YEAR VLOG CHALLENGE DAY 11 | Transforming Ecommerce

Back at it again with another vlog. Happy Monday morning, man. What a great, what a great time to be alive. Weekend is— was awesome, but I'm ready to get back to the grind. I'm ready to get back to work. I feel rejuvenated, off to a really good start this week. Looked at myself naked in the mirror about a week ago, and I decided I officially hit rock bottom physically. You know, it happens slowly. It's like this thing where it just kind of sets in and little by little creeps up on you. And before you know it, you're like, how did I get here? It's like that Talking Heads song, you know, it's like— anyways, you may find yourself— excited about this week. Got a lot of things ahead of us. Big tasks, big to-dos. We've revamped our e-commerce site. We got some changes, tweaks that we want to make there. You know, regarding websites, let's talk about this for a second. Websites are not a set it and forget it thing. A lot of businesses feel like, hey, I'm going to build a website and boom, they don't make tweaks or changes to it for years. And then before you know it, it becomes this thing where it's like, oh, every decade, every 7 years I need a new website, make it more modern. If you're doing that, you're missing the mark big time, especially if you have an e-commerce site where you're sending traffic to yours. You're spending a lot of dollars to drive traffic and revenue to your site. So this is one of the things that we've been trying to do a lot recently is kind of tweak very consistently to make our website a living, breathing, evolving, iterative process of getting better over time. And you know what, it's been working pretty well. So about 3 months ago, our store conversion rate was just plummeting. It was tanking. I mean, we would have days in the ones, 1%, which is well below industry average or industry standards. And so we've kind of revamped the site, figured out some different placements. Um, surprisingly enough, the way that we had our products separated out on the site was contributing in a major way to our conversion rate, kind of confusing for the buyer. And so we kind of separated those things out and now we're seeing a major jump and major shift. Like over the weekend we saw, you know, like 3%, 4% days, which is great. I mean, we haven't been there for a long, long time, especially just in the middle of a random month with no real sales, no real promotion, no real reason to, you know, buy on the site. No incentive. It's not like it's Black Friday here. So anyways, we're gonna continue to make some tweaks and changes to our site this week. We've got a major overhaul there. We're wrapping up a funnel that we've been building for a couple of weeks now. That's gonna go live this week. We're gonna start spending a lot of, a lot of money, a lot of media to that funnel, seeing if we can drive traffic and revenue. We're hiring some new virtual assistants as well that are gonna take over a lot of our manual outreach on behalf of our agency, which is gonna be fun. And then, yeah, we've got some potential prospects I'm gonna be communicating with, hopefully landing some more big deals. So it's a really exciting week. In the world of AI, there's been some interesting news as well over the weekend, starting with Apple coming in hot with some interesting news there. When I get to the office, I need to read up on it a little bit more, but I've got a bunch of thoughts around some AI stuff I've been doing research on. So maybe I'll give you guys kind of a little bit of a rundown when we get into the office there. But man, this world is moving so fast. It's really exciting time to be alive. With it comes some struggles, right? Like it takes a little bit more discipline to stay on top of the trends, to stay on top of the tools and, you know, the mediums people are using to generate leads and sales and customers. But man, there's like, never a boring day at the office, especially as a business owner. There's a never-ending way you can generate customers and advertise for your business. So I love it because it's like every single day there's something new, there's something changing, there's a new algorithm update, there's something that's making it interesting. And you know, where there's a lot of information, there's a lot of overwhelm. Where there's a lot of overwhelm, there's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of business owners And people, they get overwhelmed and they feel like the best thing to do is just to retreat, take a step back. When in reality, the best thing to do is to jump all in and try to become an early adopter. People that are early adopters can get away with not knowing as much, simply sure to them coming in playing first, being first at bat. So there's a lot of these cool AI tools that, I mean, I think are going to completely transform the way that we operate, the way that we think, the way that we, um, go about generating customers. So I'm going to be diving into some of those tools this week as well and probably doing some AI walkthroughs there. So anyways, lots of good stuff today. Hopefully I'm also recommit myself to filming a little bit more throughout the day, giving you guys a little bit more behind the scenes and thoughts as I'm going about my day today and all the tasks I'm doing. So hopefully there's a lot on this, this, this week that's valuable. Hopefully there's a lot today that's valuable. Let's get it. All right. On the way back home. Some good thoughts today. Really productive day. Really liked kind of how things went. Made a lot of progress. A lot of, you know, kind of tweaking behind the scenes on different campaigns. Had a couple really interesting conversations today with prospects as well as with some clients that I think is valuable to cover. And I think a lot of business owners have this problem because they feel like You know, one of the, one of the clients, for example, this is a situation, right? They, they are only spending about $1,000 a week. And I say only, only is relative. Only for them is a significant amount of money right now because they're testing and trying to get this business off the ground. And, you know, that is a lot of money, but in the, in the realm of online spend with the amount of money that we've managed and spent, $1,000 a day is, is very, very minimal. And One of the frustrations that they had with $1,000 in spend is they were reaching out to us with a little bit of concern because we aren't launching a ton of new campaigns and they felt like they're not getting enough out of their marketing budget. And it was honestly a really great question and a good concern. And it was great conversation because it allowed me the opportunity to think through the importance of your ad spend. In the amount of tests simultaneously that you can run in a given marketplace. And ultimately it depends on the nature of the product, how expensive the product is that you're selling, um, relative to what your customer acquisition cost needs to be, your goal customer acquisition cost, and how much money you're spending. So for example, if you're selling a $1,000 product, and you're generating, you know, calls for, uh, you know, on a book, a book call funnel, for example. I mean, realistically, if you're spending $1,000 a week, that's $4,000 a month. And you can't realistically spread, number one, that $4,000 monthly marketing ad budget across, you know, a Meta, a Google, as well as a TikTok. Effectively. In fact, you couldn't probably even do two of those platforms. I would recommend that you would pick one of those platforms, wherever you think is the lowest hanging fruit with the greatest opportunity to acquire leads. And I would recommend that you allocate all of the spend to the one platform. Now, this is really important because a lot of business owners, and this is what this company had been doing previously, they had an agency that they were working with before us and they were spending $1,000 a week on all platforms. They felt like they were getting a better bang for their buck there. And it was just a complete mindset shift, paradigm shift for them because they started to recognize and realize that, oh, maybe one of the reasons why we haven't been able to get a lot of results today on this campaign is because we're spending too little on a given campaign and it's taking us, if it's, you're divvying out the spend across 3 different campaigns accordingly, 3 times as long to get data to make tweaks and changes there. Revenue creates opportunities. As you generate more revenue, you generate greater opportunities to invest and experiment on other platforms. And then as you generate revenue on those other platforms, what does that do? It unlocks other opportunities for you to scale, uh, your, your spend across other different placements. So that's the first thing. Now, as it relates to the marketing campaign itself, like, let's say you understand that. And you're going to pick, hey, we just wanna dominate and we just wanna get traction momentum on Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram primarily because we feel like our ideal customers are going to be there the most and it's gonna be the best way for us to scale and grow and build. Fantastic. I would agree with you. In fact, for the overwhelming majority of businesses, I'd say Meta is probably going to be your best bet and where you should focus. Okay? So let's say you do that. Now, this doesn't mean that you can launch 50 different campaigns. I would recommend, or, or ads for 50 different products, especially if you're an e-commerce business, which is the majority of the businesses that we work with. You need to pick the best-selling product that's got the greatest, you know, ratio of COGS to average order value, that's got the greatest ability for you to scale with. Maybe that is easier to get in inventory, it's got shorter lead times, for new production, and it maybe has the lowest minimum order quantities for you. It's easier to sell. You want to start there and consolidate that $1,000 a week just on that one product if you have the capability to actually fulfill on those sales. And once you get traction momentum there, then you can start to, once again, revenue creates opportunities, expand into other product lines and expand into advertising other products. So One of the other issues I see is businesses will be, have, you know, maybe call it 20 different products on their store. And they'll start with $1,000 a month trying to run ads for all of those 20 products. But what you're doing is you're not really getting enough data or testing enough creative or enough audiences for any of those products to really get traction momentum. What you're doing is you're spraying and praying, you're throwing shiz at the wall. And you're hoping that something is going to stick, and ultimately you're trying to get lucky. Because once again, revenue creates opportunities. If you focus on a specific product, one product on one platform, you get momentum and traction there, and you perfect the ability to sell that, then you can scale. And that $1,000 can very easily turn into $2,000 a week, which can turn into $4,000 a week, and so on and so forth, until you are literally in a position where now it's really easy for you to allocate more ad spend to other products. So ultimately, if you think about it this way, and just for simple math, if you're thinking about a $20 customer acquisition cost, okay, you have to be willing and able and ready to spend at least $20 on one specific creative type for one specific type of an audience or targeting to one specific type of a landing page. That's one essential, you know, characteristic is you have to get at least $20 in spend there if you know you can acquire a customer there profitably. And if you can, then great. It gives you a really good idea that you can continue to spend money there. Now, what ends up happening is you want to maybe spend more than that because maybe $30 is a little bit more reasonable and you don't want to maybe just turn an ad off if once again, you spent $20 and it didn't quite work because you might spend an extra $10 and get 2 purchases. Who knows? So you got to be willing to go a little bit over when you're testing your initial creative and your audiences, your placements and your, you know, landing pages. You've got to be a little bit more willing to put your ad spend out there. And in this situation, if your, if your goal customer acquisition cost is $20 and you're like, we've got to be at $20, I would recommend that you're willing to spend $40 just to test and and see before you turn it off. And if it is, once again, if it's double or higher than double what you're willing to spend on a customer acquisition cost, then turn it off. So this is once again why it's so important that you consolidate your ad spend to one product on one different, on one specific type of platform, because reasonably you're gonna be able to get a lot more reps and touchpoints. Now we're talking about an e-commerce product here. What about if you're selling $1,000, a high, you know, high ticket coaching program or, you know, a $1,000 offer? And you're spending $1,000 a week, you've gotta be willing to spend that whole $1,000 on one, one type of ad to realistically know if it's gonna break even or not. Assuming that your customer acquisition cost is $1,000 to break even is probably gonna be closer to maybe $500. So you're gonna be willing to spend, you know, at a minimum $500. So two different ad creative tests in one week. And that's the type of discipline and the type of ad spend it takes to know if what you're going to do works. This is why it's really hard to sell high-ticket packages and high-ticket programs without a lot of ad spend, without a lot of data, and without a lot of historical evidence, KPIs on what works well for your audience, because you've gotta be willing to put so much more out there to test with. So anyways, some interesting thoughts here on my way home. I hope that's helpful as it relates to scaling and spending money online and hoping to get your product out there for creative testing because a lot of business owners don't think understand that. They don't understand the importance of how much you actually have to spend to test and how much you gotta be willing to test to create something that works. And that it's always an ongoing process. It's never just a one-time set it and forget it deal. You have to constantly be trying and iterating and improving on this over time. So with that being said, see you guys tomorrow. Hopefully that's valuable. If you found this useful, You know, you want to learn how to sell more stuff online, you know, like, subscribe, hit the bell notification. I'm gonna be dropping new videos every single day, not just vlogs, me kind of talking, ranting here about marketing stuff, but actual insights and trainings, tactical tools and takeaways for you to grow and sell more stuff online. So anyways, take care.