Listen carefully: You can always hire people to deliver the work, set up the technology, do your company accounts and tax returns.
But the guys who know how to craft a killer sales pitch that forces people to whip out their wallet and throw money at you will always be rare… incredibly valued… outrageously well-paid… and sitting in the driver’s seat of their abundant future.
Good advertising is simply a sales pitch. Or better put, salesmanship multiplied.
Your advertisement and sales message should act like an army of tiny salesmen soldiers. And they should go forth, regardless of the delivery medium, and deliver a concert pitch.
If you’re running a YouTube ad that’s viewed by 200,000 people, that’s 200,000 chances to give your best sales pitch. It’s 200,000 separate prospects all seeing and hearing your ad via one-on-one communication.
Think about it this way – if you had a chance to make a 60-second sales pitch 80,000 times to 80,000 prospects, what would you say to them during those 60 seconds to give the most compelling information, build the most desire, make the best case, and reduce the risk for them to take the next step?
What would you say? If you were right there in person, in front of your dream buyer? Would you blurt out, ‘Here’s our stuff — come buy from us for no justifiable or rational reason’?
~Novel Serialisation: Heavens Fire~
I hope not! Sadly, most advertising you see and hear is weak and vague. It would be taken hostage and eaten alive by the money-multiplying soldiers described above.
You see, after coming into contact with tens of thousands of business owners every month and speaking with thousands from all over the world, I’ve noticed that not even 1% of businesses put together advertising that builds any kind of a case for a prospect to wants to buy their products or services.
Instead, it just fires features and benefits at the prospect, serving no more purpose than to announce, ‘We exist, so buy our stuff’, instead of giving a compelling reason why they should do business with you.
A good example of this sort of ‘here’s-my-stuff-come-buy-from-us’ advertising can be found on any Google search results page.
Just do a search on ‘financial planners’. Here’s what most say: ‘Financial Planning Services, Friendly & Trusted Experts, Tailor-Made Advice, Trusted Advisors, 30+ Years of Experience, blah blah blah...’
Every single ad says basically the same thing. It’s impossible for a prospect to make an intelligent decision about whom to call based on any criteria other than who’s got the prettiest website.
The prospect can’t determine if any of the products or services are any better or any worse or different than those offered by the sea of competitors.
This situation is true for any medium. Your ads should make a red-hot pitch for your product or service in just the same way as a salesperson would in a face-to-face selling situation.
Look at your ads. If you were talking live to a hot prospect, your dream buyer, would you say the same thing your current advertising says to convince them to buy from you? If you’d say something different, then you need to light those ads on fire and rethink your whole advertising strategy.
When somebody is considering buying something, the one thing they want is information — useful, helpful, no-nonsense information. The more information you can give them in your ads, the better your chance to generate an action.
Before we get deeper into the quality of your information, let’s first talk about a problem that vexes many business owners: the level of traffic to their website or store.
The Biggest Misconception
When it comes to growing sales, businesses generally have one or more of the following challenges to overcome:
SMALL LIST: Your list may be small or even non-existent. Meaning, you don’t have a large enough database of prospects or previous clients you can call upon to generate tens of thousands of dollars on demand.
LOW TRAFFIC: Meaning you’re simply not getting enough people to your website, store, or landing page.
LOW CONVERSIONS: If you’re getting enough traffic but you aren’t seeing as many leads and sales as you want, then you have a conversion problem. Meaning, what you’re offering simply isn’t compelling your prospects to buy.
People often ask me, ‘Sabri, I really want to grow my business and I just need more traffic… Can I hire you to get me more traffic?’ Most of the time they’re looking for the latest ‘hack’ to triple their traffic… A golden Google leprechaun that sky rockets their rankings… The latest Facebook ad tactics to increase their click-through rate… Or the Instagram bot that secretly follows people and reaches into their pockets and deposits their money into the company’s bank account.
But you don’t need the latest traffic hack. You see, in today’s day and age, traffic is a commodity. Just like milk or bread. If you want to buy groceries, you go to a supermarket. And if you want to buy traffic, you go to a traffic supermarket.
Just like a supermarket where you can go and buy as many groceries as you want or can afford, you can also go to a traffic supermarket and buy as many website visitors as you want or need. Literally as many as you can handle! Never have businesses had such instant access to millions of consumers within minutes. Now, when it comes to traffic, there are only two names worth mentioning. You can think of them as the Woolworths and Coles of the online traffic world. They are Google and Facebook. And they account for more than 90% of traffic online.
Get this: On Google, people make 3.5 billion searches per day. As for Facebook, there are over 16 million active users in Australia alone. You can have a Google Ads account set up and running in under 30 minutes, giving you access to literally millions or billions of people within hours. Or you could set up a Facebook Ad campaign in a couple of hours and have access to the 1.8 million Aussies who log on every day!
We’re living in an age where you have access to millions of prospects within hours. It’s incredible and I could go on about this for hours, but here’s my point: If there is so much traffic available at your fingertips, and you can literally go and buy as much as you want at any time, then why do businesses say they have a traffic problem?
The truth is this: They don’t have a traffic problem!
They have a conversion problem. When you really think about it, this traffic complaint makes zero sense. How can you have a traffic problem when digital marketing has made traffic more abundant then it’s ever been? The real issue here is not in buying traffic. Anyone with an internet connection and a credit card can do that.
The real issue is converting that traffic into actual sales using a system based on unit economics that makes buying traffic profitable and self-liquidating. Meaning it pays for itself like a modern-day golden goose. I’ve spent millions of dollars battle-testing different traffic sources and marketing strategies for our clients. After all this testing, I came to one conclusion:
If you want to land those high-value clients like clockwork and grow your business to $1,000,000 a month in revenue or beyond without spending 70 or 80 hours a week in your business, then you need an automated lead generation and client conversion system that turns advertising into profit.
You need a system you can put $1 in which generates $2, $5, $10, $50 or even $200 back. You see, the most dependable and predictable way to grow sales and generate wealth is to turn advertising into profit.
And if you can’t pay money to acquire a new customer, then you don’t have a business. Let me say that again: If you can’t pay money to acquire a new customer, you do not have a business.
If you’re solely relying on free traffic, referrals, joint ventures, or other channels like these, then you don’t have a predictable and dependable way to grow your business. You’re simply at the whim of whatever fate drops in your lap. However, generating a return on investment from paid advertising is like pulling a lever and having cash drop into your account. It’s predictable, repeatable, and scalable.
This isn’t something I made up because I thought it was cute. We’ve helped small businesses flourish into multi-million-dollar companies using this approach. And it’s grounded in the same principles used by some of the world’s wealthiest investors.
A Wiser Investment Than Savings, Stocks or Real Estate
Instead of relying on luck to deliver you customers and cash injections when you need them, you must do what billionaires do. Invest in assets and get returns on those assets. Look at how much return some of the most prolific billionaire investors in the world are getting from their assets:
Carl Icahn: 31% annual returns
Warren Buffett: 20% annual returns
George Soros: 20% annual returns
Peter Lynch: 29% annual returns
Clearly, these giants of investing are not relying on referrals to average a 20% annual rate of return or more. They are putting in $1 and getting $1.20 or $1.30 back on a predictable, billion-dollar scale.
In other words, they maximise and leverage money to make more money.
And think about this…
These are the most famous and wealthy investors in history and they’re completely happy to invest billions to generate a return of just 20-30% per year. More on why this is important in just a moment.
First, let me ask you this: What are some of the ways you could try and leverage your money? And what kind of returns could you get?
Remember – you’re not a billionaire or genius investor, so you’re going to have rely on something simpler and more accessible to get the same results.
Let’s look at some options together, starting with high interest saving accounts or term deposit. If you were to invest in a high interest savings account, you’d typically look at a 2-3% annual return. In other words, you put $1 in and get $1.03. This isn’t great, right?
So, what about stocks and bonds? A recent report by the Australian Stock Exchange showed that over the last 30 years, Australian shares have produced a 9.5% return per annum on investments. In other words, you put $1 in and get $1.09 after a year.
But these are just two examples, so let’s look at another. There are a lot of people making a ton of money from real estate and property investment, right?
Well, real estate investment has yielded an average annual return of 11.8% per year over the last 20 years. Now that’s better than the others – on average – but it’s still not the kind of money that could transform your life and build wealth fast. You’re still only getting 11 cents from every dollar you put in.
Not very inspiring. But you’ll be happy to find out that investing in your business, more specifically your advertising, smashes these woeful returns on investment.
Look at this advertising expenditure from one of my client’s Facebook accounts. $4,403.64 was spent for a return of $17,850.00. That’s $13,446 in profit in just two days. That’s a return on investment of 305%!
Even if you consider product costs of 30-40%, this business is still making an unbelievable return from its advertising investment. They put in $1 and got $4.05 back. Or more specifically in their case… put in $4,403.64 and got $17,850.00 back!
Here’s another example from Facebook. The advertising spend is $7,334.06 and the return is $104,683.48! That’s a 1,356.96% ROI! In other words, they put in $1 and got $14.27 back. Or once again, specifically, they put $7,334.06 in and got $104,683.48 back! If that doesn’t get you excited, I’m not sure what to say.
But here’s another example. In this case, we were generating leads for a business. We spent $12,252.75 and generated 2,968 leads! The cost was just $4.13 per lead.
And for this client a lead wasn’t just a name, email, and phone number. It was a 16-step application asking all types of information, resulting in super qualified buyers. In fact, because they were targeting high value prospects, they only needed one or two of the leads to become clients to make back that $12k investment. And they got 2,968 leads.
And here is another lead generation example from a client’s Google Ads account:
We spent $8,310.59 and generated 2,330 leads at just $3.53 per lead. This was for a client selling a product retailing for $1,000. Again, this is insane ROI!
Here’s another example of one of my client’s Google Ads account:
Over four months we spent $46,792.25 on AdWords to generate $1,490,028.30! That’s a 3,084% ROI! They put in $1 and got $31.84 back.
One last example. Here’s another client for whom we generated a huge ROI. Over four months we spent $8,132 on Facebook to generate $34,579. That’s a 325% ROI!
Anyway, I think you get the point by now. Investing in advertising that attracts high value prospects and then converts that traffic into bona fide sales and clients is the smartest, most lucrative investment you’ll ever make.
And those were just examples of Facebook Ads. That’s not taking into account SEO, Google Ads, re-marketing, or any of the other traffic channels we employ for our clients to multiply money.
Yet despite this reliable, lucrative return, many businesses brag that they don’t spend money on advertising. They almost wear it as a ‘badge of honour’. And usually they don’t advertise because they think of it as an expense. However, that’s a huge tell-tale sign that you’re playing too small. You see…
Advertising is an investment that makes more money than anything else. Period.
But not your typical investment, where you stick a bunch of money into something and hope you end up rich when you’re old. Because when done properly, advertising can make you money almost immediately. Just like billionaires who leverage money to make more money, you can also multiply your money by attracting high value clients through smart investing in paid advertising.
So, the big question is, how much should you invest in advertising for your business?
I hear people talking all the time about business books or university courses where they learned about marketing budgets and having a ‘defined budget’ as a percentage of sales.
Like you should spend 10% of turnover on marketing, and ridiculous things of this nature. Let me tell you: You should only have a marketing budget if your marketing isn’t working. Because if you’re putting $1 in and getting $3 back… Why wouldn’t you want to invest as much as your cash flow allows? In some cases, it may even make sense to borrow cash to invest in marketing, as you have essentially created a money-printing machine.
The way I think about it, it’s like a vending machine that you can put in a dollar and buy a $5 or a $10 note. Essentially, you’re buying money at a steep discount! And why would you limit yourself to how much you should spend? I don’t know an investment on the planet that gives the types of returns that efficient paid advertising does, except perhaps super high-risk, start-up unicorns. Warren Buffett himself, the most successful investor in the world, only gets a 20% return.
You see, contrary to what you’ve been told, it’s not simply all about traffic and getting thousands of visitors to your site.
Nor is it all about the latest sales funnel software or Google hack that will open the floodgate to free traffic.
The reality is that competition online is at an all-time high. With the rising cost per click in Google Ads, or the competition with SEO and Facebook ads, the online marketplace is so fiercely competitive that you must have a solid strategy to convert traffic into actual leads, customers, and revenue.
If you don’t, you’ll end up wasting your money and your competitors will eat you alive.
Get this right, and you will have the most dependable and predictable way to grow sales and generate wealth.
What marketing is giving you the biggest ROI?
Sabri Suby
**This article contains excerpts from new international best-selling book, ‘Sell Like Crazy’ by Sabri Suby, available on Amazon**
About The Author
Sabri Suby is the founder of Australia’s fastest growing digital marketing agency, King Kong, and author of international best seller, ‘Sell Like Crazy’. The book covers all facets of digital marketing and illustrates the path to success with real-life case studies where Sabri has used the exact same selling system to supercharge their business.
