So you agree that paid traffic is important to your business, and you’ve got the necessary “plumbing” set up.
Now it’s time to get up and running. Teach Traffic’s Ilana Wechsler is back to tell you how to get your ad campaigns off to a fast and effective start, working with what you’ve already got.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 24:59 — 23.0MB)
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In the podcast:
01:08 – What we’ve talked about and what’s in store
02:40 – Consider the audience you’ve already got
05:50 – What it looks like when you’re starting small
08:46 – The very relevant story of a local surf shop
11:35 – What a huge difference email can make
14:50 – Targeting the folks who haven’t bought
18:34 – How do you know what to sell?
19:50 – You have to work on your approach
22:09 – A quick recap
22:58 – Remarketing offers that work well
Get your marketing on the right track with help from James
Transcription:
James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. I have my special guest Ilana Wechsler back for round two of what is shaping up to be a hugely impactful series on traffic.
What we’ve covered and what’s to come
In Episode One of this series, which is called number 767, we talked about why you want traffic. We talked about getting all your plumbing right. We talked about trades people nightmares, actually. I’m having flashbacks already.
Now we’re going to progress the series on and after we’ve got the fundamentals in place, there’s some low hanging fruit that we can go and get. So Ilana, I want you to explain, what are we going to cover in this episode, Episode 768, Part Two of a three-part series on How to Succeed with Paid Ads on Any Budget in Any Industry or Market. Let’s go.
Ilana: I know, it’s a bit of a bold claim.
“If you can get paid traffic working, you can scale and you can grow your business, you can get a bigger sale price, you can sell it easier.”
James: It’s crazy, but I like it. I’m a broad brushstrokes sort of person. So I’d like to get the essence of the idea. I agree paid traffic is a very important piece of the overall puzzle of a business. If you can get paid traffic working, you can scale and you can grow your business, you can get a bigger sale price, you can sell it easier, because people can see a predictable revenue stream.
We’ve talked about not being dependent on one platform. So if you can get paid traffic working on a few platforms, even better. Today, we’re going to discover how you can probably get your paid traffic working way quicker than you ever thought possible. And I’ve got a little story up my sleeve that might come out during this episode, too. So stay tuned.
Ilana: I’m curious about that. So what I want to talk about in this part two is really getting the most out of what you already have. I’m a big fan of that.
Think of the audience you’ve got
And using that as a starting point, I feel that many, I guess probably agencies, you know, often say to people, oh, we’re going to spend all this money on ads. But I’m a bit contrarian with that, and actually starting out, dipping your toe in the paid traffic water, I really like to actually start with a small budget and just focus on the audience that you already have.
So be it retargeting, it’s the perfect starting point. I kind of touched on this concept which I came up with, called the paid traffic puzzle. I talked about it at your last event, James, when the world was normal and people were gathering into large rooms for conferences. So you know, if any of your listeners have the recordings, they can definitely revisit it.
But it’s this concept of, yeah, as I said, the paid traffic puzzle, of which the basis of this puzzle is at the corners of your puzzle. And that is your retargeting campaigns across multiple platforms. So that’s, I guess, also how I feel it’s different in the market, in that I’m a big fan of retargeting on multiple platforms and not just focusing on one platform.
And I think that’s the mistake that many business owners and advertisers make, is they might implement a retargeting campaign and only retarget their past website visitors on social. And it’s just, you’re missing out on a whole other area, which is an area of opportunity.
So really, it’s leveraging off your existing traffic that is coming to your website. Because even though you might not generate a lot of traffic, you will get some people to come to your website. And so it’s just that, the low hanging fruit, that you’re getting the most out of already what you’ve got.
And it also extends beyond just traffic. If you think about it, most businesses and even a brick and mortar business have often got a database, you know, of their clients. Or if they’re, let’s say, I don’t know, a mortgage broker client or a dentist, they’ve got their existing client base. Or a chiropractor.
You can actually upload that database to Facebook and really engage with your past customers that way, if you kind of find it hard to engage people. If you’ve got a Facebook page where people kind of like your posts, etc., you’ve got what’s called a page engagement audience that you can, you know, reactivate and show ads to those people.
Maybe a video engagement audience. If you’ve got a very large YouTube channel which gets lots of people watching your YouTube videos, that’s also another kind of, you know, engagement audience that you can use to get more out of what you’ve got. So it really extends beyond just website traffic into those other areas as well. That kind of make sense?
James: Sure does. You’re like the perfect podcast guest, Ilana, you could just talk for the entire time and everything you say makes sense.
So just a quick recap there. This will be good news for people who say, Look, I don’t have a big budget. Every ad person I speak to wants to charge me a $5,000 sign-on fee and retainer and you know, then they’re going to want a test budget and they want three months for it to see if it can prove out.
An overview of a small campaign
This is great news, because we know that we can start a very small campaign. Give me an example. What does a tiny campaign look like in terms of dollars per day?
Ilana: I’m glad you asked this, because it’s actually probably one of the most common questions that I get asked, is what’s the minimum do I need to spend in order to run a successful retargeting campaign? And the answer is it largely depends on how much traffic you are generating to either your website or those engagement audiences that I mentioned.
But let’s say you get up to 5000 visitors to your website a month, which is actually quite decent, actually, that’s a little over 100 people a day, 130-odd people a day. So you could easily run a retargeting campaign on multiple platforms for like $10 each platform per day.
And you’d get a sense pretty quickly, A, if you’re reaching that audience, and B, if it’s converting or not. And often what I say to people is, starting small with 10 or $20 a day with a retargeting campaign is a great way to test a bunch of different offers. We can get to the offer a little bit later.
But yeah, it’s really not big budget stuff. And it’s totally possible to do. But if you get sort of north of $5,000 a month, you probably might find you need to spend the $15, $20-a-day mark on the different platforms.
James: Out of control.
So, you know, you’re right. The other thing is, instead of going really, really deep into one platform, you’re suggesting to go shallow with that first campaign across multiple platforms. Your traffic puzzle presentation was a standout at my event.
You’re right, it did happen around the time the world shifted. In fact, the day you presented the event was March the 12th. And then by March the 13th, the USA had gone on to a ban, Formula One got canceled. I say the world shifted while we were at our event. It’s as if the whole world spun. We went into the hotel under one circumstance and from memory, you couldn’t even come back on day two, because the travel restriction says you should be self-isolating.
Ilana: Correct. I’d been in the States six days earlier at Social Media Marketing World, and then I was forced into quarantine. I couldn’t even come back on day two.
James: Right. It’s actually, I’m going to say it’s a rare recording. It’s a rare live presentation, one of the styles you’re not going to see for a long time. So that’s available inside SuperFastBusiness membership. If you’re listening to this and you’re a member, go on and check out that presentation.
I for one am very pleased that you’re advising me and my team on how to do our traffic through your TeachTraffic.com website. Because you’ve got all this experience.
We’re not going to go off and spend $5,000 a month for the traffic agency, because we have a great amount of visitors to our various profiles. We’ve got the ability within the team to put up a little bit of basic copy and a few creatives, and we just need to know where to do it and what to do. And that’s where you’ve been so helpful with advising that, and so I’m super grateful for that.
The surf shop example
And it’s one of the reasons you’re on this podcast, because I think more people need this option. You don’t have to have an agency to get going with what we’re talking about here. And I want to prove that with this little story. Because it’s super relevant to what you just said.
I’m thinking about businesses who are pretty ordinary with their marketing. You referenced the idea of getting everything you can out of all you got. I love that Jay Abraham style concept. That’s actually my favorite book of all time, by the way. So it is a good idea. And I’m thinking about stores and online businesses who don’t do much in terms of marketing.
And the greatest example for me was my non-sales type, local surf shop guy. And he was so unsalesy, he would never ever capture the details of anyone who came into the store or was even inquiring about anything. It was just like, they literally had to buy from him. And in the very end when they put the rent up on his store and he was about to go out of business, he had to do a sale to get rid of all the last stock.
Now, I talk about this story in one of my presentations, which is called How to Sell and Remain Friends with Your Customer. Because, you know, over time, I was able to help him get a better approach to it. And at the end, he said, okay, hands up, just tell me what to do. I’ve been listening to you for like four years. Just, what do I do now? This is an emergency.
And I said, go into your store, your online store or your database, and let’s just export the name of everyone who purchased a surfboard from you, ever. And then we exported it, and we loaded it up as a custom audience into Facebook.
And he had these commemorative T-shirts, which I think sell for $40. And I’m just going to estimate the numbers here, because it’s quite some time ago now, but I think we sold 1500 of them. And the whole campaign cost almost nothing. It was like, $38 or 100 something dollars to target those people who already know, like, trust, have purchased, or a fan or local.
This is a store that doesn’t even collect prospects. It’s only people who’ve ever bought. And we were able to advertise the clear out sale. And in that last weekend, we sold virtually everything in stock. Just this push through an email, which I helped him write, a retargeting campaign, and creating an actual celebratory product on the way out.
And this is for the least salesy and marketing business you’ve ever seen, ever. To the point where they went out of business, because they couldn’t sell. Because in that industry, there’s a bit of a culture that if you actually make sales, you’re a sellout. But it’s also fundamental for staying in business.
So I’ve seen the power of an underutilized business turning on this exact campaign of having something for the people who you’ve already dealt with. Such a no-brainer.
So with that being said, let’s continue.
How email can make a difference
Ilana: Well, I just want to add to that, and I love the fact that you sent an email.
James: He never ever ever sent the emails in the four years I’d been buying boards from him. Not once sent an email. And I’m like, Why? He goes, I don’t want to hassle them. I don’t want to be in their face.
Ilana: But the fact that you combined your ads with the email is actually a pretty ninja tactic, because so many businesses don’t do this. And we all know that email open rates are not 100 percent, especially when they never send emails, right? But even the people that do send emails, you know, you’d be lucky to get, what, 50 percent? When you think about it, that’s 50 percent that are not opening your emails.
And so like, obviously, that’s another way of getting your offer or whatever you are saying in your email in front of people. But even the people that have opened your email, and then see an ad, what I find happens is, you might get some people commenting on that ad going oh, yeah, let’s take the surf shop, right? I love these T-shirts, they’re awesome. I’ve ordered one from my friend. And they start sharing it.
Like, people these days don’t forward emails to their entire contact list. But what they will do is they will share a Facebook ad, right? So you’ve got that viral aspect as well. And then as a result of that share, you don’t have to pay for that.
James: Plus your best customers are just going to buy it.
I’ve bought surfboards when a store uploads an Instagram picture, or a shaper uploads a picture. A guy did that, actually. He uploaded an Instagram picture. And he said, available. You know, this was a rare board that would normally take six months to build, that would be quite expensive. And someone ordered it, obviously, and didn’t go ahead. And I snapped it up.
If he’d sent an email to his database, it would have gone within a minute. Like when I tried to sell an e-bike recently, it sold instantly, because there’s no stock in Australia of this particular model till next year. And I sold for more than I paid, actually, 18 months later. So that was good.
But I often buy surfboards because I’m seeing them on my Facebook feed. They’re just sticking the ad right in front of my face with exactly what I want. That’s just like, if I’m at a weak moment, or I’m tired, or I just feel, like, that’d be just fantastic, I’m likely just to go through the cart and they combine it with a special coupon or something with a deadline.
Then they send emails and follow it up. And now I can’t escape these people, and this board is destined to be mine. And compared to the people who I never hear from and maybe just purchased once, they’re phantoms to me, they disappear into the background. So you can actually generate more of the type of sales you want with your very best customers by continuing that relationship. For $10, $20 a day, you can turn it up.
With your help, Ilana, we’ve got our basics covered, with the brand name bidding on Google, with some remarketing on Facebook, with some ads on YouTube, Instagram. I’ve got my Amazon stuff I talked about in a previous episode.
So I’m using paid traffic just to warm up my machine. And it just, you can get such incremental profit from the people who are most likely to buy. You don’t have to do much selling. Just have to let them know what you’ve got.
The folks who haven’t bought yet
So let’s keep this journey going, because I’m fascinated. We now know we can reach out to people we’ve already dealt with. We could probably reach out to people who haven’t bought yet, but are engaging with our stuff.
You mentioned something about video views, video engagement. That’s, I know at least friends of mine have used particularly well. I’m thinking of Ezra Firestone here, he’s very proactive about marketing to people who watch a certain percentage of his Facebook videos, because those people have pretty much voted and said, hey, whatever you’ve got, it’s interesting enough for me to watch. And we know how much attention is in short supply these days. So they’ve voted with their eyeballs.
Ilana: That’s exactly right. And people do the same thing by promoting their podcast episodes, actually. They create the podcast episode, they just make it into a video, they attach an image to it, and promote them as videos to their existing audiences. So their existing audiences consume their next content. And then that then helps feed what we’re going to talk about in a future episode, their cold traffic campaigns. But it’s just, once again, like, getting the most out of what they already have.
I want to touch on as well, like, I know that your listeners are in such a wide range of industries. And so maybe one of your listeners might be thinking, Well, I’m a chiropractor. Or, I’m a mortgage broker. How did this apply to me? You know, like, maybe, or, I’m a dentist. Like, I’m not really going to run videos on Facebook, you know?
So it is different for different businesses. And you’ve got to think about, obviously, what’s relevant for your audience. But for the traditional service type businesses, be it a mortgage broker or a chiropractor, what you might find you do is you do a retargeting campaign for search on Google.
So imagine this, if I’m a mortgage broker, or an insurance broker or whatever it is, I get people coming to my website who don’t end up buying. And then when they leave my website, if they then start searching for other mortgage brokers or comparing rates or whatever, their search activity, very high-intent based activity after, you might find you want your ads to be there, but only for the people who come to your website.
So for really competitive industries, like mortgage broking (and I just know that because I’m kind of helping someone in that space), you can be really, really strategic with how your strategy and how you’re sort of playing the online ad space with that, rather than going after the big guys and the big banks. You’re just really, really focused and, yeah, laser-focused in what you do. If that makes sense.
James: It does make sense. So basically, by casting the net across a few different platforms, and taking advantage of the different types of creatives and strategies, you will find your special recipe. Kind of like a DJ, you know? What beats are going to work for your crowd.
And that’s exactly what you help people with inside your membership, is like, Hey, here’s what I’ve got. Here’s the things you should try first. And then you pull those levers.
But the good news is, it doesn’t have to cost much to do this. You’ve got the tuition fee to learn how to do it, and then you’ve got your ad budget which can be small, because you’re starting with a warm crowd. A hot crowd, even. It doesn’t have to be cold. Because it’s much harder to convert cold traffic. It takes some pretty special skills to do that. But why start there when you can go for the easy stuff, is really the essence of this particular episode. Right?
“The person who’s most likely to buy from you is the one who’s purchased from you before.”
Ilana: Exactly. And I mean, there’s a common marketing, I guess, theory in that the person who’s most likely to buy from you is the one who’s purchased from you before. And so even if someone has come to your website and made a purchase, you’re not completely new to them.
Or even as, you know, with your surfboard guy, he just accessed his past customers, they know him, they like him, they trust him. It makes sense that they’re going to buy a different surfboard or something else afterwards.
Knowing what to sell
So I guess the next stage from that is, many people might be wondering, Well, how do I know what I want to sell? Especially for e-commerce people, they’ve got a whole array of products that they’re trying to sell, and it’s very hard to think.
And often I say to people is, and really this actually applies to lots of different types of businesses as well, is focus on the 80/20. Focus on the 20 percent of the products, be it service, information or physical products, that are generating you 80 percent of your results. And just take that 80/20 approach and just focus on those bestsellers, because odds are they’re bestsellers for a reason. And that’s just a really good starting point as well.
James: Yeah, it’s the first thing I look for, is like, which one is the one that sells the most, has the best profit, is like, the easiest, lowest resistance.
And again, when people are showing me campaigns, they’re going for the hotspot. Like it’s the most obvious one that is going to generate the volume. They don’t go for the fringe or the quirky stuff. Don’t try and be an artist here. Just lean into the mass market. And you’ll find it’s like a very ready, willing audience for you.
Ilana: Yeah. I mean, your customers have voted what they like the best. So listen to them, and just try and, you know, double down on what’s working the best.
Work on your approach
And lastly on that, I’d also say is, don’t just throw up one kind of ad creative, throw up – well, not throw up – but like, you know, launch different types of creatives that showcase that product or service or whatever it is in lots of different ways, be it video or image ads, or if you’re doing on social, carousel ads.
“You’ve got to keep it fresh. You’ve got to keep it interesting for people.”
You’ve got to keep it fresh. You’ve got to keep it interesting for people. And don’t just think, oh, I threw up one ad and it didn’t work, and that’s it. It doesn’t work. Like, well, no. Maybe, you know, you didn’t present it in the nicest possible way, etc.
James: Yeah. And, you know, I was just in research mode, because I purchased a regular pushbike. Because I sold my e-bike. I got a regular pushbike. I listed all the reasons why inside SuperFastBusiness membership yesterday, it was quite an interesting story.
But the different brands had very different approaches. I found some of the brands were super proactive. They were there wherever I was, in Google, Instagram, Facebook showing me the models that I’d gone and looked at on their site. So they knew I’m in the zone with whatever I was looking at or searching for.
And so the ones who do this well, and no surprise, seem to be the online style businesses who don’t even have physical premises, which is like a real 2020 business model. They’re going to be strong, because they’re just doubling down.
If you have physical premises and you’re not doing this to compete with the people who don’t have physical premises, you’ll be eaten up, probably. It’s likely. And there’s a lot of empty shops around where I live, for retailers. Like, it’s stunning how many times I go out in my local area and a shop that used to be there is no longer there. And I went to the mall for the first time in about three months, yesterday. It was like a deserted ghost town, with a significant portion of shops gone.
So the online marketers are doing this well. I would say it’d be interesting to go and visit some of your competitors and then observe how you’re being tracked and cookied and marketed to. Would that be one of your research tips?
Ilana: Oh, I do love doing this. I love triggering retargeting campaigns to see what ads I get. But you know, you don’t have to do that. I mean, that’s one way to do it. Because you’re obviously only going to see their retargeting ads. When we get to the next episode, James, we can talk about how you can sort of reverse engineer the cold ad creatives that they’re running, so that you can kind of get a sense of what their funnels are, etc.
In summary
James: So is there anything more to talk about on the warm? Recap here: we’re using audiences we’ve already got; we’re using across multiple platforms; we can start off with a small budget. You’ve got more tips and tools on which type of campaigns to run inside your membership, TeachTraffic.com.
What else do we need to know before we move into the last part of this series where we’re talking about cold?
Ilana: I think we’ve pretty much covered it, you know? The first is, we talked about the importance of the digital plumbing, which in order to be able to do what we do in part two, you need to set up that plumbing party in part one. And then yeah, we’ve pretty much covered most of it.
And I would say also, you know, just as you keep running different offers, just keep combining your ads with, like, the email marketing, like that surf guy did, so keep changing your offers. And yeah, that’s pretty much it.
The remarketing offers that work
James: Have you got an example of the type of offers that do tend to work well with remarketing? I mean, in this case, my example was like, it’s a closing down sale. It’s like the last chance to come and see that board that you’ve been admiring or to steal it off the racks for a bargain price. So we had a very specific, clear message.
We also have the T-shirt campaign, the commemorative T-shirt campaign. I’m sure there’s plenty of others, as simple as, here’s your coupon, you know, you left our checkout type thing. There must be other ones.
Ilana: Yeah. Look, obviously, discounts work, discounts attached with a deadline, a classic kind of copywriting technique to get people over the line. Personally, I’m not a massive fan of discounting in a retarget.
James: Me neither.
Ilana: Yeah, because it just sort of trains your customers to wait for that. And to sort of always intentionally…
James: Yeah, skip the cart and wait for the deal.
“At the end of the day, we’re all humans and people like to get a deal.”
Ilana: That’s right. So I personally don’t like doing it. What I kind of like doing instead is value-adding, you know? So not discounting, but just, you know, maybe value-adding something else that wasn’t included. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re all humans and people like to get a deal. Like, they like to feel like they’re getting something of value. And so you just try and make it a no-brainer for people. So I will often include a value-add with a deadline.
James: Yeah. Perfect. Thanks, Ilana.
So this is Episode 768. And in part three, what are we going to be talking about?
Ilana: Part Three, we’re going to talk about cold traffic campaigns, which are so important because they feed this what we’ve talked about in this episode. They feed your retargeting campaigns, and sort of outreach and yeah, cold traffic campaigns.
James: Looking forward to that. Thank you, Ilana, from TeachTraffic.com. I appreciate you spending your time.
Ilana: Thank you so much, James. Always a pleasure.
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