302 | Paid Advertising for E-Commerce Brands with Taylor Frame, Focus Funnels
Today we're gonna talk about paid advertising. I have spent years searching for someone that has extensive experience in the e-commerce space, and who understands the unique challenges and needs of micro-businesses, solo entrepreneurs, and small businesses, particularly with paid advertising.
What I found in my search was that there were a lot of people who were focused on paid ads, but for service businesses or for larger brands with huge budgets. There were people that only focused on ads, but did not look at the holistic marketing strategy that the ads were pushing to. I also encountered a lot of people who just didn't understand the nuances of e-commerce sales.
So this is a topic that our community has asked for over and over again, but I never felt like I could find the right expert to put in front of you. Until today—my guest today is Taylor Frame from Focus Funnels. Taylor is the co-founder of Focus Funnels, which is an e-commerce growth shop. He has consulted and worked with over 400 e-commerce companies including several from our Proof to Product community. Focused Funnels has launched and scaled over 100 brands to consistent six-figure months, finding creative solutions for bootstrap founders.
In addition to the overall success, Taylor's team has managed over $45 million in performance ad spend across a variety of niches. Taylor and his team specialize in working with women-owned e-commerce brands on holistic marketing that ties together both organic and paid advertising efforts. This is key—this is critical to success. As you will soon hear he breaks down complex ideas and strategies into easy-to-understand solutions, which I love.
On today's episode, we're talking about trends in the marketing space, how much money you'll need to spend to get started in paid ads, and how to leverage different ad platforms for different outcomes.
Today’s episode is brought to you by our Proof to Product LABS coaching program. This is a coaching program specifically built for product-based business owners, with members from across industries and across the globe. Inside LABS, Taylor will lead a training on quick win ad strategies that you can implement right away. He also will offer a training featuring ad audits for our members, so we can measure and track and see what's working and make shifts as we need to. These are member-only events inside of LABS, so request your invitation to join below!
Paid Advertising-Based Marketing Funnels for E-Commerce Brands
Many product-based businesses are interested in running paid ads for their products, yet don’t consider the holistic approach or the funnels on the backend. That’s where the team at Focus Funnels steps in.
One of the major factors in creating a paid ad strategy that works is the product itself—it should solve a problem and be compelling to the marketplace. From there, Focus Funnels will help brands determine how to position themselves in the market, the type of content that they need to create, and how to nurture existing customers.
Transitioning From Organic to Paid
We’re all too familiar with the importance of an organic marketing strategy, but sometimes it can feel oversaturated and draining. The platforms we’re creating organic content on are strategic in that they’ve created a pay-to-play approach for brands and businesses.
What’s the best way to approach your transition from organic to paid? You can test your hooks and content organically—the best results should then be moved to paid. This allows you to see what resonates with your audience, then leverage those results for your paid advertising efforts.
The Investment in Paid Advertising
Over the last few years, the cost of paid advertising has gone up. As you’re building your plan and strategy around your paid advertising efforts, the key element you should be considering is the cost per acquisition (or per customer). Realistically, the cost per acquisition, historically, has not gone up like people would like to believe.
If you’re brand new to paid advertising and you’re looking to simply get started with it, Taylor recommends testing it out for $10-20 a day.
The best way to see if paid ads will work for you would be to:
Create an organic post that is problem-solving, like a testimonial or demo of the product
Allow it to organically gain traction for one or two days, then
Turn it into a boosted post for a few days
This simply allows you to test your potential with paid advertising without a large investment of time or resources. Once you’re ready to go to the next step, consider raising your budget to $1,500 or $2,000 a month and find a vetted freelancer or agency to help manage your advertising.
Product-based brands that are invested in paid advertising are typically spending a decent amount when they’re doing it strategically—averaging around $10k per month. If you fall into that category, you should consider working with someone who knows what they are doing and is focused on paid advertising. Not only will they save you a significant amount of time, but money as well that you may otherwise be wasting.
Marketing the Solution Your Product Offers
In a really solid paid advertising strategy, your product should talk about the problem it solves; this means the ad creative needs to talk about the problem and the solution to highlight why people need it.
In all of the brands and products that Focus Funnels has worked with, they have yet to find a product that doesn’t solve a problem.
While it can seem tough to pinpoint a problem that your product solves, it does exist—look at your reviews and you’ll find them!
Where E-Commerce Brands Should Focus Advertising Efforts
Every paid advertising platform provides different results. What the Focus Funnels team has found is that it’s best to utilize the different platforms based on the places in your marketing funnel:
Top of the Funnel (Awareness, engagement, follower growth): TikTok and Pinterest
Bottom of the Funnel (Conversions): Google, Instagram, and Facebook
If you’re just starting out, Instagram and Facebook offer the best user experience, conversions, and results. If you’re running on multiple platforms, a great strategy to optimize the top-of-the-funnel traffic is to create retargeting ads on Instagram and Facebook.
The content you are sharing within these funnels is also important as you want the messages to match the goal of your advertising.:
Top of the Funnel: Engaging and educational
Bottom of the Funnel: Action-based messaging
The competitiveness of the e-commerce industry has gone up, yet more people are interested in supporting smaller brands. Therefore, when it comes to conversion rates, you need to look at all of your metrics, but specifically look at the return on investment.
ROAS (return on ad spend) is the metric you should consider looking at; if you spend $1 on ads, what are you getting back? The goal that Focus Funnels wants to see is $3. Once they hit that, their clients are increasing their ad budget.
A Holistic Approach: Optimizing Your Funnels for Paid Advertising
Before you jump into paid advertising, it’s important that you have optimized your funnels through a holistic approach.
When the team at Focus Funnels got started, they only offered ads. Through those initial experiences, they found that some of the brands weren’t getting the results they wanted because they weren’t set up holistically for the investment they were making.
Whether it was a lack of SMS or Email Marketing opportunities to continue the nurturing of leads, the systems were simply broken.
Now, Focus Funnels has a holistic approach with paid advertising, development of the ad creative, setup and optimization of the website, and overall marketing funnels. This allows their clients to have the best experience with paid advertising.
You have to have these systems built out before you ever start spending any money.
quick links:
Here is a recap of links shared in this episode:
227 | Paid Advertising for E-Commerce Brands with Alexander Rossman | Rossman Media
088 | Email Sequences, Sales Funnels and Facebook Ads with Zoë Scharf from Greetabl
252 | Why you need a 90-day Marketing Roadmap with Lyndsay Clements, Ellen Grace Marketing
288 | SMS & email marketing strategies with Arianne Foulks, Aeolidia
275 | How to Improve Your Customer Journey with Jordan Kentris, A Good Day
If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you check out our upcoming events in our Proof to Product LABS coaching program.
This is a coaching program specifically built for product-based business owners, with members from across industries and across the globe.
Inside LABS, Taylor will lead a training on quick win ad strategies that you can implement right away. He also will offer a training featuring ad audits for our members, so we can measure and track and see what's working and make shifts as we need to.
These are member-only events inside of LABS, so request your invitation to join below!
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MEET TAYLOR
Taylor Frame is the co-founder of Focus Funnels, an eCommerce growth shop. He has consulted and worked with over 400+ eComm companies inside Focus Funnels. The agency has launched and scaled over 100 brands to consistent 6-figure months, finding creative solutions for bootstrapped founders. In addition to the overall success, Taylor’s team has managed over $45M in performance ad spend across a variety of niches.
CONNECT WITH TAYLOR
WEBSITE: focusfunnels.com | INSTAGRAM: @focusfunnels | LINKEDIN: @taylor-frame
Connect with Katie Hunt
Katie Hunt is a business strategist, podcaster, mentor and mama to four. She helps product based businesses build profitable, sustainable companies through her conferences, courses and coaching programs.
Website: prooftoproduct.com | Instagram: @prooftoproduct
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