Hi there, it’s Matthew Larsen from Ultra Growth Marketing, and the topic of this blog post is how to advertise for your eCommerce Store.
If you are able to advertise profitably in eCommerce, you will have no problems, worries, or stress. If you can advertise profitably, nothing else really matters. Seriously. When you are able to advertise profitably, you can build your store as big as you want. It is the only way to generate a reliable and consistent form of website traffic.
Organic traffic such as that from social media or search engines like Google is not reliable or consistent. You cannot “scale” it up like you can with Paid Advertising. Because of this, 80% of our effort and attention should be put towards building profitable advertising campaigns.
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How to Advertise Your eCommerce Store
When talking about advertising, there are a few things that we need to understand and remember. I will go over them here in a list:
1. The one and only purpose of an advertisement is to get them to click-through to your website. The purpose is not to sell your product. That is the job of your website. When we create ad campaigns, we need to apply all of our concentration and effort and creativity to the single goal of getting them to click on our ad and go to our website.
Selling the product is the job of our product pages, not our ads. It is important that we remember this because if we approach the creation of our campaigns with this in mind, we can make them much more effective at getting someone to click-through in comparison to how effective they would be if our goal was to try and sell our product in our ad.
2. The first line of the ad is the most important. The truth is that most people won’t even read past the first line of your ad copy. You need a “hook” here for the same reason you included a hook at the top of your product description. You need to grab their attention, and “reel them in.”
If the only purpose of an advertisement is to get them to click-through, then we can also think of it as the only purpose of a hook is to get the person to read the rest of our ad. That’s it. When you are creating your ad, keep this in the back of your mind. The first line is the most important and its sole purpose is to get people to read the rest of your ad copy.
3. If possible, demonstrate the product in the ad. There are a lot of advertising platforms available, such as Facebook, and Google, and so on. If possible, make sure to demonstrate the product right there in the ad. This works especially well with Video Ads but it can be done with photo ads as well.
If we remember the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” then a video demonstrating your product must be worth a million. A demonstration communicates and resonates with our potential customers better than we possibly could through words. We should always try to create ads that demonstrate the product and show it in a real-world setting.
4. Focus on the benefits, not the features. This point appeared in the last email when we were talking about creating product descriptions. We need to focus on the benefits of the product. Not the features.
If someone is buying a new golf club, what are they really buying? Are they buying the golf club, or are they buying another “ten yards on their drive?”
The more we can identify the benefits of our product and use those as selling points in our ads, the more effective our ads will be. Learn to identify the main benefits, and then use those in your ads.
5. Make sure you have a popup, as well as automated email campaigns, and great product descriptions. Although we are talking about advertising in this email, we need to implement all of the essential aspects that we talked about in the previous emails, because they all work together.
Advertising doesn’t exist by itself. It works hand-in-hand with your popup, email campaigns and great product pages. Your ads drive traffic to your website. The popup captures the visitors’ email addresses. Your automated email campaigns start. They educate the potential customer about the product. The person comes back to the website, and the product page convinces them to buy.
Without implementing a popup, email campaigns and great product pages, your ads will not be as effective as they could be.
Testing, Testing, Testing & Testing Some More
What a lot of people won’t tell you is that the number one way to succeed in advertising is by doing a lot of testing. Simply put, your opinion doesn’t matter when creating an ad. All that matters is the opinion of your customers. They are the ones who click on your ad and go to your website, where they choose to buy, or choose not to buy.
Even the best advertisers in the world rarely “strike gold” on their first, or second, or third, or even tenth attempt. What separates the best advertisers and most successful eCommerce Stores from everybody else is that they commit to a massive amount of testing.
This is important because as an advertiser, you are never completely sure what your audience will respond to best. An ad you may think is good might do very poorly, and an ad you think is bad may end up performing great.
You have to commit to testing. Commit to creating one new ad per day, five days per week. This could be a Facebook ad, or a Google ad, or whatever you choose, but always make sure that you create a new one every single day.
When you commit to doing this, a few things will happen:
1. You will get a lot more practice, and will quickly become better at making ads.
2. You will be able to find out what your target audience responds the most because you will have so many more options and versions and variations of your ads.
3. You will eventually “strike gold” and find that one ad that gets you a 5x or a 10x ROAS and changes your business and your life forever.
Commit to testing. It is the number one cause of success in advertising. Create and test a new ad every day, at least five times per week. That is the number one secret for success, and no one ever talks about it.
Don’t Make Your Ads Like Everyone Else
When creating ads, a lot of people will go look at their competitor’s ads, and model their ads after their competitors’. Don’t do this. This is almost never a good idea for two main reasons:
1. You have no idea if those ads are actually working or not. If they aren’t, you are essentially copying something that doesn’t work.
2. If you copy your competitors’ ads, your target audience will quickly learn that that is what all of the ads look like in your particular industry.
Over time, their brains will instantly be able to recognize what ads look like, and they will automatically ignore them and tune them out. This will lead to more people ignoring your ads, which will lead to a lower click-through-rate, a more expensive cost-per-click and a lower ROAS.
By copying your competitors, you are hurting yourself and your entire industry. Learn to advertise your own way, for your own company, with your own unique style.
Criteria For a Good Ad
Before I wrap up this blog post, I am going to give you a few criteria as to what makes a winning ad. This can be viewed as a guide or summary:
1. You are demonstrating your product in your ad.
2. The first line of your ad copy is a “hook” that reels them in and makes them want to read the rest of your ad.
3. Your ad focuses on the benefits of your product. Not the features.
4. You have a strong call-to-action in your ad. This should focus on the benefits. If you are selling a golf club, instead of having “click here to buy now” as your call-to-action, you should have “click here to add 10 yards to your drive.”
5. Your ad is different from your competitors’ ads.
6. Your ad stands out, so when someone is scrolling their Facebook feed, or looking through search engine results, your ad “pops out” and they stop to take a look at it.
7. Your ad is high quality. It should be visually pleasing to look at. It should not look cheap or bad or amateur.
Summary
The ability to advertise profitably is the most important thing for an eCommerce Store. If you are able to advertise profitably, you are already 95% of the way to being a success. If you can advertise profitably, nothing else really matters.
Even the greatest advertisers rarely are successful on their first try. They test a whole bunch of different styles, concepts, ideas, etc., until they find out what works. Once they find out what works, they go all in, and commit to even more testing, all centered around improving what is already working.
Advertising is the most important work you can do as an eCommerce Store. You should commit at least 80% of your time and money towards successful advertising campaigns.
If you can master this one skill, you will be a success no matter where you live in the world, and what type of products you sell.
It is that important.
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Thanks, and if you need anything, email me at matt@ultragrowthmarketing.com
-Matthew Larsen
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