Why I Can’t Help You Scale With Ads

Out of all the people that hit me up, 95% of the time I can’t really help them achieve their goals. It’s either they want to “blow up their business” with digital advertising or they come talking about how they want to “take their business to the next level” and they think that if they buy ads, it will fix their growth problem.

So they hit me up because they think I’m the guy they need to help them. They think that if they just hire a top “ads person” that I’ll be able to magically solve the issues they have that’s keeping their business from growing.

Well guess what…

Not only will I not be able to help them in many cases, but nobody will really be able to help them because here’s the truth…

The reason they can’t grow usually has very little to do with ads. It’s likely a symptom of a larger problem that more eyeballs ain’t gonna fix.

But most people don’t want to hear the truth. And if that’s you, that’s fine with me. You may as well stop reading now.

But if you want to learn a thing or two, let me tell you what I’ve seen from my experience. And what I’m about to share is part of the secret to how I really help businesses scale.

To crack the code, you have to go beyond the ads to really assess the underlying problems. When it’s clear that someone is not willing to do that because they are stuck on the notion of getting more traffic, I politely let them know they aren’t a good fit for me and keep it moving.

So what the hell am I talking about?

It’s usually 3 things, but certainly there could be tons of other reasons. These 3 are just the ones that are the most common in my experience.

1. Infrastructure
2. Conversion
3. Metrics

Let me explain each one individually to give you some context.

Infrastructure

Let me ask you a question: If I sent you 10X the number of leads and/or sales you’ve ever received in one day tomorrow AND did that every day for a month, could you handle that?

Most of the time when I ask that question, the answer is NO. It’s because you don’t have the proper infrastructure in place to rapidly scale your business and sustain that scale moving forward.

There could be a million reasons why that is true and I could go on and on. The point is that in order for someone like me to get excited to work with you, I have to know you have the infrastructure to scale.

But here’s the thing…

If you don’t have the infrastructure today, I just need to know you are willing to do what it takes to get there and willing to make the investment in your business. Otherwise, I’m not going to be interested.

Most of the time what I see happen is that the person who reached out to me will go find someone else with less experience or cheaper. And typically that eventually leads to more frustration and delayed success because they hire people who can’t help them diagnose and correct the real issues.

So here’s what you need to do…

Really think about all the facets of your business you would need to upgrade in order to handle an increase in capacity.

It could be customer service, operations, servers, internal systems, fulfillment, etc. I could dive deep into all of this, but it really depends on your business and you should be the one to know these things.

If you haven’t thought about any of this, I can guarantee it’s because you’re not ready for the next level. Figure this stuff out or get someone to help you figure it out. Until you do, you’re crippling your growth potential.

Conversion

I have a client that’s doing extremely well now. But over 2 years ago when I started working with them, they had everything except this part nailed down. Not only could they not convert on the front end, but because of that we could not put enough people through the front end to figure out how to optimize the funnel to get a customer value that made the numbers work.

They needed to convert better and they needed to be able to track it all the way through to revenue, which would allow them to make data-driven decisions. So they took my advice and hired a superstar copywriter and implemented a proper tracking system.

I can’t stress how important it is to invest in conversion. Find the best copywriter you can and PAY THEM. Do whatever you can to get the best on your team. I’ve never seen a situation where we hired the cream of the crop to help fix conversions where it didn’t pay off tremendously.

But what’s equally important with being able to convert is that you must implement a conversion tracking process that tracks based on revenue. Everything you do from a tracking standpoint should be tied to revenue. Unless you’re focused on building an audience or a user base, you’re probably trying to generate revenue so this is a must.

Once you have a revenue-based tracking process in place, all your decisions should be based on that. For example, we track all the way down to the ad. If one ads gets cheaper clicks but another gets a positive ROI, guess which one is getting shut off? The only way you can make these types of decisions is when you’re using a revenue-based tracking process.

Conversion and tracking go hand in hand. You can’t optimize what you can’t track. At its core, optimization is knowing what’s working and what’s not working so you know where to focus your efforts. I tell people all the time, I’d pay $100 per click if it makes a profit any day of the week over paying pennies for clicks that don’t generate any revenue.

Cheap-click-chasers usually do so because they can’t convert. Don’t be a cheap-click-chaser for the sake of getting cheap traffic thinking it’s going to fix your woes. People who think like this are usually an immediate red flag for someone who’s not a good fit for me.

So here’s what you need to do…

Do whatever it takes to convert and make sure you track based on revenue.

Metrics

I can count on one hand how many times I’ve talked to a business owner that really knew their metrics well. And I’ve talked to hundreds, if not thousands of business owners. The ones that struggle with growth the most are usually the ones that don’t know their metrics well. Even the ones that seem to know them initially are usually quite a bit off once we have a further discussion.

Questions like this are usually what I ask:

What is a new customer worth to you lifetime?
How much is a lead worth to you?
What is your average order size?
How much can you pay to acquire a new client or new lead?
What are your margins?

When you can’t answer these questions, I know immediately it’s going to take some work to help you dial in your metrics. Not that it’s a bad thing because that’s how I can create a ton of value and get compensated accordingly.

But many times I encounter business owners who don’t know and don’t care to know because they leave that up to someone else. Big mistake.

If you’re a business owner and you don’t know your metrics that well or not willing to figure them out, you’re probably doomed and likely to fail. Sure, there’s always exceptions to the rule. But from experience, I know that’s like hitting the lottery so I ALWAYS pass on working with someone like that.

I’ve had several instances where just by improving margins or figuring out ways to increase average order size, we were able to go from losing money to being profitable. There’s a host of other little things like those 2 examples that can make a huge difference and usually it’s knowing your numbers that will allow you to see where the profits are leaking out of the business. The more holes you plug, the greater the chance of turning a loser into a winner.

So here’s what you need to do…

Take some time to really dig into the numbers in your business and determine what you can pay to acquire new leads or new customers. Even if the numbers suck compared to your competitors, doing that exercise will give you some great insights on how you could make the numbers work where you could compete in your market well enough to use ads to scale.

Conclusion

Again, this is not an exhaustive list by any means. But the goal here is to provide you with some valuable insights on how you should be thinking about using digital ads to scale your growth.

It’s ok to not know this stuff. I didn’t always know it either and I learned most of what I know from mentors, peers, and working with top notch people. But hands down, the best teacher has been executing, gathering data, and using that data to make decisions.

So get out there and execute some campaigns, gather some data, and figure out what to do next. Execute!