Knowing how to scale. That’s it. Plain and simple.
- Cross-Platform advertising
- Red Bull (Bryant prefers RockStar Recovery)
- Focus on core objectives
- Coke (the kind you drink)
- Messaging
- Insert another caffeine drink here
- Programmatic Targeting
- Decent to great products
Based on the above list, If you asked your absolute smartest of the smartest business friends who run eCommerce businesses that are growing and stable the following question…
What advertisements platforms do you run traffic on?
What do you think their answer would be?
“I really only focus on Pinterest”?
Maybe… “I used to run ads, but then Facebook shut down my ad account”
Of course not! If you asked them “What ad platforms do you run on?”
They are going to tell you
“All of them that give me a return on my ad spend!”
It’s not revolutionary folks. Seems simple.
We’ve heard it before.
Did you know 90% of businesses don’t do it or do this high-level strategy?
About 80% who do cross-platform selling, do a terrible job; which is like trying to fill water buckets full of holes.
They just keep losing money, which isn’t sustainable!
Here’s the concept- get 3-10x the efforts by being everywhere as opposed to just on 1.5 platforms (cough, cough Facebook).
Hang on, we’re going to show you 3 ways we were able to scale with eCommerce companies.
To start things off here with full context, we recommend you immediately tackle paid advertising with:
- Google Search
- Google Display
- Google Shopping
- YouTube
- Bing
- Yahoo Gemini
- Adroll
Do a pixel inventory on your site now. If you have just Facebook’s pixel, you are killing your business slowly without even knowing it.
It’s like the guy in Indiana Jones scene where he is in the crate over the pit of lava and gets his heat ripped out slowly. Kill me now!
Your site should have all the relevant pixels setup. Quickly go and set up:
- Google Analytics
- Google Adwords Conversion Tracking
- Google Remarketing
- Facebook (double check your conversion setup)
- Adroll
- Bing
- Native ad networks like Gemini, etc
- Bing
Even if you don’t use all those platforms yet, you want to be ready. BUT mostly, you want to be collecting pixels (i.e people to remarket to) now. Start today. The day you start on the new platforms, you will have immediate traffic opportunities.
Scaling Up- In Channel
We teach that every business needs to get aggressive and scale up your best platform now. That’s easier said than done though.
You want to make sure you are completely filling your “funnel” with potential customers.
Again start with your best platform currently
I’ll use Facebook because that’s the hottest girl/guy in the room right now.
If you haven’t created Lookalike audiences off of your converters. DO. IT. NOW!
Ideally based off Purchase info you’ve been passing through the FB pixel (see “Proper Pixeling” above) so your “seed audience” is constantly changing and growing.
Start by creating 3 audiences. The 1%, 2%, and 3% audiences for your top country you sell in. For the US that should have given you 3 new audiences close to 2.1MM people each.
The 1% audience is going to be the percentage of the population that most closely resembles whatever your seed audience looks like. It get’s farther away from the core audience the higher percentage you create.
Scaling out- Cross Scaling
This is where it gets fun.
If you started to master Facebook, you need to keep that up. Hopefully you have created a system that lets you manage that platform with minimal time.
Because- you gotta get going on the other platforms.
Time to get more traffic from other people’s pockets that aren’t on Facebook.
Or even simply become omnipresent where your potential customers spend their time online
Here’s 3 things you need to make sure you are doing to best cross platform scale.
- Remarketing Pixels for all platforms
- Be everywhere your potential customers are
- Repurpose creative for different platforms (display, native etc)
- Brand Search
- You ARE building a sustainable brand right?
- People will search for it
- Across Google, Bing, Yahoo
- Conversion Pixels for all Platforms
- so you can optimize in-channel and scale
Scaling In- On Site
This is a good one.
But we already talked about scaling up and out.
This one main idea is leaving a lot of money on the table.
We like to call this our CRO phase. The stage where you get your site to operate in tip top converting fashion. These tips below are what we call revenue generating opportunities AKA CRO. The following tips will boost your conversions. Take notes. Shut the office door and buckle in.
- Be Mobile Friendly (not responsive)
- Up to 80%+ of your traffic can come from Mobile!
- Design for mobile usability first
- Think Mobile first- Always
- As stated above, optimizing mobile traffic is like as important as taking toilet paper on a 10 day hiking trip in the back woods!
- Mobile is only getting bigger and bigger.
- How do you connect with other apps?
- How do you take transactions in the highest converting manner?
- Are you aware of tablets and the traffic generated there?
- Lead gen
- Mobile experience
- Desktop/ tablet experience
- Multiple Payment Options
- Pay with Amazon
- Paypal
- Financing, larger purchases
- Apple Pay
- Be willing to take their money… anywhere
- Customer support needs to learn how to close deals or support the sale
- Facebook messenger
If this has been helpful- you should subscribe to our free gift we made.
It teaches the top 16 things we’ve learned from spending over $100MM in online advertising to generate over $300MM in online sales within the last 6 years.
We think you’ll dig it.
Cheers
Jay and Bryant
