In August of 2023, I started supporting a client of mine full time as their Marketing Manager. I had been working with this client for over 3 years in various capacities, but the time and circumstances were right to take a more direct role in the marketing of his company.
Alongside this position came a commute that most people would scoff at, San Diego to Los Angeles. So much traffic. So much time. I wanted to find a way to use this time most effectively, I've always been a fan of long drives, they give me time to think and plan out what I want to get done for the day, the week, and further out. So I got to thinking about what I could do with this time.
I figured I would take the same advice that I had given to hundreds (maybe thousands?) of business owners, everything from organic plant soil to B2B Insurance sales: create some freaking content!
So that's what I set out to do. I started recording notes to myself while sitting in traffic, thoughts on advertising, thoughts on business strategy, thoughts on why the hell people feel like they need to go from the on ramp to the HOV lane is the shortest time possible. I'll try to keep it focused on what I think will help business owners who are struggling with the ever changing landscape of digital marketing, running and growing a business in a digital economy, and maybe even help a few more people.
I don't mean whatever third party data providers are filling your inbox with offers for. I mean actual, real-life, actionable data from your business. If you're anything like me, you are bombarded by ads, articles, social media posts, and carrier pigeons showing up to your front door, all telling you about how to 'Hack the system' or 'MULTIPLY YOUR GROWTH' like the ads you used to get in your inbox. In all my experience helping business owners grow, I've found the real 'secret' to growing your business is almost just common sense. Business owners don't see it because they're too busy running their business.
So here's the secret: Track. Everything. Seriously. Maybe not everything but at least all of the activities that lead to getting clients and customers. Ad clicks, form submissions, scheduled calls, opened emails, purchases, all of it. A lot of CRM's will help you do that. The problem I keep running into is that most people, even if they have the info, don't know how to get it. There are some really basic questions that almost any business should be able to answer, and it is shocking how many don't:
1.) What is your most profitable source of new customers?
2.) What is the most effective path that a customer takes from not knowing you to becoming a high ticket or repeat purchaser?
3.) How much do you pay for a customer, and what's your average profit per customer?
These are some questions that, once answered, can make decision-making so much easier, but it often takes too much time to figure it out.
I want to primarily talk about the first question today:
This question should be the driving force of your marketing strategy, yet it's not something that most business owners know top of mind. Even if you have an in house team or agency managing your marketing, as the owner of the business, you should know this. However, it is fairly easy to lost this in the many other decisions and data you have to think about. If you do not know the answer to this question, find this out. As in, right now. If it takes you more than 15 minutes to narrow down your entry points to the answer, you need to make changes in how you view your business data.
I've worked with a company that would spend 100s of thousands of dollars on TV and Radio ads. I asked them what their return on that spend was, and they said 'I don't know, we've just always done it'. Based on some other factors, I was almost positive they weren't getting customers from these ads. I could tell a solid 80-90% of their customers were coming from Facebook ads. Even if they were getting the last 20% from those channels, it wouldn't have been profitable. So I had them turn them off for a quarter, and just reserve the money they would have spent on them. Not only did they not see a significant drop in customers, they now had over a quarter of a million dollars that they could put towards their other efforts. This was money they were basically throwing away, and they were still successful.
Note: I checked back with this client 1 year later, wondering if maybe there was some sort of brand reputation or top of mind effects. No changes whatsoever to their funnel, and they are crushing the game.
Getting in a position where it becomes harder and harder to find this out is frighteningly easy. If you go through a few agencies, try out some ads yourself, don't have consistent tracking, you can often know if you are or are not making money, but you aren't clear on where specifically your revenue is coming from.
This can be super easy to set up if you have a longer sales cycle and a CRM such as HubSpot, Klayvio, InfusionSoft, all you really need to do is set up ads tracking and UTM parameters for your ads so that you can track back what ads are doing well. Of course, easy isn't easy if you've never done it before. Luckily, most CRM's have well written walkthroughs on how to set this up. As an example, if you use HubSpot, you should be able to look at your ads like so:
Because this tracking is housed on your CRM, as long as you have proper UTM parameters on your ads, you can know precisely where each lead is coming from, and see real time calculations of ROI all the way down to the ad level.
If you are doing most of your ads optimization in the ads manager, it's likely you are missing out on critical data. Creating a direct integration between where your ads are served and where your leads are stored is the most effective way to ensure long term, accurate tracking. If you are relying on pixel or cookie data, you are going to miss out on many different conversion events. Accurate data tracking needs to be a focus on your business, because it is going to drive all of your marketing decisions.
With the plethora of API options to transfer data accurately and timely from place to place, you can also be in a position to leverage post-conversion strategies that are informed by what happens after a lead converts for the first time.
For example, Facebook has Conversion Leads Optimization, which uses data from your CRM to inform your lead ads about what happens after the initial opt in. This can turn lead ads from a mostly useless feature to generate a large number of low-commitment leads for a low price into an efficient system of generating high quality leads that are willing to take further steps with your business.
We implemented this into a high ticket investment opportunity and saw a truly massive increase in our ROI generating almost $3 million in investments with just $30,000 in ad spend.
The only way we were able to do this is by making sure that our leads were tracked as they came into our system, and that as they moved along the buying journey we were properly sending that data back to Facebook to better optimize our ads. I also needed to do monthly reviews and look back at past ads, to see if the leads generated ended up moving further down the pipeline. This isn't something that can just be plugged into a Pixel and optimized for, this is something you need to keep on top of if you plan on getting the most out of a lead generation strategy.
So if you primarily doing phone sales and using Facebook to generate leads, look into Conversion Lead Optimization, and definitely make sure you are tracking your leads properly, setting up a series of funnel stages, and passing that data back to Facebook in order to optimize on the front end, as well as doing a review on the backend. If you want help setting anything up that I've discussed here, let me know, and I'd be happy to help