Today is all about giving you a competitive edge over all your business rivals {real or imaginary} using a mind-numbingly simple paid ads strategy that I learned from a ninja-master last month.
Today is just as good a day to begin building your business like any other. Sure yesterday, last week, last month — they all would have been better but if you don’t start now you’ve got a lot to lose.
It’s a natural first-instinct to pull all of your fishing lines into the boat as soon as rocky waters hit. It’s what many businesses have been doing for the past month and they still continue to reel things in. Yes, I’m talking about paid ads specifically but people are struggling with just the IDEA of selling!
Logically, if there’s less demand to place an ad, the cost for the ad is going to go down. The unicorn opportunity is that while businesses are pulling back on ads, the amount of people using social media is skyrocketing because people are at home twiddling their thumbs.
This is not something you’re ever going to see again. I’m not suggesting you go drop thousands of dollars into an ad budget (especially if this is your first toe-dip into it) but I am 100% suggesting that you should be doing some kind of paid ads right now.
Before we get into the paid ad stuff – let’s quickly talk about marketing basics.
You’re a fool if you think that marketing is anything much beyond empathy and emotion. Consumer psychology. Behavioural economics. It’s all the same.
People buy on emotion and later justify using logic.
We know that part, right?
What we don’t want to do is be a douchebag with our marketing. My email subscribers will remember the examples I gave you a couple of weeks ago.
The guy who used scarcity timers and bloated claims that levels were sold out in his academy when really he only ever had one level available to purchase. If I had to guess, his paid ads looked much the same way.
The better marketer would have led with a little bit of heart. Sure, keep the timers but tell people that you want to limit the number of seats so no one is overwhelmed and everyone gets the attention they deserve.
By the way — if you don’t know who your audience truly is then it’s time to do some planning and grunt work. Send out surveys, get on social media, go into forums, read book reviews, look at your Google Analytics.
Now let’s go rain hellfire with a cheap paid ad strategy.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Empathetic marketing and putting some money where your mouth is.
Grab a pen because it’s time to work. On a piece of paper, draw a square with 9 squares inside of it. This is going to be your paid ads testing ground.
Grab your phone and make sure it’s charged up. Because you’re going to be a video star baby.
EVERYONE has to figure out a way to get $90 for the month of May to do some ad testing.
The ads across the top are your Inception ads. The middle is your Consideration ads. The bottom is your Conversion ads.
I want you to create 9 different videos that are going to go into each of those squares.
- INCEPTION — what do people need to know about you or your story to start to like you? What makes you (not your product or service) memorable?
- CONSIDERATION — think about the obstacles in the way of your customer getting the result that you can offer to them.
- CONVERSION — these are the ONLY ads that actually talk about your product or service. THE. ONLY. ONES.
As you complete your first 3 awareness ads, post them onto your Facebook page and boost them so that they run over the course of the month of May.
As you finish your other videos, you’re going to create them as retargeting ads on Facebook. Your consideration videos will only be shown to those people who watched at least 15 seconds of your inception videos. And your conversion videos are only going to be shown to people who spend at least 15 seconds watching your consideration videos.
This is the most basic funnel that I learned from Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics.
Here’s why he’s so damn smart and why this paid ads strategy works so well.
- Videos outperform almost any other medium out there. By keeping your videos short (1 minute), you don’t have to worry about dwindling attention spans either.
- You can quickly see what’s working and what’s not. If the ad is getting less than 3 seconds of watch time, there’s something terribly wrong. If people are watching more than 30 seconds … you’ve got yourself a hellfire storm and you need to pour a heavy amount of gas onto that thing.
- You’re not trying to marry the guy on the first date. The only people who EVER get proposed to (AKA asking to buy your product) are the ones who have engaged with your previous 2 levels. Go on dates. Fall in love. Then get married.
