you’ve spent testing different colors, headlines, or images.
I see this all the time with businesses starting out with advertising, spending all their time and energy testing the ad but neglecting testing anything that happens after the ad click.
No amount of targeting and ad changes can make your campaign profitable if it’s simply a poor offer.
The truth is, ads catch attention, but the offer and the way you position your product with that offer has a massive impact on the true success of your campaign.
Focusing on your unique offer and how you’re positioning that in the marketplace will be a better use of time during your first campaigns.
#3 Spend More Money To Acquire Customers
Spend more money? Let me explain.
A lot of businesses just getting started are focused on how to get really cheap leads and clicks.
Maybe you’ve been guilty of this?
It’s completely normal. We all want to save money and protect our margins.
However, the thing we need to consider is how to maximize the value of a customer so that we can spend as much money as possible and still be profitable and growing.
Not convinced yet? Take this example…
Let’s say I have a product to sell, and I know my customer will spend $40.
I’m willing to spend up to $20 to acquire a customer because I need a 50% margin to have a healthy business.
I could spend 2-3 thousand dollars a month acquiring customers up to this $20 mark, and that’s where I have to stay.
On the other side of the field, there’s another business in the exact same marketplace that’s competing for the exact same customers.
They know their customers will spend $100, so they are willing to spend up to $50 to acquire a customer.
What happens here?
The competitor starts running the bases around me, outspending me, acquiring more customers, and growing faster because they are willing to spend more.
If you want to scale and grow aggressively, you can’t be focused on the cheapest leads and the cheapest customers.
When we’re working with clients, we tell them our job is to maximize your ad campaigns so that we can keep your costs down.
But we need you to be maximizing the value of the customer as well.
It comes down to how we maximize your volume based on your company’s goals to get you as many customers as possible within your healthy profit margin.
As costs and competition on ad platforms continue to rise, and it gets more challenging to run effective ad campaigns, it’s important to get into this mindset of maximizing and optimizing everything that happens after the ad click so you can maximize the growth of your business.
Every Business Can Profit From Advertising
The question isn’t whether or not advertising will work for your business, it’s finding the best way to set it up with compelling offers and the right mindset around how you’re structuring your customer acquisition, so you can spend money, get customers, and scale your business.
Advertising will always be this process of testing, iteration, and optimization, but I believe that every business can find success and tap into the opportunity on ad platforms if they take the time to strategically play the game with the right mindset.
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