The temptation, with your incredible offering, your ultimate product or service, is to dive into something like Facebook Ads, and spend, spend, spend.

Expecting to retire on your own island, with a private yacht and far too many pina coladas for one person to consume.

And it doesn’t happen.

And you’ve spent a fortune. So how can you avoid this “oh so easy” way to waste a ton of advertising cash?

You have to use the “Craft, Test, Scale” process. Which I’d like to copyright, but I can’t, as simply put it’s best practice.

Crafting

Before you spend any money looking to attract millions of customers, go back to understanding your target audience.

It’s a theme throughout the T4S “Traffic for Sales” book. You must (must!) know your target audience better than yourself.

So you can craft your message. Your promise. Your offer.

And then test with a small number of people. I’m talking about less than 20. Seek out and test your perfect message. Which might turn out to be not so perfect, if the conversion rate is poor.

But now you have the opportunity to ask this small number of people, who you are engaging with personally, why they didn’t take the offer.

• Did they understand it?
• Was it relevant to them?
• Did if solve a problem?
• Did the message resonate with them?
• Was the price point too high (or too low)?
• Was the benefit clear?
• Was their sufficient value?
• And so on.

Because when you know the answers, you can review your message and change it. Improve it. Make it better.

And try again, with a small number. Ask the previous group if it’s any better.

You keep in this crafting loop until you get conversions. Probably not 100%, but high enough to give you confidence in your message.

Testing

Now that you are confident in your message, you will already have saved some money. You may have got it spot on first time, in which case, awesome! But if not, you went through a critical learning phase.

Now you can up your game. Don’t spend lots! You want to test your (probably pretty damn good) message on your advertising and marketing.

Remember – don’t assume Facebook Ads. Or Google Ads. You want to test in the best channel that your target audience will be. Where they hang out.

Don’t make life harder for yourself!

Follow best practice (for example, if Facebook Ads, let Facebook do it’s “thing” for about 3 days before pulling it, but not much longer).
And make sure, above all else, you can track what’s happening. Use Google Analytics and (for example) Facebook Business Manager.

• Are you getting attention?
• Are you getting click throughs?
• Are they getting to your landing page?
• Are they then converting?

At this point, you should be getting traffic to your landing page.

If that’s not converting, don’t worry! I’ve got your corner! The T4S “Traffic for Sales” book is all about how you can create your landing page(s) to convert.

At least you know you can place an advert and get traffic there.

Why aren’t you getting traffic? At this point you have to rely on the creative part of your advert (as it’s no longer personal).

So you have to test (and test, and test). It could be the headline, the text, the image, the video.

Unless you are either (a) lucky, or (b) incredible, you won’t get it right first time.

That’s expected. You have to go through this testing phase.

But with small numbers. Small enough to avoid spending loads, but large enough to get enough data to build confidence in your advertising message (and creative).

Scaling

When you are confident you can get traffic from your advert to your landing page you are ready to scale. Because you have that confidence.

At this point, I would advise you to shift focus to your landing page before spending much more.

That traffic you’re getting? You want to be converting it. Not all of it, that would be awesome, but unlikely. But enough to make it worthwhile, before you really scale up your advertising spend.

Now, in your crafting and testing, you will have learned about your landing page.

If it wasn’t converting, you will be improving it, and seeking feedback. In the crafting phase especially.

Traps to avoid

Do not craft and test with your mum (or others that love you, or are loyal to you). It is very likely they will love whatever you show them!

You want to craft and test with people that represent the audience that you will be advertising to.

To follow on from the previous section, you want to craft and test with people that represent the same level of awareness as your target audience.

The second word of warning is… patience. You have to go through the learning phase at each point. You have to expect times of failure, so you can learn.

Every successful advertiser has failed, and learned. This is normal. 100%. This is part of the process.

If at first, you do not succeed, remember Edison and his 1,000 “failures” at creating the lightbulb.

“How did you feel, failing 1,000 times?” he was asked.

“I did not fail, I learned a little more a 1,000 times before I got it right”.

Thank goodness he didn’t give up too early!

Split Testing

When you are running adverts, best practice is to run two variations. If you are getting reasonable traffic, you can see which is performing best. The same with landing pages. After a while, you will see a clear winner. Pick it. And then split again.

Repeat this process, as you will gradually see better, and better results; as you discard the losers.

Changes to test will probably become more subtle, eventually maybe even just one word here or there!

Split testing is highly recommended, once you have enough traffic on which to base decisions. Don’t make decisions with low traffic, the data isn’t enough to warrant it.