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[00:00:00] What's going on, crew? Welcome back to the retail initiative. Today, I want to talk about paid traffic. I love advertising. It's such a fun thing. Maybe it's because I'm a little bit of a marketing nerd and I could talk about it all day long. And so let's talk about paid traffic. And so first, let's understand what What types of traffic there are, you know, there is traffic that you earn.
[00:00:22] This is things like your SEO work. This is your, um, social media and the things that you actively work to gain traffic to your [00:00:30] site. Then there is the next group, which is traffic that you own. This is your list, your text list, your email list, your physical mail list. And that's the best type of traffic hands down.
[00:00:41] Like it's your hot traffic. It's the people that are ready to buy from you. But then there is paid traffic traffic that you buy, and this can be one of the best ways to scale your sales quickly. And so I want to talk about some key mistakes that retailers make in the paid ad space. [00:01:00] And then I want to get into some strategy around how to have a more successful ad account.
[00:01:06] Cool. Let's jump in. So number one, let's ask ourselves, are we ready for paid ads? It doesn't mean like, are you ready financially or any of that? Cause a lot of you, I would say you can't afford to not be running paid ads. It is difficult to be competitive in online sales without paid traffic, but if we get into it before we have two key things in place, we're going to be making [00:01:30] a massive mistake because your ads will not take off.
[00:01:33] Thing number one that you need to have is your own creative. You need to have your own imagery that connects with your customer. We have never one time seen a successful ad account using vendor images, stock images, stock video, any of those pieces. Even like if you're a part of an association that gives you images, it probably is not.
[00:01:54] It doesn't represent your brand that well. So getting your own quality imagery, and [00:02:00] I don't mean quality, like you get a professional photographer. In fact, our most successful clients are doing everything on their iPhone. They just are able to do it in a way that connects with their customer. That is thing.
[00:02:11] Number one, that you need to have is your own imagery that resonates with your customer. And number two is you need to understand your brand voice. If you're still figuring out how to write in a way that your customer connects with you. Maybe you should figure that out through your organic social media before putting money behind it.
[00:02:29] So your [00:02:30] own imagery and your own brand voice. And those two things are the key things to starting a successful paid ad account. So let's get into, you're ready. And let's talk about five mistakes you might be making and what you can do instead. So big mistake number one, the most common one, is we boost posts.
[00:02:50] And I get it. It's so easy. You post on Facebook, you post on Instagram, you click that boost button and boom, you're in front of more people and you're getting all these likes [00:03:00] and comments and all this engagement, and that feels good. The problem here is boosted posts are not designed for sales. Boosted posts are not designed for sales.
[00:03:09] They're designed really to get more likes, more comments. You might get more followers, but it's not likely to produce sales because that's not the intention of boosted posts. So instead we want to actually use the Facebook business manager, and this is how you run ads on both Instagram and Facebook, it's all managed in [00:03:30] one place.
[00:03:30] But the cool thing here is that you can tell Facebook what your goal is and it's algorithms, which are. Complicated is I'll get out, but you don't have to know what they are. I was able to get in front of people that can accomplish your objective. And so when you start a campaign, you're choosing like, okay, I might want to reach as many people as possible.
[00:03:50] I'm trying to get famous here. So put me in front of as many people as you can, or you're going to say, Hey, I just want traffic, or I just want likes and comments. There's nothing wrong with that, but you want to [00:04:00] know what your goal is. And then the last one is actually saying, Hey, I want sales. When we launch this ad, I want people purchasing on my site, and it's able to optimize the traffic around people that are most likely to purchase from you.
[00:04:17] So that is the thing that we want to focus on is let's instead of boosting post, let's use the ads manager so we can actually. Say like, Hey, this is my goal. And thing number two, we [00:04:30] don't test enough creative. So the first one is we're boosting posts. The second one is we're not testing creative. A lot of us see ads kind of like a billboard.
[00:04:38] Like you design it and you go run your ad, your billboard, and you see if it worked or if it didn't. But with Facebook, what we want to do is give them an arsenal of different images, different graphics, different videos that it's able to show to people and its algorithms will see like, okay, people are resonating with this one.
[00:04:57] And this one, let's show that to more people. But when we [00:05:00] only give it one piece of creative. It doesn't have enough to be able to do that. And so you're putting all your eggs in one basket, rather than saying like, Hey, it's likely that one of these two of these are really going to resonate. Let's give it more things.
[00:05:16] And then the cool piece is as you do that, you're then able to model the more successful ones. So when you see that your audience resonates with more lifestyle imagery and people like laughing at the camera versus just [00:05:30] standing there and smiling, well, that tells us what to do in our next big launch. So mistake number one, we boost posts, don't choose the right objective.
[00:05:38] Number two, we don't test enough creative. Number three, we get impatient. We launched the campaign and we put 5 a day behind it, which is nothing. And then the next day we're like, Oh, I didn't get any sales. And we turn it off or we go in and we turn, we throw in a different image or we change the copy.
[00:05:58] Facebook needs [00:06:00] time to optimize. And the more you spend, the faster that comes, but. Even if that's the case, we want to give it enough time to optimize. So instead, like be patient, wait till your ad has been seen by at least three, four or 5, 000 people before we start judging the metrics behind it and looking at the click through rates and the cost per acquisition and all of those really important metrics.
[00:06:26] We want to make sure that it's had enough time to [00:06:30] actually run its course. Number four. We don't focus on retention. Here's the thing. When you're running ads and you're crushing it, you are paying 20 a customer. And let's, let's just say that they buy a dress and great. You got that one sale, but if that was the case, did you make any money on that transaction?
[00:06:51] If you paid 20 to that customer and they bought one thing, did you make money? Chances are you did not. But if we can get that customer buying a second time, a third [00:07:00] time, a fourth time, Well, then that's where we have the power of real profitability. And so having automations in place. Using regular email marketing, SMS marketing, these things keep your customers coming back and buying again, but we never want to jump into paid ads without a retention strategy in place.
[00:07:20] Otherwise it's constantly buying new customers without ever making the most of the customers we have. And then the last [00:07:30] one is we get pretty stubborn on who, not how we obsess over. How do I do this? And how do I update my site this way? How do I run ads? How do I, how do I, how do I, do any of you ever ask this question constantly?
[00:07:46] And look, this can look like two different things. One, it's bringing someone in house to handle these pieces. And there, what I want to guard you against is have you ever as like the CEO of a business said. I'm going to [00:08:00] learn X so I can go and train my team. So we're the ones going through all the courses, attending the conferences, doing these pieces and turning around and training our team on how to do all of that.
[00:08:10] The problem here is when we do that, our team can never be better than our own ability to understand that subject. So what if you brought someone in that actually understood the foundations of marketing, and then you are the one teaching them Facebook ads. Well, they will never be able to be better than you [00:08:30] are, but instead if you can give them direct access to the right training to equip them around what it looks like to grow, you're unlocking their potential to be better than you at that thing.
[00:08:42] Your role is to be the visionary. It's not to do all the pieces, or maybe you need professional help. You know, our agency helps retailers gain quick traction online through paid ads. And we'll, it's not like this secret thing where [00:09:00] you start doing Facebook ads and all of a sudden you're a million dollars in sales the next day.
[00:09:05] It is a long haul process, but our ads work. And that's been the cool thing. And so not that this is like a big sales thing, but if you are interested in learning more about that, you can go to madebycapital. com slash ads and connect with my team. And honestly, if we don't think you're ready, or we don't think we can help you, we're not going to offer it.
[00:09:23] We're going to try to get you pointed in a really good direction. But now let's get into the strategy [00:09:30] of successful ads. Like what does it look like? And so here, what I like to do is just think through the journey that the customer goes through. So first, like, We're in our ads manager. The big thing you need to do is make sure you're setting the right objective.
[00:09:45] The objective is set at the campaign level and you're telling Facebook, Hey, this is my goal. And we want to make sure that we're always choosing conversion or sales and sales being a purchase, not add to cart or anything like that. It is a purchase. So choose the [00:10:00] right objective. But now let's think through, you have someone scrolling on Instagram, scrolling on Facebook, what is the first thing your ad needs to do?
[00:10:09] The first thing your ad needs to do is stop them from scrolling. Our brain, like we're, it's, we're designed to not want to stop at things that we don't want to see. And so your ad needs to have something that makes them actually want to stop. And the big, the first area you can do this in is what's called a pattern interrupt.
[00:10:29] A [00:10:30] pattern interrupt is like, we all have these rhythms that we expect life to go through and it looks a certain way. And then when we see something out of place. Our brains like, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, what was that? And so, like, a really good example is a coach of mine had an ad like a year ago and the dude was walking out of an office holding a coffee cup and he's talking about whatever the ad was about, but like one second and someone ran by and just knocked the coffee cup out of his hands.
[00:10:57] It was a brilliant ad and here's the thing. [00:11:00] None of us expected him to get the coffee cup knocked out of his hands. And right after that happened, he kept talking. It stopped them from scrolling and they kept going. Now, you don't have to do anything that extreme, but we want to think, is there anything that we could do that might, like, stand out?
[00:11:18] It would, it would just break that pattern. And, and so that's the hardest one, but the most effective. The next one is you really having something that looks organic, [00:11:30] things that look like ads typically don't stop people from scrolling. And so this is where you'll see a lot of really big ad accounts right now, having pictures of people taking selfies in the mirror with an outfit on.
[00:11:41] Because it looks like it should be in the feed and people will be like, well, I don't know who that is. And my friends with, Oh, and then we got their attention. And then the last one is simply imagery or video that your customer resonates with. It's something where they would stop and like, Oh, that dress is cute.
[00:11:56] And they stop. Now those are ranked in the [00:12:00] order of effectiveness. They all are good though. And so the pattern interrupt is the hardest to do, especially as a retailer, but it's the most powerful in stopping the scroll. Even just that brand, the, those imagery, the imagery or video that resonates with your customer is still so powerful.
[00:12:16] So the first thing we need to think through is what will stop them from scrolling. The next thing is what's going to entice them to click. And this is where a copy comes in having effective copy that. The big mistake here [00:12:30] is talking about you. New arrivals in this week. Check us out at josh's boutique.
[00:12:35] com. No one woke up today and was like, I need new arrivals. That doesn't resonate with anything going on in my life. And so instead, if it was centered around your customer, How would it feel to blink or are you wanting to feel? Are you wanting to do, um, or even just something resonating with the season of life that they're in?
[00:12:59] We [00:13:00] just got our first pumpkin spice latte and we're bundled up in this cozy sweater. Are you two, that's terrible copy, but you get the idea. We're talking about our customer and then we're tying it into. Our products. We're not just leading with the product. We are leading with our customer and something that draws them in.
[00:13:20] And then we're tying it to the call to action. So we stopped the scroll. We entice the click. Then we need to convert the sale. And I have a [00:13:30] ton of training on this, uh, around how do you make your site actually high converting. As it relates to paid ads. The number one culprit that I see here is when your link that you're pointing people towards.
[00:13:43] And where they land on your site or have a discrepancy. Let's say you're when the day you launched your ads, your new arrivals was all dresses and your, your ad is all around dresses. But since then you've added a ton of t shirts. And when I click on that link, I land and I [00:14:00] see a page of a bunch of t shirts.
[00:14:02] That is a disconnect between what was, what the purpose of the ad was and where they landed. So make sure that there is a cohesiveness between this is what our ad is about and this is the experience they have. As it relates to what you can control in your ads manager, that is the number one culprit. And then the last one is get them purchasing again.
[00:14:24] Simple automations, a thank you, um, like a post purchase flow. [00:14:30] Getting them into the brand, getting them in your loyalty program, cross selling them on other things they would be interested in these simple things, maximize your profitability. So this was a super tactical one. And I honestly hope that you can go back, listen to this, take some notes.
[00:14:45] And I think that if you can follow the things that we teach. This will help you in your journey to become more successful in your paid ads. And again, if you are interested in learning about our ad services, where we will run your ads for you, write your copy for [00:15:00] you, optimize your audiences for you, you can learn more about that.
[00:15:03] It made by capital capital with an a. com slash ads. So can't wait to see you next week. Grateful that you're here. If you like this, leave a review. That's the biggest way that you can say thank you. And can't wait to see you next week.
