You’ve Got To Think Through Your Online Marketing Strategy. (It’s costing you money!)

I’m frustrated.

It’s hard to sit around and watch current and former clients create huge holes in their online marketing strategy in the name of saving a few dollars.  (Hint:  It’s actually costing them tens of  thousands of dollars in the long run.)  Let’s discuss.

A comprehensive online marketing strategy is a lot of work.  Between clever ad design, compelling offers, managing budgets, getting everything loaded, following up with leads, and more, it can quite literally become a full time job.  But where I see the biggest shortcuts being taken revolve around the 3 lists.  We’ve talked about this a bit before, but I really want to talk about some numbers here.

When I refer to the “3 lists”, I’m talking about your email list, your Facebook remarketing list and your Google (Adwords) remarketing lists.  All 3 are critical to a successful digital marketing campaign and if you’re not building all 3, you’re seriously overspending on your marketing efforts.  Here’s why…

When you’re running ads to what is called “Cold Traffic” (people who are completely unfamiliar with your company or brand but are targeted, potential leads), you pay more per click.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with paying for cold traffic.  Every business needs to do it.  But you need to be thinking about your total cost of customer acquisition, not just what it’s costing you to get a single new lead.   Not every lead is going to provide contact information or get in touch on their first experience with your brand (we love it when they do!), it’s going to require repeat messaging and advertising to convert the lead into a customer.  So, how do you cost effectively reach those leads over and over until they become a customer?  With the 3 lists . You need to be capturing emails and make sure your tracking pixels (Facebook and Google) are on every single page a lead might hit, especially if you paid money to get them on that page.

For all intents and purposes, it’s free to send an email.  Sure, you might be paying a few bucks for an email sending service, but you can literally send tens of thousands of emails for that same monthly fee, so the cost is negligible.  So, if you’ve managed to capture an email from a lead, now you can continue to market to them until they either buy from you or tell you to go pound sand. (The 2nd best thing to a “Yes” in sales is a “No” – you stop wasting your time and move onto your other leads)  This doesn’t cost you a thing.  But it costs you thousands of dollars if you didn’t capture the lead in the first place.  Maybe 10s of thousands.  Why?

Let’s look at an example with a 10 Day Tent Sale event that we typically run.  A typical client would spend $5000 on their ad budget for 10 days over Google, Facebook and Youtube.  For that ad spend, they would generate somewhere between 40-60 leads (Name/Email/Phone) and 80-100 people coming to their event.  In most cases, they’ll see an immediate return of 12-15x on your investment.  (Spend $5k on ads, generate $60-75k in top-line revenue during the sale)  Great! but only if you’re doing it right.

The Email List

First off, let’s talk email addresses.   If you’re running a 10 day sale, let’s say you end up with 50 email addresses.  And of those, 5 buy a hot tub.  You’ve still got 45 people who are interested in your product.  They may not be ready to buy today, but they certainly have some money in their pocket for whatever you’re selling – in this example a hot tub.   A lead would never part with their contact info if they weren’t at least somewhat interested in your product.  Now, let’s assume that you’ve got a proper follow-up system in place which converts 5-7% of your leads within 180 days.   That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of another $20-25k in top-line revenue on the same original ad spend.  If another 5-7% convert within the 1st year, you’re now over 20x ROI on your ad spend.   But it doesn’t end there.

The Facebook List

Cold traffic clicks off of Adwords can be expensive.  Sometimes pushing $6-7 for Hot Tubs or Swimming Pools.  But remarketing clicks on Facebook can be had for around $0.15.  Those clicks are 97.5% cheaper than your original cold traffic clicks.   So, if it takes someone 5 visits to your website to even become a lead and they keep searching for the same thing, you could spend $30-40 just to get their contact information if you keep starting from square one on the Adwords traffic.  Or, your cost could be $6.60 for the same lead.  If your goal is 100 leads per month, you’re talking about the difference between spending $3000-4000 or $660… A savings of ~$3000 per month, every month.

The YouTube List

Did you know that you can use your Google remarketing list to target YouTube ads?   Did you know that YouTube has more reach than the top 10 shows on TV, combined?  And you can get a full view of your YouTube ads for around $0.20?  That doesn’t just mean that someone waited to click the “Skip” button.  It means they watched your whole commercial.  That means that if you’re driving 1000 visitors to your website each month using a cold traffic method, you can then show ALL of those people your YouTube commercial for $200/mo.   There is no other place you can get such affordable video advertising.

So back up.   If you were not capturing emails, or building your Facebook and Adwords remarketing lists, you’re talking about losing out on $50,000 in revenue over 12 months and overspending on your advertising by $36,000 every year.  And this is just the potential from one 10-day tent sale.   If you’re doing more than one, the missed opportunities add up real fast.

Ok, so what’s the point.

I care about our clients.  I know that sometimes it can feel like there might be a cheaper option out there, but in the long run, there isn’t.  We don’t take a shotgun approach to your digital marketing.  There are a lot of moving parts to be aware of, and when they’re all working together, holy cow!  We put a lot of hours and brainpower into making sure you’re getting the most out of your online advertising strategies.  Your advertising costs go down, your lead quality goes up and your ROI goes through the roof.

If you’re spending thousands of dollars in a blitz to get people to show up at an event but you’re not planning for the long term sales, please stop now and call us.  We can walk you through the comprehensive strategy, show you what it costs and how much money it’ll help you make.  Our team does this every day and we want everyone on board an not wasting money.