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As digital marketers, we love our traffic.
Because after all, more traffic = more sales…right?
On the surface, the math behind this seems pretty straightforward:
Traffic x Conversion Rate x Price = Revenue
So if your price and conversion rate are fairly stable, that leaves traffic as the main “lever” you can pull to grow your business.
But there’s a problem with that thinking.
Yes, growing your traffic will grow your sales…but only if you have an offer that converts.
After all, if the “Conversion Rate” in that formula is 0, then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get. Anything times 0 is 0.
But sometimes it can be easy to forget this. Sometimes we get so focused on driving traffic that we blind ourselves to the fact that the real factor holding us back might be something else altogether.
Recently, I was talking with Amanda Powell from DigitalMarketer about one of DigitalMarketer’s longest-running offers: “The Facebook Ad Template Library.”
Here’s one of the many ads they’ve run for this offer:
There’s a decent chance, if you follow Perpetual Traffic, that you’ve seen some iteration of this ad before—because it’s been running for a looong time. And over the years this offer has generated many, many thousands of leads and kickstarted a ton of revenue.
I’m not surprised. It was a great offer! But over time, the conversion rate for the FB Ad Template Library started to decrease.
And that shouldn’t really be a surprise, either. This offer had run for so long that many people in their audience had already seen it. It wasn’t new or timely or exciting. The market had matured, and this just didn’t provide the same value it used to.
At first, the team at DM addressed this problem by creating more and more new ads, and tweaking the landing page to try and squeeze more juice out of the offer. Eventually they went through so many variations of this funnel that people started to become confused about what it even was.
In Q3 of 2020, they recognized the truth: this wasn’t an ad problem. It wasn’t a traffic problem. It was an offer problem.
As offers go, the Facebook Ad Template Library was kind of like a Larry Bird: a legend in its day…but no longer in a condition to compete in the big leagues.
It was time for the Facebook Ad Template Library to retire.
To the credit of Amanda and the rest of the DigitalMarketer team, they recognized the fact that there was a problem here and took the necessary steps to fix it.
So how do you actually do that?
It might sound a bit counterintuitive, but the first step to fixing a problem like this isn’t a step forward but a step backward. In other words, you need to take a step back from the day-to-day work to get a more holistic view of what’s working in your business and what isn’t.
See, when you’re too close to the problem, that’s when it’s easy to assume that the problem can be fixed with tweaks (like new ads or an updated landing page).
But when you step back and look at the big picture, it’s easier to see the big problems—like the fact that an offer has run its course.
So the DM team created and launched a brand-new offer called The Napkin Challenge:
This was a completely fresh training that no one had ever seen before.
It had a compelling story and hook—generating a cold traffic funnel that’s simple enough to fit on a napkin, because “napkins force simplicity, and simplicity beats complexity.”
It included 5 days of live interactive training from Ryan Deiss himself.
And the whole thing cost just $10.
That’s what you call an irresistible offer. Just as importantly, it was also a NEW offer. Novelty is huge when it comes to offers. Here's why:
In his book Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff wrote that humans are hardwired for the new and novel, saying, “Attention will be given when information novelty is high and will drift away when information novelty is low.”
Our tendency to notice change and focus on what's new and different is deeply hardwired in our brains. In fact, one big reason why our species was able to survive on the African Savanna was by learning to ignore things that stayed the same (grass, trees) and focus on things that moved or changed (a stalking tiger, a rustling in the bushes).
And it’s that same tendency that causes us to scroll past old offers we’ve seen 100 times, but stop and pay attention to one we’ve never seen before.
So when DigitalMarketer promoted this irresistible and new offer, it performed exponentially better than those old offers. They easily hit their revenue goals.
They solved their problem. At least…for a while.
Here’s the thing we have to remember:
Offers don’t last forever.
It’s easy to get nostalgic and think back to the days when your best offer used to kill it. But just because something worked before doesn’t mean it will work again. We live in a fast-changing world, and your business has to change with it.
Take Columbia House for example. If you’re old enough to remember this company, you know that they had an irresistible offer of their own—sign up and get a bunch of records/tapes/CDs for practically nothing.
In the mid 1990s, Columbia House grew into a $1.4 billion company mainly on the strength of this one great offer.
But fast-forward 25 years to a world where nobody buys CDs anymore, and Columbia House was filing for bankruptcy.
Make no mistake: if it can happen to a billion-dollar company with a killer price on a highly in-demand product, it can happen to anyone.
So if you’ve been running the same offer for a while now, and it’s slowly starting to decline, there’s a good chance the problem isn’t anything to do with your ad copy, or creative, or audience, or optimization method—but the actual thing you’re selling. The offer.
At Tier 11, we get together once a quarter for a 2-day meeting where we talk about our core values and how we can focus on growth. It’s a chance for us to step back and work on our business, rather than constantly working in our business.
It was during one of these sessions that we stumbled onto a transformational moment for us.
We had a client who had been with us for about 3 years. We were running their Facebook ads, and had generated some incredible results that the client was thrilled with. But we knew we could do more.
The problem, as you can probably guess by now, was the offer.
Their introductory offer still worked, but we saw so much more opportunity to build out a wider variety of front-end offers that would help to…
Appeal to a wider segment of the market and thereby scale bigger & faster
Naturally lead to higher-end purchases on the backend
So we approached the client and made our recommendations. They trusted our advice, and we promoted the new offers for them.
Their business absolutely exploded as a result. The experience opened their eyes so much that they now think about customer acquisition in a whole new way.
It was a transformational experience for us, too. Because now that we’ve seen how effective new offer creation can be, we’re going through the same process with ALL our clients.
Before we wrap up, I have 2 more things I think you need to know about offers.
Thing #1: Not Every Offer Is Going to Work.
In business, as in life, you’re going to fail some of the time. That’s just the way it is.
And that’s OK.
At Tier 11, about 7 out of 10 ads we launch typically fail. But we’re OK with that. Because that gives us the volume we need to find those few ads that absolutely knock it out of the park.
So don’t put all your eggs in one basket here. Instead, create multiple offers. Some of them will be so-so. Some will fail spectacularly. But eventually you’ll find one that will work so well, it transforms your entire business.
Thing #2: Use Data to Point You in the Right Direction
Like I just said, not every offer you try is going to work. But there’s something you can do to improve the odds of your offers being a success:
Leverage your data.
You have analytics from a variety of sources—your website, your Facebook Ad Account, your email provider, and so on. So use that data to point you in the right direction.
Here’s an example from my business. We were promoting this video, and we noticed that only 50% of people who signed up actually loaded the video. The other 50% were a complete waste.
The writing was on the wall: interest in this offer was lukewarm at best.
So we started digging through our metrics, and we found one specific part in the video that had a big spike in view data where people were really engaged.
Translation: this was an idea that resonated with people.
So we built our next offer—the SAP Selling System—around the idea covered by that segment of the video. We felt confident that it would succeed because we knew the offer had its roots in something our audience cared about.
It succeeded in a big way. And it was all because we listened to the data.
When your offer isn’t working, nothing else will work either. No amount of traffic can fix an offer that doesn’t convert—that’s just throwing good money after bad.
But when your offer is firing on all cylinders, it can do wonders for every other area of your business—including your traffic.
When you find that irresistible combination of products or services at a price that your market just HAS to have, then your ads will work better. You’ll get better clickthroughs, more revenue, and a higher ROAS.
You can even scale that winning offer to other traffic platforms.
And when you have both of those things working together in harmony—a killer offer with well-optimized ads—it’s like a force-multiplier that can catapult your results into the next stratosphere.
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this article, it’s the fact that good marketing requires a lot more than just creating new ads and testing new audiences on Facebook.
Of course a well-optimized traffic campaign can work wonders. But in order to achieve your full growth potential, you have to take a holistic view of your business.
Is your offer working? Is your funnel optimized? Are you tracking the right KPIs? Do you have the right creative strategy? Are you using your data to its fullest potential?
The problem with most marketing agencies is that they focus entirely on generating clicks, with no regard for whether the rest of your business is set up in a way to take maximum advantage of that traffic.
Here at Tier 11, we do things differently. In fact, we’ve come to think of ourselves as an Anti-Ad Agency. Rather than just running ads, we work to maximize your revenue by providing…
We call this Customer Acquisition Amplification™ (CaAMP™).
In other words: when each part of your marketing is working together synergistically, the results will be greater than the sum of its parts.
The best way to find out if we’re a good fit is to hop on a quick call with one of our Senior Strategists. This is a no-pressure call where we simply ask some questions and try to get an idea of where your business is at and whether you’re ready for the kind of growth we aim to deliver.
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