How To Make Sales Even If You’ve Got A Crappy Website.

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I heard an interesting perspective yesterday during a conversation about targeting specific audiences.

It basically amounts to this: You can still make a tonne of sales even if you've got a crappy website & average sales copy.

I was saying that I’m noticing how selling physical products seems to be easier than selling info products online at the moment.
You don’t need to have killer sales copy, a pro website or a kick-ass sales video with professional production. You can often just get away with a short blurb and some good product pics and things will sell.

The guy I was talking to was saying that he’s noticed that copy, videos, even split testing (which I’ve always been a fan of) is only about 20% of what’s responsible for a conversion.

In fact he showed me some really hideous sites, with some pretty average copy and graphics that still sell well… not because of the site, not even because of the product… but because it was put in front of the right people…

It’s all about the targeting.

If you’re product is not selling chances are that the problem may be less to do with the site and the sales copy… and more to do with you not getting in from of the right people.

If you want to sell bottles of water… the best place to sell them is to put them in front of a man dying of thirst. He’ll pay anything…

Yes it’s that old motto from Dan Kennedy all over again… Give me a starving crowd.

Finding a starving crowd used to be about research and finding a niche that had people who were spending money, who were passionate about a topic and that were not being hammered by your competitors already.

That was a pretty hard triangle to get in the middle of.

But the guess work in many ways has been removed by better data, and better conversion tracking from social media platforms… the biggest of which is of course Facey.

Now it’s not necessarily about trying to guess which target market is going to work best but aiming more or less in the right direction, firing off a couple of rounds and seeing what sticks.

What do I mean by that?

Well let’s give this some legs and talk specific examples.

Let’s say that you are selling weight lifting gear… Not weights of course… too heavy to ship… But you could sell, gloves, belts, bands for cross fit, water bottles, supplements, and yes even info products 🙂

So how do you target?

If you go into Facey and create an ad campaign aimed at weight lifters you’re going to be paying top-dollar for those ads. There will be lots of competition and you’ll pay more because your target is broad. Facebook have a relevancy score. That score measures how relevant your ad is to each person you are targeting.

So even though people fall within the weight lifting category in the ad platform they might have once clicked a picture of some musclebound Adonis or Aphrodite and have not much interest in the sport or the activity itself.
So instead of going wide… consider looking for specific people in the sport. Consider looking for brands that people like. Look for events that are related… there are many ways to go down this path.

Do them all, with a wide demographic (if that’s appropriate) and see what sticks…

Facebook provide a conversion pixel which you can use to track a triggered conversion, and you can even assign a value to that conversion.

That way when you go into the ad platform you can see how much you’ve spent on each target audience and what you’ve made back.

At the same time you can split test your ads to see which worked better…

There are thousands of targeted interests that Facebook have created. After all people hand over all their likes and preferences every time they use Facebook.

You can keep refining and testing different audiences and putting different ads and products in from of them until you get the right combination.

Now don’t think that this means you have to spend a fortune on this process, you can literally set your budget per ad set as low as $1 a day, which means you get to run plenty of tests and watch while the stats build…

As they build you can get a picture of where people are responding and where they are not and you can make your adjustments accordingly.

If you ran 10 ad sets for 10 days, testing different ads and products you’d spend $100.
If I was to offer you a list of people who are interested in your subject and the ads that will get them to take action and spend money… how much would you pay me?

100 bucks seems like a pretty cheap price when you look at it like that doesn’t it?