MKT 101 #2 - It’s Getting Harder To Sell Stuff

It’s Getting Harder To Sell Stuff 2012 was an incredible year to sell stuff online. Facebook ads were cheap, nobody knew how to run direct response offers online, and spammy offers hadn’t yet saturated the market.

At that time, things were so easy that I was able to run $4,000/day worth of Facebook ads direct to a short sales letter that sold my copywriting services, and I saw a ROAS (return on ad spend) north of 6x (for every $1 I spent, I made more than $6 back).

No email follow up. No funnel. No retargeting. No webinar. Just ads to a text-based sales page for something expensive.

To try and do that today would be advertising suicide. Sure, you see a few offers these days running ads directly to a $997 offer sales page, but their cost per sale is near 75 percent of the total price, and when you factor in payment plans, I’m doubtful they’re getting any profitability on the front end. It’s more likely a loss leader for a backend $30k+ mastermind offer.

If you ask most Facebook “gurus” why it’s so hard to get ROAS from Facebook ads these days, you’ll hear them talk about “how the algorithm has changed” and “ads are just more expensive now” and “Facebook isn’t what it used to be as an advertising platform.” I can almost always tell how much experience someone has in online marketing by how they explain the difficulty of advertising on Facebook these days.

Here’s the real truth: It isn’t more expensive to advertise on Facebook today than it was 8 years ago. The algorithm has actually improved in delivering better results. The data is better, there are more people on the platform, and Facebook is better at optimizing critical actions like an opt-in or a sale.

The Facebook platform has changed very little. What has changed massively is the audience seeing the ads. My team and I manage more than $400,000 per month in Facebook advertising for ourselves and clients. We have access to real-time data, we’re testing 50+ ads per week, and we have internal goals for ourselves and clients which demand the best performance possible.

Our CPMs are at the same levels as they were in 2012… MIKE SHREEVE 37 Our CTRs are at the same levels as they were in 2012… But conversions are changing. The audience on Facebook is becoming more jaded, more skeptical, and less trusting. They’ll click your ad, then roll their eyes. Part of it is cultural. Look around. Do you feel like you trust a lot of things right now? Conspiracy theories are mainstream, most of the internet is just a drunken barroom argument, and clickbait reigns supreme.

Conversations are more accusatory and emotionally charged, logic and level-headed thinking have become rare commodities, and the open access to freely available information has turned everyone into an armchair expert. More businesses are using online advertising now than ever before. That means your audience is seeing and buying more offers, more courses, more services. They have been cheated, ripped off, and scammed by sleazeball “get rich quick” brosephs trying to score their next Lambo.

Your audience is more experienced at being a buyer than you probably are at being a seller. That’s important and worth thinking about for a while.

As a business owner, you must understand and accept that the world is less trusting, more skeptical, and less likely to part with their money. It’s not just Facebook. Whether you use cold outreach, organic, or any other method for getting clients and business, it’s a tougher world.

Blaming Facebook or any other platform is shortsighted and missing the point. It’s not the platform. It’s the people. It’s your prospects that have changed. On top of the increased skepticism, your dream buyer has more choices than ever.

More people are offering exactly what you offer than any other time in history. The barrier of entry is lower than ever before. Anyone with a few bucks and a will to learn can turn advertising into profit. On the one hand, this is a wonderful time to be alive, and we ought to be grateful that there is so much opportunity available to us in this era.

On the other, we can’t ignore that your dream prospects have already been pitched, and sold to, dozens of times. By the time they show up to your marketing campaign, they’ve heard it all before. Does that mean you should just give up and quit trying? Of course not. As skeptical as prospects might be, they really do need your help.

If you offer something The One Book Millions Method 38 INTRODUCTIO N that can change a person for the better (coaching, agency services, courses, freelance services, etc.), you have a moral obligation to overcome the skepticism and help people, even if they don’t yet know that they need help.

If anything, people need more help now than they ever have before. If it’s rough out there for you, it’s probably rough out there for them too. Call me sentimental, but I truly do believe that you can generate wealth beyond anything you can imagine now (financial and otherwise) by realizing the truth that everyone needs help. Everyone. So, what does this mean in practical terms? Simply put, it means you need to plan for skepticism.

Don’t ignore the facts of today’s market. Purposefully create a plan to overcome the challenges you and your company face right now in this new reality. The biggest mistake I see people making these days is running 2012 strategies to a 2021 audience. Cold traffic direct to a webinar or VSL. Spamming Facebook groups and sliding into DMs. Blogging 60 times a month. They worked in 2012. They’re working less now. They may stop working completely in the next few years.

We’ll talk more about this later in this book, but if your business doesn’t strategically account for the growing distrust the modern-day audience has towards coaches/agencies/ freelancers/course creators, then you’ve got a ticking time bomb as a marketing strategy.

Eventually, market skepticism and burnout will reach a point where your stuff just won’t work. You don’t have to take my word for it, just look at how many online business gurus have had to fold up shop in the past two to three years. You might have already noticed this in your business now. More “no shows” than ever before from call bookings.

Conversion rates plummeting on a previously successful marketing campaign. Email open rates going down. Less love from fans on social media. Cost per acquired client more than doubling, etc., etc., on and on... Standing around and waiting for this all to self-correct is not a good business strategy.

Figuring out how to overcome the skepticism is. The “gurus” blame the platform because it keeps them safe from criticism. If you can blame someone else as to why your stuff doesn’t work, then you get off scot-free. I’ve been around long enough to know that the tools still work, but the audience has changed.

Emails still get opened at high rates, campaigns can still turn high profits, and there is still plenty of money MIKE SHREEVE 39 INTRODUCTIO N to be made...but not if you’re thinking like a business owner from 2012. Few in this space want to talk about it because even fewer have a real solution for overcoming the problem.

In this book, I’ll not only show you how to overcome the skeptical nature of today’s audience, but I’ll show you how to set yourself apart as “one of the good guys/gals” through the automation of building goodwill and Delivering Results In Advance. We’ll talk more on that later, but for now, it’s worth taking a moment to ask yourself the hard questions: