The Too Good To Lose Strategy For Slaying Giants With Your Paid Advertising Funnel

I shared my bold prediction yesterday and couldn’t be more wrong..

I also shared some timeless advice on strategy to increase your marketing performance even in unfavorable environments. In general, I’m always hedging against that. But it looks like “too big to rig” Donald Trump came out on top despite Kamala’s team pulling all the stops with their marketing and connections.

Whether you think elections are rigged or not doesn’t matter, but it is very important to understand how to beat big competitors who spend frivolously and have way more buying power, notoriety, and resources than you.

How to Compete When They’re Outspending You by Millions

Because there will be another election in four years, advertisers will be far outspending you for your audience’s eyeballs, and we’re heading into the Black Friday season when a similar thing will occur.

The thing I love about social media and advertising is that you can create a fair playing field no matter how monstrous the competitor is, even if they have Taylor Swift endorsing them. If you want the right to believe and achieve that, then there are a few things we’ve got to get straight. 

Is Your Media Buyer Blaming Facebook? Here’s the Brutal Reality

Last month, a media buyer came to me stating that the client was getting destroyed on social media. I received many of these calls, but only a few were ready for what I was about to say. For a week straight, my answer to this media buyer was, “Doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world, the ads, media buying, and offers just aren’t good enough.” There’s a radical difference between blame and responsibility. Blaming is very disempowering, whether you’re being blamed or blaming an external force. I just don’t allow this in any of the businesses I own or advise. Period.

If you’re not getting the desired results, it’s your responsibility. Something from the moment they see your ad down to when they tell the sales rep no, it just isn’t good enough. The results say so. If you can accept that and you’re an intelligent person, that’s more than half the battle.

Data Passing 101: How We Used Precision to Slash Ad Costs and Boost Quality

What I had this media buyer do was ensure that data was passing to Facebook to the best of its ability. Meaning when a sale, call, or lead comes through, Facebook is getting the most accurate data possible to understand what’s working and what’s not. We use Hyros and a few other tools for this, but you still have to do some dialing in on the tech side to verify. You’ll usually have quite the discrepancy in any ad platform you use.

Think You Can’t Afford to Outbid Them? This Strategy Proves You Can

From there, I had him deploy a manual bidding play. It was for a call funnel, so we bid specifically for calls. This isn’t always the case; sometimes, we do this for leads, calls, purchases, etc., so your team’s situation may differ. If your data isn’t passing properly, this won’t work either.

Then he dialed in the bids aggressively, starting out 3-5x higher than the call cost we can withstand. In return, he beat our competitors, got much cheaper costs, and was awarded some of the highest-quality leads.

How To Win Over Niche Audiences

The other lever I had him pull was niching down. We knew, for example, that in this account, their ideal buyers are mostly conservative truckers and nurses. So, I had him model the ads after magazines and other icons they were familiar with. I've done this in local markets, for example, using football team colors in the ad. The messaging was dialed in to be as specific as possible to those people. I’ve mentioned this before, but not in this context. The key is being way more relevant than anyone else advertising to them. It makes it dead obvious to the AI and your prospect precisely who you’re looking for. A confused ad AI will struggle to help you. People may not think so, but that’s its job. People who play the blame game attribute their poor results to Facebook or Google stealing their money when, in reality, they’re just not doing a good job.

Quadruple Your Content, Double Your Results – Here’s How It Worked

The last thing I had this client and media buyer do was quadruple their content, going to leads who opted in and those who booked calls. For months, we’ve had this client’s video guy build a library of content that covers a variety of fears and questions the prospect has before getting on calls. We deployed emails also covering these topics for those who booked, and we did the same thing for leads who haven’t booked using my internal email swipe files. The result was a lot more appointments on the calendar to reduce cost and a lot more shows to reduce the volume needed.

Relentless Testing: The Secret to Winning Against Tough Odds

We also used a testing framework where brand-new tests were created every 2-3 days. This is the rule with any team I work with when trying to overcome great adversity. If you’re not getting the results you want, then you have to be relentless in creating data-backed theories and testing every 2-3 days with as few test variables as possible so you know what worked or didn’t.

Why Fraud Traffic Could Be Killing Your ROI – And What You Can Do

In these environments, it’s not uncommon to also get a ton of bot and fraud traffic clicking, opting in, adding to cart, or booking. I won’t promote any one platform here, but there are multiple you can use against this. Make sure someone on your team is doing quality control by looking for duplicate opt-ins and fake call applications. Also, if you're getting an abnormal amount of traffic out of nowhere, it could be bots. Chances are you already get this type of traffic, but your team just doesn’t see it. So it’s less about getting the traffic or not and more about how much you’re getting, what’s abnormal, what you can withstand, and how much you can eliminate to waste less money and stop sending bad data to the ad AI.

Send this over to your team. 

Be too good to lose.

—Lance C. Greenberg