Business Owners (who suck at marketing) Do THIS

Here’s a very common issue I’ve been seeing over the last year or so (among business owners who don’t have much of a marketing background):

A lot of people will DRASTICALLY overestimate the role of the media-buying team in their success (or failure).

When deals are flowing in left and right it’s “the media-buyers are killin it!”

Or

When lead quality tanks, it’s:

- “the media-buyers are using the wrong audiences”

- “the media-buyers picked bad interests” or

- “the media-buyers are targeting people who are too young to work with us!”

As a general rule of thumb for people who haven’t spent a lot of time in an ad account…

Media-buyers typically are not making as many changes as you think they are.

A good media-buyer is very unemotional and data-driven (which creates a lot of issues when you have a Founder who freaks out every time there’s a bad day).

Sure they’re constantly testing some new audiences, copy, and creative…

But the large majority of the budget is going toward a few CBO campaigns that they have been running for a long time (and generally analyze on a 14-21 day timeframe).

It’s funny to me because over the course of a month, marketing teams will routinely hear something along the lines of:

“Ads crushed it on week 1. Weeks 2 and 3 they sucked. Then week 4 they were back to what we were seeing on week 1. Make sure you use the audiences from week 1 and 4 and cut the audiences from week 2 and 3.”

Meanwhile, the marketing team has literally not touched anything over that time period lol.

Do media-buyers play a role in your success?

Absolutely.

But when things aren’t going right…

Your first reaction should be:

1) Be patient - Making your decisions on a day to day timeframe in an ad account is a recipe for disaster. Facebook isn’t going to be perfect every single day of the week and spit out nothing but ridiculously high quality/high intent leads.

2) Test new offers - online businesses are not like small local businesses where you can sell the exact same stuff for years at a time and have consistent, predictable revenue. If you last 18+ months running the exact same offer, I would consider that to be a win.

3) Test new ads/creative - a lot of business owners think they can just find a winning pair of copy/creative and it will crush it for them for forever. Not the case, you need to be testing new ad angles, variations...etc.

If your front end revenue is up or down…

Chances are it’s not because the media-buyers picked the wrong audiences or interests (there are many factors that are much more significant).

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