Avoid This Costly Mistake with Advertising Campaigns | Expert Tips for Effective Advertising

Avoid this one mistake when you're advertising your small business if you want to be successful. Hey everybody, Hernan Vazquez here from ScaleDriven.com, and this is a problem. This is a pandemic. This is something that I see happening over and over and over again with advertisers and entrepreneurs and business owners. It's such a big of a problem that a lot of people are wasting their money, their time, their effort, their focus on the wrong activities and the wrong platforms. So in this video, I want to share with you guys our process to actually nail it in the head when it comes to advertising so that you can maximize your budget, number one, but also number two, so that you can avoid making this deadly mistake. And the deadly mistake is simply getting pushed into platforms where your potential audience and your potential demographic might not be in there. Right now, there's a lot of fear of missing out or FOMO when it comes to advertising platforms. And there's this new up-and-coming app and up-and-coming platform that you should be advertising because you saw a guy doing it and you saw a guy and this guy crushed it and all of that good stuff. But the reality is that there's a lot of platforms that might not fit what you're trying to achieve when it comes to advertising and attracting your ideal customer. And the problem with this is that a lot of entrepreneurs might be successful successful to a degree, but then they forget what they were doing or where they were advertising, and they drop what they're doing and they turn around and they go out there and advertise in this other up-and-coming platform or up-and-coming app because they succumb to this pressure, this peer pressure, and this fear of missing out, and that only brings issues. So for example, let me tell you a story of a big advertising agency that I was part of, that I was the marketing director for a while, and they had this exact issue. They actually got shiny object syndrome, and they veered away from true tried and tested platforms to dive into this unknown platform. And that was the demise of this agency. This was a really well-known agency. It was before the pandemic, and we were close to 8 figures per month, and we were close to 7 figures per month in revenue. And then what happened is that we were advertising on Facebook and YouTube for small businesses. That was our deal. Our deal was we were advertising on Facebook and YouTube for small businesses, and we were having decent amounts of success. Most of our clients were information products. We have webinar funnels. We had ecommerce stores. We had brick-and-mortar businesses. We have dealers like car dealerships. We had realtors. We had pretty much any type of client under the sun, and we were giving them consistent good results. With our advertising campaigns and with our advertising strategies. The problem is that one day some executives came from this new platform, and this new platform was supposed to give us everything that we had running ads on Facebook and YouTube, but at a much cheaper rate, and it was supposed to be great, and it was supposed to be awesome, and it was supposed to make all of our dreams come true and give us a ton of leads. So what happens is that the executive level of that agency decided to go ahead and make that decision when it came to switching platforms. So they came to us and said, hey guys, listen, we're not gonna be advertising on YouTube and Facebook anymore. We're going to be switching to this platform. It's a brand new platform. It's gonna be great and it's gonna be awesome and all of our dreams will come true and it's gonna be fantastic for all of our clients. So what we had to do is we had to, on my case, I had to switch every client from Facebook and Instagram. We were talking around 200 and something clients at that point. And we had to switch them from running ads from Facebook and Instagram into these brand new platform. And then on the communication side of things, the team needed to communicate to each of the clients that we were going to be switching platforms, that we were going to go from Facebook and YouTube into a brand new platform and how this was good for their business and how we were learning this new platform and all of that. So not only we had to train the entire team, I had to learn the entire platform, you know, top to bottom, A to Z, and I had to train the entire team on how to use it. Not only that, but actually we had to communicate to 200+ clients that we were switching their advertising budgets into this new platform. And for a while it was great because originally or initially we were getting a decent amount of clicks, a decent amount of impressions, a decent amount of all of that stuff that happens when you start running ads. But then as we started progressing into that platform, we realized that we weren't getting the same results that we were getting on other platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Moreover, we were new at the platform as well. So we were selling something, the guys at the sales department, they were selling something that we weren't truly or fully trained to manage. So that was another issue. That was another problem when it came to running ads on that platform. Long story short, 3 months later, everyone was unhappy. The account executives were unhappy because they were getting a lot of heat from the clients because we would keep on spending money of the clients into this new platform. We weren't happy as media buyers and the marketing team because we simply weren't getting the results that we wanted. We weren't getting as many leads. We weren't getting as much revenue for our clients as we wanted to. We were getting a lot of impressions and clicks, But that didn't translate fully into the results that we were trying to do. And then what happened after 3 months is that we started digging in and we started diving deep into what type of demographics and what type of targeting we were able to get on that platform. And we realized that a lot of targeting options that we had on YouTube and Facebook, they were completely missing on this platform after running ads for a while. So what we had to do at that point is to switch everyone back into Facebook and YouTube. Explain everyone that that was kind of a quote unquote failed experiment and we had to switch everyone back. And of course the client success team had a lot of issues with clients. We dropped a bunch of clients, we lost a bunch of clients, and then we had to learn our lessons as to which platforms to choose to effectively advertise. So this was at a high level, right? 200+ clients, 7 figures a month in revenue, was an 8-figure company. It was a big, well-known company and they made the mistake. We made the mistake because I was working there. We made that mistake of actually switching platforms without really knowing what to expect. And that's a problem that a lot of entrepreneurs have right now. A lot of entrepreneurs, the problem that they have is that they get consumed by FOMO, fear of missing out, or shiny object, and they want to try the new platform, the next platform, the new up-and-coming app. But that requires a learning curve, right? You need to actually sit down and learn the thing or have a team to learn the thing, number one. But also number two, you don't really know if your demographic and your ideal customer is going to be in that platform. So for example, it happened with TikTok. TikTok was all the rage a couple months ago. Everyone was switching to TikTok. And the reality is that at ScaleDriven, I told some clients, listen, you don't need to be advertising on TikTok right now. We're crushing it on Meta. We're crushing it on Facebook. We're crushing it on Google. You don't need to go out there and advertise on TikTok because we don't really know how the platform is going to behave. In other words, let me put another example. Let's say that you're selling a product or a service for C-suite level executives for 45 years old and plus, right? We had a client that came to us. He was selling a coaching program for C-suite level executives, 45 and plus, and they wanted to retire sooner. They wanted to buy a business and whatnot. That was the strategy and that was the program that he was selling. So we at ScaleDriven, what we did was to put together a digital marketing mix that would make sense for his ideal client and for his ideal demographic. So instead of going out there and trying to advertise on TikTok or Pinterest or this and that, the other network, we decided that we will advertise on Facebook, the platform, right? Not Meta and Facebook and Instagram, but actually Facebook, because Facebook tends to have an older quote-unquote demographic and whatnot. So we were going to advertise there. We were also going to advertise on Google, Google Search, right? Because people were searching how to buy a business and whatnot. So we will send people to his funnel, and we will also advertise on YouTube, and we will prepare also an outbound LinkedIn campaign. So we were only leveraging a couple of platforms out of the 15 platforms that we could run ads in at ScaleDriven. We're only leveraging a couple based on the client. Another example It was an ecommerce store that came to us because they're selling products for stay-at-home moms 35 to 45. And at that point what we decided to do is we did give TikTok a go and we also ran on Instagram. And we were also developing a campaign on Pinterest. So these 3 platforms actually allowed us to go after their ideal demographic. So the point is the following. The point is that A, you need to know who your ideal customer is gonna be. And where they're hanging out, right? Once you understand this, then you don't have to advertise in a million different places. You can just leverage one platform, one avatar, one traffic channel, and you can maximize that traffic channel and go after as much volume as possible. And that way, no matter how sexy the new platform might seem or how sexy the new app might seem, you will be well on your way to scaling your business. You will keep your budget in line. You will keep your focus in line, and you will not have to learn a million different things. In fact, you can get to $1 to $3 million per year just by doing this. In fact, I know people that have gotten their business to $10 million per year just by maximizing one platform, one avatar, one niche, one vertical, and going all in on that. So I hope that this is helpful. Do not get swayed. Do not get FOMO. If you want to give it a shot, go give it a shot, but allocate a little bit of your budget and a little bit of your time. Also budget your time when it comes to learning a new platform, especially for advertising, so that you don't have to deal with these problems and you don't have to deal with distractions. I hope that this is helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Like, comment, subscribe, share, rate, whatever it is that you can do right here where you're consuming this content. Thank you so much, and I'll talk to you guys soon. Bye-bye.