Show Notes:
We’re almost at the finish line – or in this case, the bottom of the funnel. Phase 4 of the GPS method is all about closing. As with any sales process, closing the sale is the most gut-wrenching, nerve-wracking, and in extreme circumstances, even vomit-inducing. I kid you not, this is a thing. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
Closing the sale can be one of the most exciting and enjoyable phases of the business. And if you’re like me and you love the thrill of the chase or going for the “kill”, then this is also your favorite phase.
The goal of the Close phase is to retarget your warm audience and direct them to your paid offer. This is when you usually have the highest return on ad spend since you are enticing your audience with your offer by talking about how your product or service will benefit their lives. Highlight how it will impact them on a daily basis – in the process, you are helping them reach whatever results they’re trying to achieve.
You’ve already done the work for brand awareness through audience building in the Connect phase. It’s now about strategically retargeting those people who clicked on your sales or checkout pages and convince them to complete the purchase.
Share-worthy Quotes:
“Find the right combination of offer, messaging, and targeting. And then once you’ve narrowed in on something that’s working, that’s consistently profitable, then it’s like an ATM machine.”
“Don’t create ad fatigue! You don’t want people thinking it’s the exact same ad that they’re seeing in their newsfeed over and over.”
“It’s your job to prove to your ideal avatar the worth of the investment.”
Get the Transcript here:
Episode 5 – The GPS Method Phase 4 | Close
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Ad Agency Secrets Podcast. I am feeling a bit cozy today, recording this. So, I whined it to my husband this morning that it was cold in the house. And he reminded me that today’s high outside. It was going to be 78 degrees, which made me feel a little like a spoiled brat living in Arizona weather here.
You just kind of get used to the warm weather. And so anything even slightly cold, you complain about. Although, I will say it was 55 degrees outside when I did wine. So yeah, there’s that. So anyways, he grabbed me a nice comfy robe and put it on me. And so I’m sitting here recording this episode from my nice comfy robe.
Perks of working from home. Am I right? Yup. Anyway, in today’s episode, we are diving into phase four of the GPS method, which is the close phase. This is all about your sales ads. Now the closed phase is not where you spend the bulk of your budget. However, it is where you usually have the highest return on ad spend and meaning, this is where you see people boasting online, that they spent $300 and made $10,000 back and start scaling Facebook at, you know, like an ATM machine and they start calling it ann Amy Tan Machine.
I think I just saw that online today, call it someone calling Facebook and ATM machine, which is kind of true, but calling it that can give the wrong idea to people who truly don’t understand the work involved in it. It’s like when Russell Brunson says you’re just one funnel away, everyone thinks it’s just one funnel they need to create.
And they’ll make a million dollars. When in reality, what he’s saying is it’s in the blood and the sweat and tears and finding that one funnel that will work. And then it becomes like an ATM machine. Same with that. You find the right combination of offer messaging and targeting. And then once you’ve narrowed in on something that’s working, that’s consistently profitable.
Then it’s like an ATM machine, but I digress in the closed phase, which again are your direct sales ads. The goal is to retarget your warm audience, to your paid offer. We want to entice your audience with your offer by talking about how this product or service will benefit their lives, how it will impact them on a daily basis and to help them reach whatever results they’re trying to achieve.
If you can’t explain that thoroughly, then your ads won’t work. Just talking about the product and how amazing it is and all the benefits of it. That’s not what marketing is about and it doesn’t sell. So keeping your ideal avatar’s pain points front and center and explaining how your product or your service will help eliminate those pains and reach their goals is all the person wants to hear and we’ll have them nodding their head.
Yes, yes, yes. To your offer. Now you may be asking exactly who are we sending these ads to? Well, these ads are going to people. You’ve worked hard to build a relationship with. Maybe they’ve watched some of your videos. They’ve opted into your webinar, your challenge. They’ve been to your product sales checkout page.
So they obviously already know about your offer and are somewhat interested. The goal is to show them these ads show the ads to people who are past the audience building phase. So they at least know who you are and are already deep in the nurture phase and or convert phase. They are hot leads, guys.
They need to, you have got to have already built that know like trust factor with them. These ads can occur after someone registers for a webinar or they register for a challenge and your card opens, right. You’re ready for enrollment. Um, if you’re e-commerce, you’ve already introduced your product, you know, right.
You’ve already done the brand awareness through audience building, and now you’re going to retarget those people who leaned it on your sales page or your checkout page to come back and complete their purchase or retarget. Those who have watched 50% or more of your videos back to the offer. Some of the core retargeting points for the close phase in your client’s journey are here.
So we’ve got sales vehicle. Registrant’s alright. We call them sales vehicle, which would be your webinar or your challenge or video series, whatever it is that you’re using, um, calendar or schedule or pages. So if you’re booking a call, if that’s your call to action. Anyone who lands on your calendar page or your scheduler page or application page, and anyone who visits and views your sales page or your checkout pages, anyone who watches 50% or more of a video, you could be 75% of a video, top 25%.
I think a lot of people miss this one, top 25% of website visitors. So people who are visiting your site the most, they are super active and warm users. So by utilizing the retargeting points that I just mentioned, you’ll be able to find where your prospect is at. In their client journey and position your messaging.
So you’re speaking directly to them exactly where they are at right now. And this brings us to the top retargeting sales ads we use at the JW agency for our agency clients. However, before I get into that, I just wanted to talk briefly about the setup of these sales ads. So most of the time when setting up your sales ads guys, and we call this bottom of funnel.
You’ll actually set them up as a conversion campaign on the campaign level. And then on the ad set level, we are tracking the purchase event. As long as you have the purchase event on the payment confirmation page. 99% of the time you do, unless again, you’re tracking like a booked call or an application, then you might be tracking the submit application event.
If your audience though, and this is sometimes something we run into with clients who have a smaller spend, who aren’t spending thousands and thousands. If your audience isn’t. Big enough. If it’s not a very big audience, then instead of setting it up as a conversion campaign, you might want to set it up as a reach campaign.
This way, what Facebook does is their goal then is to send this out to everyone in the audience, right? They want to reach everyone in the audience. Versus if you did, as a conversion came, they’ll be optimizing it for those that are most likely to purchase it to convert. Right? So if it’s a small audience, based on the targeting.
We just mentioned prior, although all the points, right. Then you’re reaching really, you’re reaching a very warm audience, right? So this would work for you about 95% of the time though. We are optimizing for conversion, not reach. Um, we also sometimes optimize for the step prior to purchasing. So add to cart or initiate checkout, for example, um, that’d be people who got to the checkout page.
We do that probably maybe 10% to 20% of the time. Sometimes we test this justice, which set up we’ll actually bring in the lowest cost per acquisition. So sometimes I run them. Side-by-side a conversion for purchase and conversion, for add-to-cart, or initiate checkout. And we just see what, which ones actually bring us in cheaper sales.
And then we’ll move forward with that one. From there, I would roughly allocate about 10% of your budget to your direct sales ads. Now, this can vary guys between five to 15%, but 10% will give you a good starting point. And for us, it’s a general rule of thumb and then we just adjust from there. So be sure though, to have saved that budget after the connect and convert phase. So that it’s available for the close phase.
There’s a lot of people that spend all their money on lead gen and they’re like, I don’t really have funds for the sales ads, but as I said before, this is your most profitable kind of phase. You really need to make sure you have a budget allocated for this. Okay, now that we got some of the basic set-ups out of the way.
Now let’s dive into some of our top retargeting sales ads. One of our, one of our favorite retargeting ads is what we call the abandoned cart ad. And I’m sure most of you know it, but just to be safe, I want to dig into this a bit because it’s so powerful. So, this is when you retarget those who have landed on your checkout page but didn’t actually buy your offer.
Right. They showed interest but didn’t buy. So for whatever reason, they didn’t buy, maybe they were at Starbucks in line. They, they looked it up on their phone, they got distracted or they told themselves they’d buy it later, whatever it is, right. Your job is to remind them to buy and you’re messaging without I’m going to say this really clearly without being too creepy.
Okay. Because I’ve definitely seen creepy. So just make sure you’re not being too creepy. It should speak to them where they’re at. All right. Such as, “Hey, I saw you were interested in XYZ, but you didn’t finish enrolling or purchasing or whatever it is.” Right. So meeting them where they’re at and talking directly to them.
Now, video ads actually work best here. Well, video ads work. Battle for most things, but they work really best here. So possibly testing a few variations of this, just to see which one converts better. Probably a good idea. Also, one thing to note is you need to have enough traffic going to this page in order to be able to retarget because, if you’re doing like the checkout page, sometimes it’s such a small audience.
If the audience size is too small, Facebook, won’t let you retarget. So if you realize you don’t have enough traffic going to your checkout page, then go ahead and retarget your sales page visitors, which would, should be a lot more than your checkout page that should hopefully give you enough traffic for a retargeting campaign.
Another favorite retargeting sales out of ours are objection ads. We use these for sales page visitors, excluding purchasers, of course. And these ads are specific ads appealing to your ideal avatars main objections. Some of the main objections that most people have that are pretty common are time. Money and results.
So time is in how much time does it take to complete the course or how much time does it take to get results, money as in pricing of the program or product, right? Your avatar thinking it’s too much. And in which case, it’s your job to prove to them the worth of the investment and then results as in can they actually get results?
Does this program or product work, do they have the skills to get results? Right. So in addition to these, you can actually have a couple more, and like very specific objections to your avatar and you can create ads around those. For example, we had a client that taught others how to become fitness instructors.
I certified them. And one of the main objections was I’m not thin. So how can I teach others? Right. How to, how to become a fitness instructor. That was huge for them. It was a personal objection in their head. And so they had several videos to combat this. Again, video ads were great here, especially when overcoming objections, because these people, these people are on the edge, right.
And they have fears holding them back. And the video just brings another level of trust to the digital space. But if all else fails and you crank can’t crave it owes you’re scared to crave it. It was or whatever it is, that’s fine. Just create a static image, but the objection, content in the copy. Something is better than nothing.
So this is such a powerful process and phase and adds to do so. I want you to make sure you’re actually putting something out there. One thing to keep in mind though, because I’ve seen this multiple times that when you’re doing video ads for sales ads or for anything really it’s best to ensure that you’re wearing different outfits.
Your hair is slightly different, definitely different backgrounds. And this is so you don’t create ad fatigue. You don’t want people thinking it’s the exact same ad that they’re seeing in their newsfeed over and over. When in reality, they’re like five different ads talking about five completely different things.
So change up the look and feel of each video. Another sales ad we do with every client is closing soon and closing tonight. This applies if there’s a deadline or timeline to the purchase with the closing soon ads rerun them about 72 hours before the cart closes. For closing tonight, we run them.
The date of the copy and messaging here are really simple. They’re just, you know, cart’s closing soon or don’t miss out or last chance. We even have sometimes include like tiny gamers or clocks are like little, our glasses on the graphics. Or even sometimes on the videos while the client’s talking, just to portray that urgency and let them know that like, time is running out, right?
Those are a few, few sales ads guys. We run for every client, whether it’s life or never green launch, and they’re probably some of our best performers and not all of them, like I said. But they’re some of our top ones. And like I said, video ads to best, but I do recommend split testing, no matter what video and static images, even if you create a video.
Cause at the end of the day, we’re usually surprised by what converts best with the videos. And I, it, it’s like, it’s like clockwork. Every time we create an ad for a client and we like our favorite image, never converts well, or I wouldn’t say never, but a lot of times it won’t convert well. And like the one that you hate, I know you guys have probably run into, this is the one that converts the best.
So always split test everything. Um, and like I said because this phase is usually the most profitable. So, even though you spend less on this campaign, don’t be frugal with your creative testing test, test, test, and make this as powerful and profitable as it can be. Well, that’s it guys that wraps up phase four of the GPS method, the closed phase. And episode six, we’re going to talk about optimizing and scaling your ads, which is phase five of the GPS method.
This is probably my favorite thing to talk about because I love numbers and I love data and I just geek out over ads manager. I know I’m weird, but that’s okay because it’s for your benefit, right? Because I’m going to be breaking down in the next episode the top metrics to optimize for what they mean and really how to troubleshoot them so that you can continuously improve your campaign results.
And in addition, I’ll swiftly chat about when it’s time to scale. Like when, when do you know, it’s time to scale and I’ll give you a couple of small scaling techniques, you can actually start using them right away. So that’s it guys. Thanks so much for joining me today and I will see you in the next episode. Bye.
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