James Schramko here. What do you do when you’ve got a new advertising campaign and it’s not converting yet?
I get this question a fair bit. It’s a really hard part of marketing, when you have to try and prove a new offer. You’ve got to start a new traffic technique. Maybe you’ve just started on Facebook or Instagram or Google Ads or YouTube or LinkedIn, and you’re waiting to see if you make a return on investment. There’s a few things you should know.
Firstly, it’s quite normal for a campaign to take a while to get you a return on investment. In fact, it could take way longer than you think. An episode I had with Scott Desgrosseilliers from Wicked Reports after looking at more than one and a half billion dollars worth of ads showed the average time to get a return on investment was actually 45 days. So if you start a brand new campaign today and you’re expecting to break even tomorrow, that could be unrealistic so it can take time.
In fact, I know with my own business model, it can actually take years for someone to consume videos and podcasts and then become a customer at some point, way down the track. So sometimes it’s even hard to track your return on investments. Some avenues, especially social media, it’s a little bit harder to track.
First attribution, last attribution, you don’t know exactly where people came from, that’s why I’m using tools like Wicked Reports to try and get an understanding of that. I do know that by continually creating content and running new campaigns, eventually, you will make sales so it could take a lot longer than you expect.
If you terminate your campaign too early, if you haven’t tried a few different options, if you haven’t tried different offers, hooks, approaches, funnel pass (people call it funnels), then you might be missing out on getting that rare but exciting campaign that can actually make a profit for every dollar you spent.
The goal, of course, is to make more than a dollar back for every dollar you invest. You just need to allow time and you need to prove the campaign.
If you’re running a webinar campaign and you don’t think you’re getting enough sign-ups, it’s still worth running the webinar to see what your shop rate is and to see what your conversion rate is. Sometimes, you’ll be shocked in a good way as to how successful it can be. Now, if you’ve turned off the pipeline then you’re going to experience difficulty.
Of course, you’re also going to put a lot of pressure on whoever’s running the ads for you. If it’s not you then you’ve probably got a specialist or an expert. They usually know where to start to get the low-hanging fruit and I’m sure they will also tell you that you might have to try a few approaches to get it successful. There are also bad practitioners out there so, of course, you should guard against that and make sure that you get a good practitioner.
If you are doing yourself then, of course, you’re probably going to have some learning curve and there will be an expense. Bottom line: don’t expect paid traffic campaigns to pay within the next day, they take longer than that. You need some persistence, you need a little bit of stick-to-itiveness, and you’re going to need some budget.
It’s unrealistic to think that you can do everything online for free. If you do, you’ll pay with time. So the approach that I have with primarily content marketing, I’m paying with time and putting in the effort and waiting a long time. And then when I do run paid ads, it just compounds my results. I get a huge return on investment because I’ve built up that value in the marketplace.
Hopefully, some of this is helpful. If you are running campaigns, expect it to be more difficult than you think. But once you get a campaign working, keep it. If you can invest a dollar and you get $1.10 or a $1.20 or $2 back for that campaign, keep running that campaign while you work on the next one. Keep working on the next one even if you have a campaign that works now, you should expect that in the future the ad cost will go up, the campaign might fade, people might get blind to your offer, it might get fatigued or fade. So start on the next campaign now. In fact, I would suggest you have multiple traffic streams coming to your business to protect it, keep it strong.
I look forward to sharing more tips with you here at jamesschramko.com. I’m James Schramko. I help customers with challenges like this in my private and group coaching scenarios.
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