2 UNDEFEATED Advertising Tactics

Too many marketers are focused on the algorithm rather than the audience. Too many marketers are focused on the data rather than the day-to-day experiences and decisions that their customers are faced with. Too many of us are focused on hacks rather than what makes our customers actually happy. And there's been way too much talk about Entromata and algorithms this week for a community that desperately needs to be focused on actual creativity, persuasion, and actual marketing. So that's what I hope to correct with this episode of Tactical and Practical, where I'm going to cover my two undefeated, perfect advertising strategies. I know that's a bold claim, don't worry. I don't have a course to sell you on the back end of this. But two undefeated advertising tactics that will work regardless of the channel, the algorithm, the time of year, the economy, these two tactics will work for you, will improve the effectiveness of your marketing if you understand them and if you execute them well. This episode of Tactical and Practical is brought to you by IntelliGems. You can go to IntelliGems.io, let them know, I sent you. And you can start testing offers, copy, prices, headlines, images, and a whole lot more on your website today. You can even save 10% off your subscription when you use code "nate 10" when you sign up. All right, my two undefeated advertising tactics. Number one, you really need to understand what makes up your customer's real consideration cycle. You need to ask yourselves and maybe ask your customers the questions. How long does it take someone to buy? What are the decisions that they're going to have to make along the way before they make that final purchasing decision? A lot of us talk and act like there's only one decision to be made when someone sees an ad. Do I buy it or not? But more often, there's hundreds of micro decisions that lead into someone pressing check out on your website. At some point, a customer is going to have to decide that they like or if they trust the brand that it's coming from. They'll decide whether or not that product fits their lifestyle and fits their identity. They're going to ask themselves, am I the type of person that would be proud to use or wear or eat or whatever it is, interact with this product on a daily basis? They'll have to decide if they identify or support the brand ethos. They'll have to decide if the product is fairly priced. But note, just acknowledging that something is fairly priced isn't the final purchasing decision. They're finally going to have to decide, is today, is right now the right time for me to trade my dollars in exchange for this product. There's not one purchasing decision and I hate that we talk about it that way. It is hundreds of decisions that usually occur over months, if not years, before someone actually buys from you. If you don't understand that, you're going to be judging the effectiveness of your advertising all wrong. You're looking at a seven day row as or a seven day click, whatever. In that seven days, you might have reached a million new people who have never heard of you before and it's a sign to expect a single one of them to have bought already. I know that happens sometimes. I've seen brands where 30% of the purchases happen within a day or within a few days of hearing about the brand, but that's still the minority. You really need to understand what goes into this full consideration cycle in order to effectively advertise and effectively measure the success of your advertising. You're also going to have to ask yourself, are there any external factors that might affect your customer's considerations cycle? The time of year, is it a holiday or all those decisions going to be made internally based on their clock and desires? You should ask yourself who other than the brand can affect your customers in making those micro decisions. Is it influencers? Is it word of mouth? Is it social credibility through past customers? What makes your customers move? What can actually make them change their mind or sway them in the right direction? You need to have an answer to all of these questions to be able to effectively advertise. If your head of marketing doesn't have answers to this, they need to go find them and fast or you need to go find a new head of marketing. Because there is just no way that you can effectively scale a brand without understanding the process that your customers are going through from the time of discovery to the time of first purchase. All right, that's number one. That's all of number one. Everything your customers real and complete consideration cycle and purchasing decision journey. It's a lot longer and it's a lot more complex than we're giving it credit for. And if you want to go work on this right now, go download all your customer reviews, upload them all to chat and then rewind this podcast and ask chat all of the questions I just asked you here. They'll give you a really great start into understanding what is going on in your customer's heads before they click check out. You guys ready for number two? There's no live audience here. I don't know why I'm asking that. All right, so number one, understand your customer's consideration cycle. Number two is about understanding how you're advertising actually affects the business. This might sound simple, but a lot of marketers struggle to see the full picture here. It's probably the biggest pain point I see from founders and CEOs and owners where there seems to be a disconnect from what the marketing guy or the marketing team or the marketing agency is reporting on versus what the shareholders actually want to see happen with the business. So number two is all about creating alignment and then understanding how advertising is actually mapping to real business goals. So at the very, very least your marketing team needs to understand the following. When you advertise a certain product, how much revenue comes in from that product and how much revenue comes in from other products, but because of those ads that other revenue could be people thinking upsell or bundle offers or could you just be someone coming in on an ad and they bought something completely different from what was on the ad that's fine too. And to understand both of those things separately, when I advertise product X, how much money do we make from product X and how much money do we make from products A through Z, excluding X, you know what I'm talking about. When you acquire a new customer on that product on product X, what does the rest of that customer journey look like? What's their 12 month LTV? How often are they coming back and buying? Are they spending more or less on the second and subsequent orders? Does their purchasing behavior get faster over time? Does it get slower? You need to understand when you're acquiring a customer on a certain product or even a certain offer, what that next 12 months of customer behavior looks like. Then you need to add up all that revenue, subtract your CAC, your COGS, and this is one everyone forgets. Subtract like content creation costs and software fees and whatever else you are doing in order to sell that thing. You need to include all those costs in there to see how much money you're actually making from advertising product X, spoiler alert, your best seller might not be as profitable as you think it is. I've seen this at countless brands where they tell me they have a top selling product and then I dig into all the numbers and I realize that they haven't made a dollar of profit selling that product this year. So big, big decisions need to get made here but it all starts with understanding this data. Then you need to take all of that and see how it lines up with the shareholders' goals for the business. Do they want to sell it? If they want to sell it, what might an acquirer want to see? Is it revenue growth, profit growth? Is it a net income percentage? If the owners don't want to sell the business, they probably just want to focus on profit but even with businesses like that, there are seasons, even years in the business where they might be less focused on profit and more focused on growth or more focused on making a brand impact, more focused on customer acquisition goals. So if you're on the marketing team, you can do the first part of this. Understanding how your advertising efforts are actually affecting revenue and profit in the business but then you need to go to the shareholders and make sure that what you're doing actually maps to what you want to see. After the first example here, I give a kind of challenge to the marketers out there. I said, if you don't understand your customer's consideration cycle, then you need to find the answers fast or you're going to be. to get replaced quick. I'm going to put it back on the owners for this one. If your marketing team doesn't understand what you want out of the business, you are failing them. And you need to get more aligned with them because there's no way they can do a good job unless they understand what a good job actually is, what the best outcome actually is. So number twos about creating alignment with the business and then understanding how you're advertising efforts really map to these goals. I'll give you one quick one that I've done for years. We measure something internally called real row-ass where it's basically like a mer or a blended return and add spend like buy collection or buy skew. So advertising product X spent 10 grand on it, made 30 grand on it. Good, great week, keep it going. But you have to understand that part of it. That's only step one. Then you got to go look at the customer journey, the LTV, the profit over that 12 month journey. So it's a lot of work to be done here, but it is crucial. Otherwise, marketing and ownership is never going to be aligned. And then you guys are never going to be able to do what you want to do with the business. If you don't understand every step of your customer's decision making process, and if you don't understand how your advertising efforts are helping or hurting the business when it comes to achieving their goals, or if you don't know what those goals are, you need to stop listening to this podcast. Don't listen to another episode. You need to not listen to any other marketing podcast. You should probably unfollow me on Twitter. And you need to go find some answers because it does you know good to go learn about a new marketing tactic. If you don't understand what's really going on in your customer's heads. And if you don't really understand how your advertising efforts are impacting the business long term, go talk to your customers, go upload all your reviews to chat GPT and ask it all the questions that I asked you in this episode. Go get to work before spending another second debating marketing tactics or worrying about the algorithm ever again because this is all that matters and these are undefeated advertising tactics. Thanks for listening to Tactical and Practical. I'll see you next time.