Welcome to e-commerce Sally podcast, where we believe that great brands are built on passionate leadership, smart operations, and of course, powerful marketing. I am your host, Josh coffee, and I'm grateful that you're listening in that you're tuning in that you are our listener. And so today we are, are going to be diving deep into what I call the four components of great advertising. So we're gonna be talking pretty specifically about
toward Facebook ads. However, this really applies across the board. These four components are essential to any ad campaign that you run and you have to have all four pieces of these. So let's dive in, let's kind of start with that first piece. And, and before I actually do that, um, the reason I want to cover these four things is because so often we get into building ads, we get into building campaigns and we don't really know where to start.
And because we don't know where to start, we just end up building something and launching and hoping for the best. And then what happens is, as things start to go wrong, we don't know what to go back and fix. And so if you know, the four components of every campaign, it kind of creates an ease of your mind and you get to know, okay, when I go to plan a campaign, whether it's a, uh, a timely campaign, like it's a holiday, or it's a specific promo or a season or a new product launch,
if it's a timebound campaign. Well, then I know I need to make sure that I have these four components. I need to make sure that I have these four ducks in a row. Uh, and the same thing will apply when you're going to build evergreen campaigns. When you're building a new evergreen campaign for a specific product line or a new point of, uh, cus new customer acquisition, you will utilize these four components.
So the first component, and in this order, the very first component that you need to have dialed in is your offer. And so I'd like to call these cash cow offers, and I don't like to call them products. So yes, the first thing you need, you need to determine what product or X you're going to sell, whether that's a collection or an individual product, we need to position it differently. It's not about selling a product or, or really promoting a collection when it comes to advertising.
It's about the positioning of that product or of those products. And I'll give you a really, really good example. So I was down, uh, I was, I was on vacation last week. There was this ad that I watched by dominoes and it's, it was a brilliant ad. And what happened was that this, this wife gets home. She, she opens up the door and she has Domino's pizza. And the, the husband and the kids are all sitting on the couch. And the kid's like, mom,
where were you? And she was, she said, oh, I just went to dominoes. And I delivered my own pizza and they tipped me $3, a $3, uh, delivery tip for picking up my pizza and I have it on my dominoes app. And so the whole gist was, Hey, by picking up your own pizza, we will tip you $3. And at face value, it's people are like, oh, that's so cool. I can tip myself for picking up my own pizza. And as the marketer in me, that positions hundreds of offers all the time.
I'm like, that's brilliant because it wasn't, it wasn't a tip. It was a $3 coupon. That's all it was because it's the same thing, right? If you bought a $20 pizza it, and you got a $3 coupon, it costs you 17. If you bought a $20 pizza and you got a $3 delivery tip, it was $3, but here's, here's the best part about that? Uh, that $3 tip, guess what? It's on the dominoes app. So now not only is it worse than a $3 coupon because you don't get the money off, but you can only spend that at dominoes.
So brilliant messaging the same, it's the same thing. It's $3 off, but it's the positioning of it that makes the difference. And so the first part of, uh, any advertising campaign, the first component is the offer and the offer has two pieces. It has the actual product or products, and then it has what the promotion is for that. And when I say ocean, I mean, what is the, what is the unique selling point? Like what's the unique offer that you're going to make them so that they can
become your customer. Now yes, you can take your products and you could just package them as is, and you could change the messaging and just sell them it retail rate. Absolutely. But when we're acquiring new customers, when we're really trying to scale, what we often see work best is to take those products and then create some kind of a front end offer for new customers, because it's gonna increase your conversion rate and your, the, the velocity in which you acquire new customers.
And I'll give you a couple examples and you you've heard these before. Right? Very simple. You can give a percentage off really, really basic you've can get a, give a sitewide or a collection or a specific product dollar amount off. You can do a buy one, get one, you can do a, buy two, get one, something that we see work really, really well. And to be honest, this is probably one of our number, uh, one promos that we see do well with an offer is a buy a product and receive a free gift.
That's complimentary really makes sense to the product purchase. So if you were buying a pair of shoes, you could offer a low cost to ship, low cost of good sold pair of socks. So that, that way it's enticing enough to acquire the new customer on the front end. And it doesn't cost you a whole lot to ship it. And so we see that do really, really well.
You can give a percentage off tiered percentage off where they buy, if you're doing, uh, food or beverages, this happens to work really, really, really well, where you get 10% off when you spend a hundred dollars or more 15% off when you spend, uh, 150 and 20% off when you spend 1 75, whatever those tiers are, it's a tiered percentage off. And we see that. We see that do really well, uh, from a promo and offer standpoint with beverage. And we say it do really well with food.
And so that's an example of what the promo is. And so the first component is like, what's the actual product we're selling and what is the promotion? We will run with that product. Now, you, you don't have to do a promotion where you give a discount or you give a free gift with purchase or free shipping with purchase. You don't have to do that. But what we've learned is that increases the conversion rate dramatically. You know, if Domino's just said, Hey, come by our pizza. It is large, 1999.
Or they said, Hey, come get a large topping pizza. And you'll a $3 tip. Well, which one is more enticing? Obviously getting a deal is more enticing. Getting some kind of a promotion is more enticing, which is why every large brand that you see today runs some kind of a promotion for certain products that they're advertising.
So we take both of those and we consider that the offer, the offer out outlines what the product or products is that they can get and what kind of promotion is with those products. And so that's the first component your offer.
And we call them cash cow offers because once you dial in an offer for new customer acquisition on the front end, once you dial that in, that will allow you to a, a significant amount of growth in your business, because you'll, you'll be able to acquire customers a lot more efficiently. Once you dial in what that offer is.
And you'll test many offers over time, you're gonna test many different things during black Friday, cyber Monday day in, in the Q4 holiday season, you might run multiple different offers your campaigns, but the first thing to running campaign, the first thing you need to establish is what's the offer. So what's the products. I'm what are the products I'm promoting and what is the promotion that are gonna go alongside those products? So
that's core component. Number one, once you've established your CCO, your cash cow offer that, that you wanna, that you wanna run a campaign to. Then the second piece you need to identify is your are the audiences that you're going to be running these campaigns too. And when you're running ads to audiences, there are three types of audiences. And, and you're gonna hear a lot of different terminology around this. You might hear a prospecting. You might hear, uh, retargeting,
and you might hear retention. You might hear cold, warm, and hot. Now for me, I'm a simple guy. I like cold tra cold audiences, warm audiences and hot audiences. And the reason audiences are the second thing we need to look at is because audiences second to the offer are the most impactful piece on your ad campaign. I'll give you an example.
So if you were trying to advertise your fast food chain, to people who have interests in healthy lifestyle, it's gonna be really hard to get those people, to actually buy your product. If it's a really unhealthy product, because the audiences are wrong. So you could have the best offer in the world, it could be, it could be 50% offer 70% off an incredible deal. But if it's the wrong people, they're not gonna buy rogue. I'm a CrossFitter.
So rogue could promote all their barbells and have the craziest deals on their barbells and their, their bumper plates and all that. But if, if they're running ads to people who have zero interest in exercise, let alone buying their own stuff, then it doesn't matter how great the offer is or how good the ads are. Nothing is gonna convert. So that's why the second pillar is the audience. So with audiences, I'm gonna break them down and I'm gonna break them down by, by temperature her.
And then I wanna walk through kind of what those actually look like. So the first type is cold. Cold is where a majority of your budget will live. A cold traffic is in cold campaigns that you take that offer. And you're running to a cold audience is going to be somebody that has no idea who you are. You're cold to them, right? This is typically in Facebook world going to be things like interests and lookalike. So those are the two primary forms of cold audiences that you would target.
So we have cold, and then we have warm now, warmer people that have engaged with us on platform, but haven't actually taken, uh, an action. That's much deeper than that. So we consider warm and you, you could decide between warm and hot. Some people will cycle them and throw 'em between the two. We consider things like video views, uh, engagements with our Facebook page or engagements with our Instagram page or people who have like on Facebook, open lead forms.
We consider all the people that have engaged with us on platform, but never visited our website or taken a desired action. We consider that warm. And the third type of traffic is the hot trafficking. This is always the smallest. So from Laura largest, the smallest there's cold, there's warm and there's hot. And these are people that have taken desired actions, whether they purchase from us or they've joined our list, or they have been on our website, we consider those our hot audiences.
And so from largest to smallest, we have cold. We have warm and we have hot now warm and hot. A lot of those, the audiences within those two will be pretty standard across the board for you, for me and for your competitors. A lot of us are using the same warm and hot types of audiences. We're using video views, engagement website, visitors, purchases, add to cards, lead form fills. We're using a lot of the same people on our email lists.
We're using a lot of this same audiences on the warm and hot, but on the cold side, this is where I believe most people fall short. And I, I mean, I guess I believe it, but the reality is I see it all the time because we work with so many brands. And what I see is they spend close to no time, really identifying what cold audiences that they're going to target.
And what happens is, is you go to launch a Facebook campaign, for example, and you just start, you, you come up with your offer and then you skip the audience development and you just go straight to ads and you start creating ads. And then you go in and then you start setting up your workflow and you start setting up the ads within the campaign manager, you create your campaign. And then when you, you go down the ad sets, you then need to select your
targeting. So many people, that's where they do their research on targeting. They just use the stock saved audiences, uh, within Facebook's tar targeting suggestions. And they just select their audiences right then, and right there. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, I'm gonna encourage you and really strongly advised that what you do is you
sit down for two hours. Our team spends two to five hours, but I'm gonna say two hours for you to get going in this spend two hours utilizing Facebook's saved audiences in a identify what audiences you can target. You get off into different rabbit trails, start to go down the holes of different affinity products and similar stores that you can target in magazines and types of content that they can consume. And, and put these all in some kind
of a spreadsheet. We use something, we call a PPC plant, a paper click planner. And it's where we identify all of the audiences that we could potentially target. It doesn't mean we're gonna do them all the right away. It just means we want an archive of every potential audience we can target. And when we do this, we typically will spend two to five hours developing these.
And by time we're done, we will have enough audiences that we could run ads to these different audiences and layer them and stack them in many different ways for a year, easily a year. And then once a year, we go back in, we, we start fresh and we actually do a lot of audience redevelopment, and we add to it throughout the year as well. And so this is where a lot of people fall short, that you have an opportunity spend time identifying audiences.
I got an email not too long ago from a client that followed our process, that we teach about audience development and spending the time doing it. And while she was averaging, two to three extra are return ad spend on some of her campaigns, even post iOS 14, which is wonderful.
As she was spending time doing all these campaigns, she was averaging two to three while she ended up finding audiences after this process that she ended up testing and she was getting 3.3, 4.9 6.5, up to an 8.7 return on ad spend in these audiences. She never would have thought of if she didn't take the time to sit down and do audience development, sit down and do audience research, go start looking within it and go within all kinds of suggested subcategories
and really, really dive deep. So the first component we have is our offer, which is consistent of, or, uh, which consists of our product and our promo. What is the actual promotion we're gonna do with it? The second component are our, are our audiences and we have three types. We have to determine what is this campaign going to go to?
Who's it gonna go to our cold audiences, which are interests and lookalikes, our warm audiences, which are people that engaged on platform, but haven't been to our website are taken a desired action or our hot audiences, which are people that have taken those desired actions, or they're sitting on a list, or they have engaged on our website.
All right. Now, before I get into the third component, if you are an e-commerce business leader, if you're an e-commerce owner or you work for an e-commerce brand that, uh, you want community, you want to learn more, uh, beyond this podcast. If you, if you wanna take part in something really special and get so much additional, so many additional resources and video trainings, and, and more I encourage you to join in the eCommerce Ali, uh, group, it's completely free. It's a Facebook
group completely free. You can go to Ali podcast.com/group, and that will just forward you to the group. You can hit the little join button on Facebook. Um, once you get in there every single week, we are doing live sessions where we're doing, uh, workshops. This morning's workout workshop that I did was actually 75 minutes long, where we're talking about things from Facebook audience to development, to email marketing, to, uh, how to really scale campaigns up that are getting stuck.
We covered so many things, even outside the realm of advertising that will help your business grow. So if you want access to that community, I encourage you go join it. It's completely free. Uh, Ali podcast.com/group. So the first two components we have our, uh, we have our offer. Then we have our audiences that we establish for the campaign. And then we have the third piece, the third piece you probably could have guessed. It are the actual ads and the ads consist of two core
pieces. The first piece is the copy. And the second piece is the creative. And if you wanna listen to an episode where we talk about, uh, creatives and, and, and how to build high converting creatives, I really recommend you go listen to the episode. Uh, I believe it's episode number 15 with Lewis Kama, where we talk about who owns get ads.co, and he has an agency and he works with directing consumer brands and go listen
to that. He, he talks all the way through what types of elements create great, highly profitable ads in, in, in the order of which to do those. But overall ads consists of two things, copy and creatives. Now, everyone has a different style on this, but what we've kind of learned is copy is the starting point. So I haven't done that for a reason. We begin with copy and messaging based on the audiences we're gonna be speaking to and the offer that we're going to be making to those audiences.
And we will begin with the messaging. Now, when it comes to messaging, there are a few things to keep in mind that that are, that I see done wrong time and time again. Now every business is different, but the questions and the things that the thing that we want to figure out for every ideal customer that we want to sell to is we need to identify what are the questions that they are having, that our product can help answer.
What are the challenges that they're seeing, that we might be able to solve? What are the roadblock in their way that we might be able to help them overcome? And what are the results they desire? And depending on your brand, you know, maybe you solve a specific problem. You know, maybe you have a supplement or you have something that helps somebody in some way. You may focus a lot more of your copy and your messaging around the challenge, the roadblocks, the pain that they're
seeing. And you might look to solve that. But if you don't have a product like that, like let's say you sell socks or you sell something else that's more fun, and it's not necessarily a challenge. Then you're gonna focus more on the results. And you're gonna focus more on the feeling that you want people to have when they see your products and when they use your products. And so the first part is the copy. Once we have the copy that will guide our creative.
Now with creatives, there's a lot of different types of creatives. You have single image ads, you have carousel with you have longer videos, you have higher production videos. There's a huge gamut of different types of creatives. Typically, we're gonna start with image ads. Once those have proven a concept, once an ad angle and messaging and an image work, then we will take that image. And we will consider creating that into a video because we have already had to
prove a concept of that image. And so we do, we follow that process, uh, Lewis in the, in the episode of number 15, he recommends the same thing. He recommends starting with an ad and kind of starting to progress into higher production video, and other assets along the way. So that is a third thing. But here, what most people do is they start with the ads and then they come back and identify who the audience is gonna be, or they'll just start writing an ad from rat.
And they'll just kind of piece something together without considering the actual promotion, the promo, uh, of it. They only consider the product and they don't consider the, the, the packaging of the product into an offer. And so I encourage you follow this process. We have the, we have the actual offer. We have the audience, and then we go and we create the ads. Now, once we have these ads, the, then we move into the final, the fourth and final component. And this is the workflow.
And the workflow is actually the setup of the campaign and the optimization of the campaign. And if I were to lay these all out, I view, think of it from a pure, a pyramid standpoint. So can it pyramid and there's four levels. The strongest level is the offer. If a bad offer, won't convert very well anywhere. The second is the audience you have to target the right people to third are the ads. And the creative in the fourth is the actual technical components of it.
This is the, the workflow, the setup and the optimization of those ad campaigns. And the reason this is to the very, very top. And this is the smallest piece is because it has the least impact on the campaign. You know, we've set up campaigns where we accidentally forget to check boxes and we actually, we hit expansion or we forget to set an age range, or we forget to even select some
of the targeting sometimes. And, and we don't select the exact criteria in a, our workflow is set up improperly and we still see the campaigns do really well because the offer was good. The audiences were were great, and the ads were relevant to those audiences and the offer was good. So, so you can have a bad workflow and it will get you to a certain point.
Now, when you start spending a higher volume of ad dollars, when you start to exceed thousand dollars a day in ad spend your workflow has to be tightened up to really scale and be profitable. But I wanna show you and tell you that the workflow has the least impact on your actual campaigns. The other components are much more impactful. So workflow is a component and the optimization is a component.
And the setup is a component like all those within workflow or components, however, it has at least impact on the overall campaign. So what does it look like in a setup standpoint? So a setup is going to look like the actual mechanics of what you're clicking in Facebook when you're setting up a campaign, or if you're using Google, what the, what me, what buttons you're actually selecting, what targeting options you're actually
selecting. And so when we look at setup, we look at a few things we look at what's the objective, which usually is conversions for purchase or leads. What's the budget, what's the, are we doing dynamic creative on, are we doing dynamic CRAO off? Which just so you know, uh, we don't do dynamic creative for anything other than retargeting. When is this gonna start? When is this gonna end? What locations am I targeting? Are we turning on expansion? Or am we
keeping it off? If I even have the option? Because some accounts don't have that option. It's just always on, uh, what are the placements? Uh, what UTMs am I gonna use? Which by the way, you should always be using U and parameters, always 100% of your ads. And so that is the setup. That's the mechanics. And as you can tell, it's easy. I could, I listed that off in like 30 seconds. So to actually select those is not a whole lot of work.
And so that's what that is the four that is the smallest component. So within that, we have the setup which we just talked about, and then we have the optimization. How often are you making ad edits?
How often are you, uh, making major changes, cycling in new campaigns, going and deciding to create new, uh, new ads for those audiences and those problems deciding when you're gonna cycle in new audiences, which I'm not gonna spend this whole episode talking through the optimization process, but those are the, those are the things in the workflow component that you need to look at. So to kind of recap here, every great ad campaign has these four components. We have the offer,
which is the product and the promo. We have the audience, which has three types. We have the cold, warm and hot audiences. So we have to determine who are we gonna target with this? We have the ad which consists of the copy and the creative. Most of the time we have our copy guide, what the creatives look like. So they tell the same story. And the fourth and final thing is the workflow. This has a least impact on your campaign, but it is still important.
And that consists of the setup of the actual campaign, meaning the mechanics and the actual optimization, how often you do it, what that looks like and the decisions that you make as you manage your campaigns. My friends, you have been look listening, not looking. Maybe you're looking at your on YouTube, but you've been listening to the e-commerce alley podcast. I'm your host, Josh coffee. I'm grateful that you were here with me. I wanna give a huge shoutout to our producer.
Dylan counts behind the scenes that you haven't heard or seen. But one day I promise you he's real and you'll get to experience his legendary, this. You can check out more about this episode by going to Ali podcast.com J join our free group at Ali podcast.com/group. And I will see you next time.