0177: Helping emerging consumer brands succeed online through paid advertising with CEO & Co-Founder of ROI Swift Carolyn Lowe

EA interviews episode 177, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the Imperfect Action Round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Do you have a brand that you want to get the message out? Do you want to have a bigger footprint on the online landscape? Do you feel like you're emerging but you're not sure where to start or how to compete with all the different platforms out there? We got Facebook, Amazon. You want to get your products and all the other ones. I know you want to grow. I know I want to grow. And that's why I'm excited to have Carolyn Lowe, the CEO of ROI Swift. And she's going to be talking to us today about how to compete on the platforms and get the biggest bang for your buck while making the biggest impact. I'm going to bring her up right after we thank our sponsor.

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Acorns here she is, ladies and gentlemen, Carolyn Lowe. Carolyn, how are you feeling today?

Feeling terrific. Thanks for having me, Mario.

Oh, the pleasure is mine. I know there's so many people out there in Expert Authority world that have a successful business and they just want to grow it and reach out. And I've been in that place before in their shoes and it's like, where do I start? Where would you recommend they start and why?

Well, I think depending on your business, I would say obviously the most profitable place is always going to be your own website. So we always suggest people get started with their own Shopify website and driving their own traffic and owning the customer versus a lot of times it's easy to get onto Amazon and think you're going to make a million dollars, but that isn't always the case.

Tell me about this owning the customer.

So, yeah, obviously when you sell something on Amazon, you don't own the customer. Amazon owns the customer and you're not allowed to market to that customer. So you don't have to pay to get in front of those 300 million people. But the problem is you can't market to them after you've sold to them on Amazon. So we always feel it's better to own your own customers and own your own experience through your website if you can. But yet, that being said, we work with many brands that do Seven and eight figures on Amazon. And sometimes that is a necessary evil.

Well, this is very interesting because so many people think Amazon's the golden ticket or Facebook's the Golden Ticket or YouTube's the Golden Ticket. First off, it's not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it's a business. Second off, I've never heard of one business where any one thing is the make or break deal. Because I've published five books, they're all on Amazon. And Amazon's great. But like you said, owning the customer. That's something I've told my clients and audiences. Because if you don't own your list, you don't own your customer. Facebook can take them away. Amazon, YouTube, any of them can take them away. So if someone's in that position now, how could they transition and still keep the benefits of it, but start building for a better future?

That's a terrific question, Mario. We tend to look at a couple. We tend to look at a couple of different things. We've seen people do things like put inserts in packages that say, hey, if you would like a free sample, go here and sign up. And then that's how they get your email address. Technically against Amazon's terms of services. But a lot of times there's some successful companies that do it very well with direct to consumer like Black Rifle Coffee. So they have a great Shopify site. They're also on Amazon. But a lot of our clients and a lot of successful direct to consumer brands, even if they are on Amazon, they'll offer a subscription for their own website. So you can save more with apps like Recharge and other apps like that on Shopify and you can do your own subscribe and save. And a lot of times that gives people a sticky feeling and they just sometimes want to just buy direct from the brand if the brand has a really great identity.

You had mentioned when we started you'd like to set up Spot, Not Spotify, I'm thinking of podcasting. Who knew? But Shopify. Do you believe every business should have a Shopify store?

It depends. If you can't make money on E Commerce, I would say no. So if your product is less than $10, it's a really hard game to make money on e commerce at less than $10. So typically if your average order value is over $20, yes, definitely. We've seen a lot of even cleaning brands that are typically lower priced that are in retail moving to creating their own direct to consumer stores because they want to own that customer retail. There's a big markup in retail. So if you can go direct and own that customer and keep more of that margin to yourself, we're seeing a lot more folks go that way.

Now. What if it's like a restaurant really sticks out in my mind because I've encouraged clients in the past. You know, sell gift certificates, sell, you know, something that you can buy online but you'd redeem in store if you will, because you know they're not selling products. What would you say to a company that doesn't necessarily have products per se? What could you do to help them?

Yeah, I think that's great. A lot of things that we'll do is we worked with a restaurant, we ran some Facebook ads for them and we did day parting. So from 7 to 11 we would ask them, we would put an ad in front of them all about lunch, don't have lunch plans, don't eat that boring tuna sandwich, come on in for lunch. And then after lunch, from 1 to 4, we would run ads that talked about, hey, don't sit in traffic, come and pick up or enjoy our happy hour menu. So we've seen it work terrifically for everything from catering to driving in store sales across the board for restaurants.

Excellent. Now, for someone who does have a large product, whether they're an author or not, there's a lot of businesses that have products. I mean, we're looking at some of them right here. How effective is it to be running paid ads on Amazon versus direct consumer or Facebook? Does one play well to another?

Yes. So what we've seen is ads on Amazon do better when they stay on Amazon. We've seen folks run Facebook to Amazon. They never perform quite as well as getting your product onto page one for Amazon. I bought a ring light because the lighting is really bad in my office, right. And so I went to Amazon, I bought that. I probably wouldn't have bought it direct from a brand because I don't know very many trusted brands in manufacturers of ring lights. So I think that that's the one thing that Amazon brings and the thing they pride themselves on is consumer trust. You do trust that if it's on Amazon and Amazon is shipping it, the company isn't going to go out of business and they're not going to take your money and run away in the nighttime. I think it helps these smaller brands encourage customer trust.

How important would you say the reviews are?

When was the last time you bought a two star product?

Just turning it right back around.

I think you just answered the question yourself, Mario. Reviews are critically Important. The magic number is somewhere between 21 and 25 before people really start to trust that.

Oh really?

Yeah. If you see a product with five or six reviews, you're like, oh, what's wrong with it? Is nobody buying it? There's not a good way for Amazon to let folks know that, hey, this might be a new product, et cetera. So really, once you get to that critical mass of over 20 reviews, people start to believe it and take those reviews seriously. So. So the reviews are critically important. There's a great company out there, it's a home decor company and they say if they have a product that is less than four stars, they will pull it off the market and go make it a four or five star product. So I think that all brands should follow that mantra. If you have a three and a half star product, you're just going to keep spending money to drive people to a product that maybe isn't that good. So go make it a five star product.

That's awesome. That's a real expert authority insight. When's the last time you bought a two star product? I knew the reviews were important and I gotta say that's more than I really thought it took. I was thinking maybe 10 to 15, but it's also less than I thought it took also, which basically means I had no clue. But there's so many. I'm thinking of people that are like, oh, they're trying to get to 10 or 15. And I thought for some reason it was a magic number, but I guess we're not in Charlie's chocolate factory. But then there's other people that I feel like they're always trying to get over 100 of whatever. So you're saying 21 to 25 ish.

Is where your product becomes fairly legitimate to Amazon shoppers. Right.

I'm going to dive deeper here. What if it's like really skewed results where you got five five star, five four star, five three star, five two and five one. And it's just, I know with the 8020 principle it's not going to be exactly that, but I've seen some that are all over the board. I feel the ones that are all five star, it's like maybe with books it's like it's probably all their friends. And I remember getting my first one star review and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm legit now because it's unbiased.

That is true. That is true. I think on the review side too, Amazon has an interesting algorithm. It's not just a straight average. So it's the recency of the review and it's how credible the review is. And they've been removing a lot of these fake reviews. If you have sent something to a friend at that address and that IP address writes a review of your product and they know that's in your account, then they can suppress that review because it's review manipulation. Amazon has a lot of AI built into trying to make sure, again, back to consumer trust, that you don't game the system and do fake reviews. Now, does it happen? Of course it happens, Mario. But Amazon is slowly going through these things and removing hundreds of thousands of bogus reviews. So it's not a matter of if you'll get caught, it's a matter of when you'll get caught.

And I'm glad you're mentioning that, because I know there's still people out there. They just, I'll put something up. I'll pull together a quick wix website or whatever the heck, and then I'll go buy some reviews. And they're like, I have a legit company. I'm like, no, don't do that. I won't work with people that if that's. That's their mindset. But it needs to be addressed because I know how powerful Facebook and Amazon ads are for paying for them. But would you say it's even more powerful when you have the paid ads coupled with organic reviews?

Yes, definitely. I feel like they all work in tandem. We see that a lot. So people will say, well, I just want to spend money on SEO or optimizing my Amazon listing. I was like, that's great, but if a tree falls in the forest, is anyone going to hear it? No, of course not. Right? It's the same thing with. You can optimize your organic all day, but if you don't ever sell anything, you're never going to make it to page one. And if you don't make it to page one, 70% of Amazon shoppers don't make it past page one. So you really have to pay to play. Especially when you're starting out with a new product.

I'm going to dive deeper on that. I do have to mention what that reminds me of, and it's what I'm speaking on right now. My Heil PR40 black and gold microphone. And I hear people asking about podcasting and to the point of the tree in the forest, they go, all right, I got a microphone. I want to start a show. What should I do to soundproof the room. Why don't you get the best mic that you can and it will isolate 95% of it and then you don't need to work in a padded room every day. It's just fascinating to me and I hear that you're getting that people approach it with the same way of, you know, they want to do all the SEO, but they might be gun shy on paying for an ad for it. How do you get on the first page of Amazon?

Well, if you're a new player, typically you do have to pay to play.

That's fine. It's an investment.

So you pay to pay. It's just like Google. You pay to show up on the front page for podcast microphone. Then you want to make sure that you've got that four or five star product because nobody's going to click on your listing and nobody's going to buy your product if they see it's a three star product.

So if the reviews are good and is there a certain number of views or likes, it's not Facebook, I'm sorry, is there a certain number of clicks, whatever they're called in the platform, is it based on how many views per day or how many clicks or anything? And I know the reviews are playing it, but there might be 10, 15, 20 spots. Is there a certain amount, not the clicks, but even the money, or is there some metric that you can gauge? Hey, it takes XYZ days to get on the front page. If you're paying, let's say $100 a day in ad spend and you're getting 100 clicks a day, would that even do it or are we talking bigger numbers?

Yes, it's a whole auction system. So it's basically you need to outbid the next highest bidder to Amazon will typically have two or three at the top and then maybe two or three sprinkled throughout the results pages. So if you're one of the top bidders, you can get on page one and it's all cost per click. So if they don't click your ad, you don't pay. We've seen cost per click as low as $0.20 and as high as $11 a click, depending on the category. So it really depends on your category. One of the things we look at though is the advertising cost of sales. We like to see it below 25%. So for every dollar you're spending, you're getting $4 in revenue. And if we don't see that, we'll typically say, okay, after 10 clicks we'll start evaluating. Is This a good search term or is there something wrong with the product page or why is this not converting above that 25%?

Oh, the 25% conversion, you're saying?

Oh, sorry, yeah, so it's 25% for conversion and 25% for ACOs as well. We like to see both those numbers at a minimum of a maximum of 25% for ACOs and a minimum of 25% for conversion. If you're getting 100 people to your page and only 10 are buying on Amazon, there's definitely something wrong with your listing or you're sending bad traffic, like bad advertising to your listing.

I love the expert authority insight that you just shared. 25%. Say the metric again. So that way for every dollar you're investing, you're getting how many back?

Ideally you're getting 4 back. So you spend a dollar and you get $4 back in revenue. We like to see those, those are good numbers initially when you're launching, you may have to spend more to get out there and to rank. But once you're established and you've got reviews and you're a legitimate product, we like to see that not spending you More than 25% of the total revenue that you get back. We also like to see the 25% conversion rate. If you're converting at 10 or 11%, you're never gon any money. If 90% of the people landing on.

Your page are not buying, I like seeing that too. And also I hear profit in there because it's not just how much you make, it's how much you keep. I think a lot more businesses should have a higher profit margin and it's one of the easiest things you can adjust on your own without retooling the whole company. That's right, from Amazon. Let's take books for example. Do you work with a lot of authors or is it generally shipping product but you still ship books? But do you work with a lot of authors or is it other types of products?

We typically work with consumer brands, so I don't do. We don't do a lot with books.

Okay, so have you found that there's products that just no matter what brand is and what industry you're going after, do you find that there's certain products that just really perform well and others are kind of take some work and then other ones need a whole lot of work? Like how much does the product itself make the difference in the offer?

It makes a big difference how competitive your category is. We worked with a nut butter company and that is a highly competitive sort of lower price. You've got Justin's all natural peanut butter out there. You've got so many of these category leaders. And a lot of times smaller brands have less of a chance against these bigger brands. So like you said about not putting all your eggs in one basket, you need to be everywhere, right? You need to be advertising on podcasts, you need to be doing Facebook ads, you need to be running Google shopping ads. So the more and more people see your brand, the more and more they trust it. So a lot of times people will discover a brand off Amazon and then come back to Amazon to buy it because it's so convenient. So sometimes people get lured into thinking, well, all these other people are making money on Amazon. I said, yeah, but do you know how much Justin's is spending off Amazon to get the word out about their brand? So that's one of the mistakes we see.

You had touched on a great point there. That is a smooth segue for me to ask you about retargeting. So you're on Amazon. Everyone loves shopping on Amazon. Get a prime today, this and that. But what if they don't buy it right there. What are you doing for retargeting or remarketing as some may know it, in addition to Amazon?

So in addition to Amazon, are you talking, did they come to your website or did they come to Amazon?

Both.

Okay, so if they came to Amazon, Amazon does have retargeting off of Amazon so you can pay for that. It typically works well, but not as well as just spending more to get those additional searches on the sponsored product. So if they don't buy on Amazon, you can follow them around for a while. But as you know, if your product is less than $50, it's pretty much an impulse buy, right? You're not going to hem and haw for like three weeks about a $40 item, right? So we needed swimming pool filters for swimming pool that we got for the summer since we're locked down in hot Texas here for the summer and you look at the reviews, you find the one that works and you buy it, right? You don't spend a lot of time hemming and hawing. So we feel like retargeting works really well for higher priced products. If someone's going to your website.

We look at what the average time to purchase is. So Google Analytics will tell you, okay, here's how long it takes someone to make a purchase. Here's how many times they come to your website before they buy one of our clients is 85% buy within the first 24 hours or not at all.

That's awesome.

Another client is a $400 average order value and most of them take about 30 days. So we'll follow you around for a lot longer for those $400 cowboy boots than we will for that $40 T shirt.

That's also awesome that you know it and you can track it because both are good. But if you don't know it and you're not tracking it, both are useless.

Exactly. And you get fatigue. Right. If you follow someone around for that $40 shirt and they've decided not to buy it and you're following them around for 30 days, pretty soon they're going to hide your ad on Facebook. They're sick of seeing you, they're not going to buy your shirt, and that really hurts you from an advertiser standpoint. So it's really important to know, okay, do I need to retarget for 5 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, etc. So knowing how long you should retarget is one of the big things that people miss. They just retarget for 30 days and that may not be the right amount for everybody. So we have a great saying at ROI Swift, which is data wins arguments. And so we always say, let's go back to the data and see what the data says.

That's impressive because what I'm also hearing is if you only need 14 days of retargeting, maybe do 15, but don't do 30. Don't do 30 days just for the sake of saying I can follow you for 30 days. And I was going to ask also, is there anyone that's past the 30 day into the 40, 50, 60 day, or is it not who you're working with?

There occasionally will go out 60 to 70, not much past, not much past two months. You know, there's a water filtration system and it's $1,500. And yeah, we'll follow you around until you purchase, but after 60 days even we give up.

Okay. And I was thinking maybe if it's a high end car, a house or something where it's a significant, significant purchase. I know there's people that do 60, 90, 120 day retargeting, but I just didn't know. For consumer brands, it sounds like Your sweet spot's 15 to 45 days.

Yes, for most brands, that's where their majority of their purchasers fall.

Well, thank you for giving me the data because that's what I surmised out of it. And that's awesome because that tells me that you don't need to wait for six months to eight months to 10 months to see significant results.

Right. That's what I love about direct to consumer and E Commerce. When I worked at Dell, I ran a division of Dell's consumer E Commerce. And I could see up to the minute. This was before Shopify, this was 20 years ago. And we had these complex systems where I could get a dashboard and see exactly what was being ordered on Dell.com and how many computers and we would have up to the minute dashboards. And this was 20 years ago. So I've gotten used to this. And now it's interesting that E Commerce has kind of caught up to where Dell was 20 years ago.

Well, let me ask you about that because I mean Dell's, they're a pretty decent company. They've only been around since forever. Why would you want to leave them and start this?

So the interesting thing is I left because I unfortunately had one of those three star products that I was stuck marketing. And as you know, it's easier to market a five star product than it is to market a three star product. There's a reason you can't buy a Dell television anymore.

Oh yeah?

Yeah. So that's what I had for North America. Dell televisions and monitors and projectors. And Dell makes amazing monitors and amazing projectors. And there are a couple of key things missing in televisions. And people buy televisions very differently than they buy monitors and projectors. And so it was sort of a.

Tell me. It had a TV tuner card in it.

At least it did have a TV tuner card. Yes. But it was missing a lot of the connectors for hotels. So there's this little connector that all the hotel entertainment systems run off of and we were missing that little connector. So think about it. Marriott's a client. At the time, Starwood was a separate company. Now they're all part of Marriott. But we would have these big global hotel brands that couldn't use our TVs. And as, you know, as consumers, are you going to buy a Dell television or are you going to buy a Sony television? Right. Dell doesn't make tv. Sony makes tv. So it was a very hard consumer shift too. Yeah. So that's a lot of.

You didn't even have that word of mouth working for you either.

Right. The reason that Dell was so successful in computers, in consumers, was that everybody had a Dell at work and they trust them and they loved them and they worked and so it was a natural leap to buy your first home computer as a Dell, right? Oh, I love Dell. I've got one at work. It works great. You didn't have Dell TVs anywhere. So it's also a very different buying cycle. We did some really interesting focus groups about how people buy TVs, and basically it comes down to the man decides on three or four potentials and then the woman decides on aesthetics.

Interesting. Let me ask you about the, whatever you call it, the plug, the outlet, the thing in the back of the TV for the hotels. How much would it have cost to fix it? I mean, was it an easy fix or would it have added another 100 or 200 bucks on the TV?

Oh, it was. The part itself was not expensive. But as you know, once you build up a factory. So it usually takes about a half a million to scale up a factory to make a product. And so, you know, that would be a lot of retooling and things like that.

So it wasn't so much the part, it was you would have had to sell x amount more TVs to even make it viable and even have a small profit.

Right. And unfortunately, TVs were not on demand because they were so much bigger than computers. Right. Computers you could make on demand. A lot of the computers were made right in the us. The laptops are actually made in Malaysia and overnighted on a 747 because that was cheaper than making them in the U.S. so you would order a Dell laptop, they would make it in Malaysia as soon as they got your order, just the way you wanted it. And then it would go on a 747 and you would get it two or three days later.

I remember when all those were big and everything. And I do remember the big conference monitors, the TVs, and they were doing all kinds of stuff. And I was like, wow, that's a computer monitor. It's a tv. It's, you know, a lot of them were combos. And I remember when the TVs, I mean, now it's like, oh, it's a 90 inch. Oh, cool. It's 120, whatever. It's so like passe. But I remember when it was like 29, 32, 36, 39, and it was like, that was it. And it's interesting how often that changes. So I gotta ask you this. So now with your company, Roi Swift, do you have clients that you are selling TVs that are five stars?

We do not have any television clients. We don't have any Electronics clients. We have lots of.

Do you want any?

No. Because it's very impossible, as you know, to make money in electronics. Right. It's cutthroat, it's commodity. The reason that people could get bigger TVs was that the glass manufacturers could make bigger glass. That was what was the limitation, was the glass factories. After I left Dell, I went to work for a global market research firm that focused on the display industry. I know everything about your corning piece of glass that goes into your television. What I think is interesting is that TV's got bigger and bigger, more and more expensive to ship. Right. And prices came down. So it's the perfect storm of prices are coming down, shipping is only getting more expensive. And this is a commodity market. So it's really, as you can see, there's only a few players left in the TV market.

Interesting. So let's talk about your clients now. Who would you say is maybe not even your biggest client, but who would be the biggest transformation success story that you've experienced so far that you were just able to help them do basically the biggest 180 you could think of?

Well, we've got a couple. One of my favorites is a brand that just did a million dollars in revenue from Facebook advertising last month. So this is a brand that never thought they'd be doing a million dollars a month in Facebook revenue generated on their website. So that is one of our favorites, sort of claim to fame. And they're doing it at a great return on ad spend. They're not spending million to get a million, they're spending 200,000 to get a million. That is one of my favorite stories. Another one of my favorite stories is a small mom and baby brand that we started working with five years ago. They got acquired by a massive international multibillion dollar company called Reckitt Ben Kaiser, who makes Lysol and Mucinex and Airborne. That's another one of our favorite stories is 5 years to an acquisition for small 7 figure brands.

Congrats on both of those. And I'm sure there's a lot more. But let me ask you, you're saying 200,000amonth on ad spend. The ROI is 5 to 1. Fantastic. What were they doing? Were they with another company before? Were they on their own? Walk me through the picture of where they were in the beginning to even get to 200,000amonth in the ad spend. How long did that take?

Great question. So it did take about. We've been working with them about two years. And what we like to do is start folks out at. If they're 10,000, maybe a month, and then scale up. You can't pour on the gasoline. You can't spend 10,000 one month and 200,000 the next month. You'll break the Facebook algorithm for the most part.

I thought you were going to say the business or something, because I also know the reality is you need the infrastructure, the systems, the processes. I mean, if you scaled up most businesses, even when I'm speaking to an audience, I go, okay, everyone wants more leads, right? Yeah. I go, if I gave you 10,000 leads today, what would it do? And everyone goes, they know it. You have to be ready for it. But I'm interested. Why would it break the algorithm?

Just because you need to give it enough time. So once you've sort of dialed in a great profile and a great cost per acquisition, we typically say you can scale up like 20%, 20% a day. So you can add. If your budget is 1000, you can go to 1200 the next day. If you go to 1000 and then you go to 5000, Facebook is going to have a real hard time. They'll just sort of light your money on fire.

Oh, and why wouldn't you want to light your money on fire? You're telling me that Facebook doesn't have any safeguards to not spend your money and make sure it's in your best interest?

No, absolutely not. I mean, I think, you know, Mark Zuckerberg will take every dollar you want to give him.

So I know that for a fact because I was putting, I think 15 a day or 150 a day. One of those. There was one too many zeros. I was rushing out to go probably do something fun. Click, click, click, Double checked it. Didn't talk to my ads manager, and I caught it later that night, but it was ripping through a lot.

And. Yeah. So what precautions do you take to ensure your client's success? To make sure. In addition to the. Is there anything else in addition to keeping it around the 20% a day?

Yeah. I mean, we also set rules. So scale up, scale down based on performance with same thing that's on the Facebook side. On the Google side, you know, we have a client who came to us, and they were on Shark Tank, and their previous agencies set a $20,000 a day budget, so they went and spent $15,000 on branded searches because they were on Shark Tank. And so we have a lot of safeguards in place. Like, okay, don't spend more than this much a day. We have A bunch of rules around accounts so that they can't get out of hand. Sort of maximum CPCs, maximum daily budgets, all those things were they can't go crazy and get out of hand. But I mean, it does happen occasionally. It doesn't happen to that level with us. We have enough safeguards in place. But yeah.

Now are these rules you're saying that you can put into the Facebook system or is it stuff you train your team on when you're setting up the ads? Don't be putting some crazy amount in there. Or is it both?

It's both, yep. So we, we have sort of a playbook of best practices and a checklist, but then there's also some built in safeguards within Facebook and Google that we use as well to make sure that we don't go crazy.

And you're saying you like to cap the daily limit around 10 grand a day if someone's maxed out?

No, we can spend more than that. But the nice thing is for these brands that are nationwide, that have global appeal, national appeal, you can easily spend the $10,000 a day. You can spend more. Yeah, we've got clients who spend more than that. A lot of brands do. I mean the big guys, Starbucks and Procter and Gamble, I mean they, they're spending, I want to say one of them is spending 70 million a year on the platform.

That's a nice amount to just give it a shot and test some things with. For someone that's spending, let's say 1,000 to 4,000 a day, what is something they could do to improve their ad spend and get that 4 to 1, that 5 to 1 ratio? If right now they're currently only getting 2 to 1 or 3 to 1.

Yeah. So it's all dependent on the brand. We like to look at the three different parts of the funnel. We like to look at the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. So obviously you want to optimize your bottom of funnel. Like to your point earlier, if you're following someone around for 30 days retargeting and your average time to purchase is 5 days, you can probably cut out some of that spend from retargeting. So the first place we look is the low hanging fruit of that retargeting, the middle of the funnel. The people who have been to your website but not visited a product page or more importantly, a lot of times people overlook this. You can create a list of folks who have engaged with your posts or your ads and those are very Warm leads too. Even if they haven't been to your website, they're familiar with your brand and they've engaged with your brand. So you want to be having a conversation with them on social media and then the top of the funnel. So a lot of times what we'll see is that either people have too many campaigns and the algorithm cannot learn. They'll throw like $50 on this campaign and 50 on this one and 50 on this one and they'll have overlapping auctions and audiences. So we'll really sort of dial in a really good top of funnel campaign that Maybe is spending 2, 3, 4, $500 a day and then depending on your budget and how many visitors have, that really dictates how much you can spend on your bottom of funnel and middle of funnel.

Folks, that is a very intelligent way to look at it because I've heard for so many years, people, whether it's Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Amazon, just name something. It's like the whole, I've tried that and it doesn't work. It's like you can apply that to anything in life and it's so easy to just, you know, I tried it. Well, what did you do? Well, I was throwing $1,000 a day at it. Did you have a landing page? Did you have a website? Did you have a call to action? You have to look at the whole process, not just they didn't click on the ad. Well, if they didn't click, then maybe your headline was trash, maybe the image was trash, maybe the messaging was trash. Doesn't mean it doesn't work because clearly there's people knocking it out of the park like you are.

Yeah, and a lot of times people will optimize for the wrong thing or they'll say, I want to optimize for conversions. I want people to buy something on my website. Well, Facebook needs 50 conversions in a seven day period for it to optimize in your best interest. So if you're only throwing 20 or 30 or $40 a day at it, you're never going to get 50 conversions. So people will sort of slowly burn two or $3,000 a month. And by the end of the year they said I put 30,000 in Facebook and it doesn't work. So really one of the things that we'll do is with those top of funnel people, if it's a really expensive item, we'll do a great video, they'll give us a great video, we'll run video ads and then you retarget the people who watch the whole video. Because the video ads are a lot cheaper. So you got to sort of build a warm audience. If you don't have a warm audience, rather than just like you said, trying to get them to click through to your website. So there's ways that you can sort of move them down the funnel. Oh, well, they watched the whole video. Well, let's serve them up. The next in the series of this amazing cargo carrier for your suv.

That sounds interesting. So you're saying video is a good thing to have on Facebook.

Video is a great thing to have. It's typically cheaper and a lot more people engage with it. Right. And it's thumb stopping. So as you know, that first frame is really important.

Let's talk about that. Because I'm familiar, but I know not everyone in expert authority world is the thumbnail. If you. And it's why, I don't know, I'm just sarcastic or humoristic or whatever. But it's like, in all seriousness, if you have a trash headline, a trash message or a bad image or trash image, it doesn't matter if you have the funnel in place. Now, I'm not saying don't have a funnel in place. You have to have the whole thing optimized. But it's that first step. You have to just work one piece at a time. How important is the image? And what would you say of the three things I mentioned? The headline, the messaging, or the image, what's the first one you go after to improve the campaign in short order?

So the images is easy because we typically will put four to six images in a campaign and Facebook will tell you the one that's working the best and will keep serving up that one and not serving up the trash one anymore. So a lot of times we will put six different creatives in the same one. And then the winner, because you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Like you said, you throw up one image and you say, well, it didn't work well. Did you test the creative? Was it the picture? Was it the headline? Was it the image? If there's a clear creative winner, then we know it's the creative. If none of them do well, then we say, okay, it's definitely the audience. The audience was not the right audience. Going back to my direct mail days, that's what I was brought to Dell to do in 1999, was to run direct mail. Because people were buying their first computer. Social media didn't exist. So it all came back to with direct mail. Who are you sending it to what are you putting in front of them and what's the offer? Audience offer and list and creative were the three things that really matter. And it's the same on social. There's a little bit more attention paid to creative versus direct mail. I mean, it gets in their mailbox. But I really think that we've seen good creative fail on bad audiences.

But even with the direct mail, to your point, you could have the. There's a lot of people that design the postcard or the mailer or whatever, the piece of direct mail. Wrong. In the indicia, they have the message on the wrong side. And for anyone listening that doesn't know by federal law you have to have the indicia facing out. So if your message is on the opposite side, they might not even flip it over.

Right.

So for your headline in the message, you said the creative is easy to switch for the ad. How do you fix the copywriting? Has Facebook came out with any copywriting tweaks to make better headlines and messaging?

Yeah. So there is dynamic. So you can do dynamic advertising, and Google is doing the same thing where you can put in five or six different headlines and they'll mix and match them. And those are called responsive ads on Google, and Google will find you the winner. A lot of times people do the same thing. Oh, my Google Ad didn't work. Well, let's see. The words that are in your ad are not anywhere on your landing page to your point. So they click through and it says nothing about what you said to them in the ad. So you're going to get penalized pretty heavily for that from Facebook.

Excellent. You are sharing so much knowledge and I appreciate you for it. I got one last question before we do the wheel of whatever, and we're talking a lot about people that are underway, things they can do to already improve. But what if someone is on the fence, they want to do this. They're going, man, I got a great product, I got a great business. Regardless of what revenue they're doing per year, they know they want to go to that next level. And they're just hesitant to start because maybe they didn't put the investment or commit to it the first time around. Maybe it's their second, third, or fourth, they're giving it a try. What would you say is not a secret because you know it. And for the people who are making ads work, it's known. What would you say it really takes to say, hey, I want to make this work? Do they need 30 to 60 days? How much money? How long does it take to tweak? And would you say it's worth giving it a shot? Because they went from 200 grand, they invest 200 grand and make a million a month. When you're like, oh, a month, I mean, who wouldn't want that? But you can't get to that point two years later and to your other client five years later if you never get started. So if someone's listening right now and they haven't got started, what would you suggest?

Well, I'm going to back it up a little bit, Mario, and I don't know if you're going to like this or not, but we always say never throw money, good money, after a bad website. So before we take someone on will look at their Google Analytics and if your pages don't load in less than 4 seconds and if your E Commerce conversion rate isn't more than 2%, we don't recommend you run ads. We recommend you go work with a developer, fix your website and make sure that you get at least a 2% conversion rate. We've never seen anybody be able to make money with less than a 2% conversion rate. So that's the first thing we'll ask is what's your conversion rate? What's your average order value? And then we'll look at their Google Analytics and we'll run some page tests and see how fast the pages load. So my advice is do not throw any money at a website until you know it's a website that's going to convert. Now once you know that, I would say, yes, do what it takes. And I would say hire an agency. I mean, Facebook is changing every day. We haven't seen anybody sort of successfully run it themselves and see those kinds of returns. So put aside maybe 10,000, maybe 3,000 for an agency and 6 to 7,000amonth for ads and put 20,000 in. And if after eight weeks you can't make it work, then if you've got a good agency, then there's definitely something wrong. We say basically give us six to eight weeks to dial it in and if we're not doing any better, we'll give you half of the fees back.

So six to eight weeks and fix your website. And you can't say anything I'm not going to like because I'm investigating the truth. And if the truth is, don't put money at it, fix the website. You did create a new question though. How do you know if, if you have Google Analytics, how do you check for the page load times and if they are low. What do you do to improve those?

Yes. So the page load times is part of Google Analytics. You can go under pages and see your page and you can see which pages load slowly versus others. There's also a free tool out there on the web that Google does. It's called Google Page Speed Insights and it'll tell you how fast your pages are loading. And then if they are over four seconds, I would say find a great developer. So most of our clients are on Shopify and we have two or three developers that we really trust that have made significant conversion improvements for our clients. One of them took from a 1.75% conversion rate to a 2.5% conversion rate.

Just from page speed times page speed.

And they redesign the product detail page.

Wow, that's pretty impressive. I mean, that's not, hey, we're throwing all this money at ads and we tweak this and that. That's just simply it's a better user experience.

That's right. And I think the whole project was less than 12,000. But that's going to have long term benefits. Right. Every product you add is going to convert that much better. So we see that a lot of times. We'll come in and oh boy, this page is taking five seconds. And Google here in Austin has shared with us, we've done some work with them at the Google Austin office and they've shared with us that for Every second over four seconds you lose 40% of your traffic. So don't pay to get all that traffic to your website just to have them abandoned.

That's kind of what I was joking about with creating a padded room that's going to cost you probably 500, 1,000, if not even more money in soundproofing when you can get a microphone that does 90% of it, 40% for every.

Second after four seconds.

So basically after six to six and a half, seven seconds, you're toast.

Yes. I mean, next time you do that, load a webpage and look at a stopwatch and see how long six seconds is. It's a long time. It's like dial up from the 90s.

Welcome to AOL.

You are connected. You have been, wow, that's impressive. And you got me thinking about my own stuff because I've talked to a lot of people about SEO specific and things and you got me half wanting to ask you plugging questions about caching and lazy loading and different stuff like that. But that's a great expert authority insight. Fix the website first. If you're on Amazon and You're focusing there. Obviously, they're going to already be as optimized as you can, but you're talking specifically for your own website, where you're going to make the most and you get to keep all the profit.

Right? Exactly.

Excellent. So I'm going to ask you. It's time for the Wheel of Whatever. And this thing always ends where I need it to. Always on the right question. Originally, there was going to be questions on it, but I found it's actually better this way because now I can ask you whatever I want. And look at that. It did it again. Ended up right where I needed it to with the right questions. So you were talking about Starbucks earlier. Do you like healthy food? I do need to know this. Do you like healthy food or do you like junk food?

Moderation, I guess, in both.

Okay, I'm going to stick with McDonald's then.

Okay.

And that wasn't the question. But I'm curious.

Who'S a company you haven't worked with or a campaign? I'll say, out of these three, who would you love to have to run their ads for McDonald's political party, whoever, or Starbucks?

Well, let's see. Starbucks just announced they're boycotting Facebook, so it would be hard to work with them. But I would choose Starbucks because it is probably the least controversial. I particularly don't love McDonald's. I think my kids have probably eaten at McDonald's once or twice in their life. And I stay far away from religion and politics.

Okay. And I was trying to think, and I should have asked you before we started, but you gave me the idea halfway through, and I was like, ooh, McDonald's and Panera. I was like, who are the most opposite restaurants I can think of. But when you said Starbucks, I'm like, I wonder if she'd like to work with them or not.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, potentially, I think that they're an interesting brand. I'd rather work with someone like Black Rifle Coffee, which is an amazing brand. I mean, I don't. Yeah, I'm not in the military, but I love their branding and I love their identity. Brands that I love to work with are natural brands that we've worked with. There's a brand we're taking on tomorrow to take over and fix their Facebook advertising called Esker Beauty. They're a natural beauty brand, so we prefer to work with brands that have a mission.

Excellent. So I'm going to throw an audible here, and who would be your ideal brand and dream client to work with?

Wow. There's a long list of folks that we would love to work with and love to help. Basically any emerging brand, a challenger brand, someone like an Outdoor voices, someone like Magic Spoon Cereal.

What about the Honor Company?

The Not Honest Company? The Honor Company.

I probably said it wrong. Jessica Albo's brand. It's all natural. Is it Honest Company?

Yeah. Honest Company.

Cool.

I was close. Yeah, they seem like they'd fit everything you just mentioned.

They are a great brand. They are owned by Elle Catterton Private Equity. So we do a lot of work with Catterton brands. We've helped quite a few Catterton brands in the past. And yeah, we'd absolutely work with the Honest Company. Although typically our model is we work with companies 3 to 30 million then we give them the expert advice that you normally can't afford as an emerging brand, a smaller company, 10 to 20 employees. Once they get big enough they typically hire in house folks. The Honest Company would be a great one to work with, but they are big enough now that they've got a team. That's why I said we don't want to ever work with Nike. We only want to work with these emerging brands and give them the experts in their company that the bigger brands can afford.

Excellent. Well I have loved this very much. We're going to thank our sponsor and come back with the imperfect action round.

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Are back with the imperfect action round. Carolyn, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Yes.

Rapid fire questions, 60 second answers. What's the fastest path to the cash.

Shopify and paid ads?

Excellent. Number two, what's the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way they can fix it?

Spending too little or making the wrong actions on paid social advertising or having.

A jacked up website that doesn't convert under 2% over 2%.

Right, right.

Okay. Number three, it's a good one. I've only asked it a hundred times. What is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Use a model like Chewy's. Chewy's literally writes their customers handwritten notes and they know their pets names of all their customers and that is the they have some of the highest retention in any industry I've seen.

Tell me more real quick about this company that you just mentioned.

Chewy's is an online pet brand and the way that they've really differentiated themselves is by focusing 100% on customer service. Like I said, you do the first order and you get a handwritten note from customer service and then you call back in and they really have a relationship with them. These days people want to have a relationship with a brand. They just don't want to buy something. They want to work with the brand that cares about them and that knows about them and that they have a connection to. Wow.

When you said handwritten notes and that's a huge thing to do and just wanting to care that much speaks volumes. And then implementing it. Love the advice. Thank you. What are some books that have made the biggest impact in your life?

So most recently since I started the agency in the last five years, Gino Wickman's Traction is a required reading for everybody. We've been implementing EOS since last Q3 and we are on track to double what we're doing. We're doing the right things for customers and we've got all A players. So I love that. Who's Going to Do what by when is another great book. So mostly a lot of business books. Predictable revenue, how to be a Good boss. I love a lot of those in those series and of course Built to Sell and Verne Harnish's Scaling Up.

Excellent. All great recommendations. Well, Carolyn, I've enjoyed this very much. Where can we learn more about you and your company?

Well, you can go to our website, www.roiswift.com and learn about us. There we are the cobbler with no shoes. We probably have one of the worst websites out there, but you can just get our contact info and ping us and we'll be happy to do a free audit of your Facebook advertising spend or your Google spend or your Amazon account. So find us on the web or you can find us on LinkedIn. Again, we are like the worst with our own social so I apologize in.

Advance, but you're the best with your clients. Yes, and thank you very much for that. I've enjoyed this and it's been a pleasure having you.

Thanks for having me, Mario.

All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless. Why Every Business Needs a Book, including yours Would you like to save five.

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