What's up! So "how do you actually stockpile ecom cash"?
If you're here, you've probably ran paid ads online for your ecom store before, right? Nine times out of ten, a ecom brands ads are ‘unsuccessful’, that’s because running marketing campaigns are complex (like getting the perfect ratio of water to rice—you know what I'm sayin). More than likely you’ve bought a few online courses too, or possibly even paid someone to run some ads for you, yet; still no Mula—Dosh—Cashola, no golden pot at the end of the rainbow!!! Ya feel me...
Yeah, we’ve heard this same old story, one too many times before, because 'gurus' make out as if it's easy to run successful ad campaigns, and make millions of dollars overnight.
The secret is... There is no secret to running profitable ads at scale, it takes a 'rapid test and learn approach' and enough runway to scale your ads once you've discovered a winning formula for your brand.
~ Pablo
2100% increase in sales Forever Petal - Case study
Oct 2020 - April 2021 (6months)
As we've said, at FLOK we like to put our money where our mouth is, so in October of 2020, I (Matty) co-launch Forever Petal with my partner Rosina, whom is deeply passionate about flowers. With her passion, and my knowledge for ecom and digital marketing, we have "bootstrapped" this home decor brand to over $13K per month, in just six months (during the pandemic), in fact we really only started seriously running ads in February as we had many supply chain issues with shipping.
That's a 2100% increase in sales and we are now sitting on a comfortable ROAS between 6 and 8X and still growing, in fact we are growing too fast, we've had to look at increasing staff as we only work on this part time!
566% increase in sales Kent Street - Case study
2018 - 2020 (2 years)
Performance Channels We work with
FaCEBOOk & instagram
Youtube & Pinterest
Google for ecom
Email providers
This is what I believe makes us so different at FLOK—we literally build, measure, learn, until we've built ads that stand out from the competition. I've been in the digital marketing space for around 4 years now, and I can honestly say that my favourite part of the process is creative design, and understanding a brands customers intimately. I also love teaching these principles to business owners so that they too can succeed, as I see a lot of ads on Facebook and Instagram where you can tell that the average person advertising doesn't "truly" understand the buyer's journey, and how to use "passive" marketing channels, like social media.
One of my first major lessons in business was marketing, I had this idea that if I just build a cool website, and had a great product, people would come to buy it, BOY was I wrong, If no one knows who you are, you have no brand awareness, your brand is like a lily pad in a pond, that only the occasional frog will land on.
I would like to say thank you for checking out our page, it’s hard to stand out in a world with so much informational noise, your time is precious.
Hopefully one day we can have this chat, but until then, continue to enjoy only the finest of things...
Matty Rogers
Later I decided I loved digital marketing more than I did running the day to day business operations and I decided I wanted to work for one of the big agencies. It was around this time that I also started to get involved in paid search, specifically on Google Ads (or Adwords as it was formerly known).
I got a job working at UM (Universal McCann Australia) in their digital marketing subsidiary Reprise Media. It was there that I worked on clients such as the Australian Federal Government, MasterCard, 20th Century Fox and many more. I managed monthly million dollar advertising budgets across my client portfolio which allowed me to rapidly scale up my skillset in paid marketing. I also was the go to person in the team for YouTube Ads and a little known marketing platform at the time called Facebook Ads...maybe you’ve heard of it?
I moved from agency land to the faced paced world of travel working at Orbitz/Expedia until I got the opportunity to join my dream company, Microsoft. It was at Microsoft that I developed my love of data and insights which helped round out my digital knowledge and opened many new doors for me.
After Microsoft I wanted a new challenge and I joined the fledgling startup, Airtasker, which is now one of Australia’s tech success stories. The brand quickly became a household name and recently launched it’s initial public offering on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).
For the last 3 years I have been teaching Growth & Digital Marketing at Academy Xi (one of Sydney’s top future skills institutions). I’ve also been freelancing during this time and last year I scaled one of my eCommerce client’s stores from $683K in 2018 to over $3.8M in 2020.
Now I’m part of Flok and I’m ready to rock…
I look forward to chatting with you soon about how I can help you scale your eCommerce business.
About Andrew:
I have been in the digital marketing game for close to 15 years now. Some might call me an OG. Others may call me a dinosaur...I call myself Andrew - pleased to meet you!
I began my digital marketing career working in the wonderful world of affiliate marketing which, is where I first discovered my love of Search Engine Optimisation. I got pretty good at ranking websites and it wasn’t long before friends were asking me to help them rank their sites as well. Soon after that I created a small freelance SEO business working with client’s from around the world as I helped them force their way to the top of Google’s search results.
About Matty:
Firstly, I'm an entrepreneur at heart, I have started, failed (yeh I've failed, it makes for the best lessons), and succeeded across many different business models, here's an article written by the Collective Hub. Honestly; the best thing that has come from everything I've accomplished, was learning and understanding "Lean Methodology" and "Design Thinking", whether you're embarking on that bold journey of a startup, or a small to medium enterprise, the process is still the same: BUILD - MEASURE - LEARN, and know your CUSTOMERS INTIMATELY!
Understanding the power of Social Media advertising, and having a "Lean Mindset" completely changed my view of the business world - thank you Eric Ries (Lean Startup). You can't have a Lean mindset without being customer centric and using data to drive your micro and macro decision making.
Brands we've worked with
is ROAS still a metric
to track in 2021...
Yes ROAS is still an important metric, BUT with the rollout of Apples IOS 14 blocking 3rd party tracking (Pixel/Tags), we are definitely going to see our ability to track ‘Purchase’ events on Facebook/Instagram a lot harder! Our attribution window the time between seeing an ad, and the user converting (kind of like stalking your ex with GPS tracking) has also significantly changed, before we could track purchases attributed to ads up to 28 days, now we are limited to 7…in a nutshell ROAS is still relevant, but not as much as it has been in the past, going forward we believe a more holistic or blended approach, perhaps RMI (Return on Marketing Investment) will be more applicable. RMI is just another fancy acronym to work out how much revenue your marketing expenditure attributed to sales.
Can you have a low ROAS and still be profitable?
Now this is a good question, often overlooked and rarely explained or talked about. So what most ecom owners do is, look at their budget and think, we only have this much to spend on marketing (right), and if we don’t get this return, then we are making a loss (feeling me). Or they say to us, if we can just get 7 ROAS we can scale and give you more ad spend, let me show you why this is floored thinking…
Kind of like a lemonade stand (cliche I know) buying a cardboard sign for $50 to advertise (sign represents ad spend) on a street corner (ad placement) and only selling $60 (conversions value) worth of lemonade per sign displayed. There are also other expenses like OPEX (operating expenses) to take into account, usually fixed costs like leasing the lemonade cart at $10 per day. Add it all up, and you’ve just broken even; profit margin = ZERO—sound familiar (0 ROAS, you’ve broken even— meh).
My point is this, fixed costs usually don’t change (lemonade cart rental), so the question is… if I spend $100 on another 2 sign today, and it returned $60 per sign (ad spend) then tripling my budget would get me $180 in revenue, same ROAS just more profit, get your calculator out! 3x signs = $150, total sales = $180, fixed cost still = $10. Adding it together looks like this:
180 (Con-Value) - 150 (ad-spend) - 10 (fixed-cost) = $20. Your profit margin is: ($20 / 180) x 100 = 11.11% you’re now making a profit, better than before, but still the same ROA— Right...
So If you 10x your ad spend (lemonade signs) to $500, that’s $600 conversion value, less $10 fixed costs is $90 profit. As you increase your budget, so too does your profit margin, as your fixed costs don’t increase! Profit margin is: ($90 / $600) x 100 = 15%
This is how you make money—the golden pot at the end of the rainbow, so listen up!
What if you increase your ROAS to 2x… This reduces your ad spend by half of the original conversion value, so $300 / 600 = 2x, your conversion value stays the same, and so does your fixed costs, get out the calculator again:
300 - 600 - 10 = $310. So your profit margin is now: (310 / 600) x 100 = 51%
Now you’re making a profit and you’re set up to scale, even with a low ROAS!
Do you have a leaky funnel?
Are your ads not working; there has to be a reason - in marketing we call this a "LEAK", a leak just means that there is somewhere in the funnel (sales pipeline) that your potential customers are seeping out or dropping off.
This could be due a number of factors, it generally differs depending on which stage the prospect is along the buyer's journey. For example: if a customer clicks on your ad, but doesn't convert/buy your product...
So what does that mean?
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The biggest one - not establishing TRUST first
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Too solution focused and not enough emphasis on understanding their problem
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The price is too high (they want more value or don't trust in the value)
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Technical issues with your website that inhibit the completion of a purchase (loading/speed issues etc)
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Your landing page is too complex and doesn't define a clear problem
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No clear call to action
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No clear shipping price
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Lack of urgency
This list could go on and on depending on the product/service you're offering. Bottlenecks like these can and will happen at any stage of the funnel, the ad, the offer, and the landing page.
In order to create a successful online business you must understand and master this process!