by Jonah Cockshaw, Founder of FITMEDIA
What we’ll be covering in this session
In this session, we’ll be covering:
👉🏼 The 6 Customer Acquisition Channels (repeated from last session)
👉🏼 What is ‘Paid’ Advertising?
👉🏼 Why and when should you use Paid Ads in your business’ growth?
👉🏼 Where should you run Ads? Facebook, Google or somewhere else?
👉🏼 The Key Components of any Paid Advertising Campaign
👉🏼 How to calculate your ‘Cost Per Lead’ (w/ free calculator)
👉🏼 How to easily and quickly identify bottlenecks in your campaigns (and know how to fix them)
The 6 Customer Acquisition Channels
Paid Advertising is just one of the 6 key Customer Acquisition Channels, so what are the others?
- Organic Marketing
- Paid Advertising (this presentation)
- Partnerships / Referrals / Affiliates
- Manual Outbound
- Contact Lists (usually your email list; a bi-product of other marketing efforts)
- Word of Mouth (the only channel that can compound)
It’s worth making a note of these so that you don’t feel as boxed into only focusing on organic and paid marketing. The others can be extremely powerful and (sometimes) easier to get traction with. Very few people talk about this. 🙂
What is ‘Paid’ Advertising?
Paid Advertising is how all of the major search and social media platforms pay their bills.
We’re all used to seeing ‘sponsored posts’ on Facebook and Instagram, right? And the sponsored search results on Google?
Often you’ll find that these sponsored posts and search results are scarily relevant, based on your recently expressed interests and behaviours. Perhaps you’ve even convinced yourself that Mr. Zucks has been camping out at the end of your garden, secretly watching your every move. 😬
The truth is (arguably) a little scarier than that, though…
Instead, these companies track and collect data (lots of it!) which advertisers can then use to put relevant ads in front of the right kind of people, without needing to spend months and years building a targeted audience organically.
Why and when should you invest into Paid Advertising?
In my opinion, you should never be fully reliant on paid advertising to grow your business, even if it is responsible for the majority of your growth.
However, if you’re already relatively stable with your month to month cash flow from purely organic advertising, then I’d begin considering how you could supplement and scale that with paid advertising.
You should be ready to spend £5-20/day to begin with, and be willing to increase that as you start seeing profitability from your campaigns.
You should also be able to commit to this daily spend for between 1-3 months, so that you have plenty of runway to get your campaigns off the ground and ‘figure sh*t out’ along the way.
Where should you run Paid Advertising?
Of course, you want to run ads on the platforms that your audience spends most of their time on.
It’s also worth considering the ‘buyer behaviour’ of your audience too.
For example, if you land in a new city and are looking for a place to eat that night, what do you do?
Do you…
- Open up Facebook and scroll until you see an Ad?
- Go to Google and search ‘restaurants near me’?
This isn’t to say that you should only run ads on Google, but you should consider where your audience is in their journey with you when deciding where to allocate your ad budget.
There’s very rarely any right or wrong answer here, but it’s always worth testing!
The key components of a paid advertising campaign
The key components of your campaign will be as follows:
- Audience (who are you targeting?)
- Creative (what are they seeing?)
- Call to action (what are you asking them to do?)
- Offer (what is the thing you’re leading them towards?)
- Sales process (how will you lead them towards that thing once they ‘opt-in’?)
How to calculate your target Cost Per Lead (CPL)
First of all, why do we need to target your target Cost Per Lead?
It’s important to know your target cost per lead so that you have a clear ‘upper limit’ on how much you can afford to spend whilst still remaining profitable.
If your program is £500, then you obviously need to be spending less than £500 to generate leads. Ideally, you want to be spending much less!
But it’s not simply a case of spending as little as possible, because getting low quality leads is a very real problem.
Here’s a link to the calculator: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MLpOScknGkeqGDssDQKJGXzo74BbIGxSxDDp8qrohec/edit?usp=sharing
How to quickly and easily identify bottlenecks in your campaigns (and how to fix them)
The most overwhelming part of any paid advertising campaign is looking at heaps of numbers and not understanding what any of them mean.
Especially when your ads aren’t converting as well as you’d like!
Where do you even begin to diagnose the problem?
Well, we simply look for ‘data pairs’.
A data pair consists of two different metrics which are most closely related to each other, based on the customer journey.
For example, the number of people that see your Ad will be one metric and the number of people that click on the Ad will be another. Nothing else happens between seeing and clicking on an Ad, apart from perhaps watching a video (if there is one). So this would be a data pair.
Here’s some other data pairs:
- Clicks > Landing Page Views
- Landing Page Views > Initiate Checkout
- Initiate Checkout > Successful Purchase / Application
In looking at these data pairs, you can (usually) easily see where things are falling apart in your campaign, and then diagnose a possible solution.
For example, if lots of people are seeing your Ad but very few people are clicking on it (average is 1-5%, depending on audience warmth), then you know that your offer / audience / creative aren’t in alignment and that you should test some alternatives.
If you want to make that path quicker and easier to market to your clients, check out all the client management tools that we offer here at My PT Hub. Or, better yet, try them out for yourself with a free 30-day trial starting today!
