I get questions every day asking, “What should my ad budget be?”

Unfortunately, these folks are asking the wrong question. Of course, I understand that everyone needs to know how much to put forward in order to get the right number of leads without overspending. But there is a better way to determine that.

Asking the Right Question

So if you’re not supposed to ask what your ad budget should be, what are you supposed to ask.

The right question is, “What is my ‘magic metric’ and is my ad campaign meeting it?”

What is that? If you haven’t heard me talk about a “magic metric” before, let me explain. Your magic metric is your major key performance indicator (KPI) for ad campaigns.

Here’s how you find your magic metric:

First, look up the total number of leads you’ve generated in the last 30 days. I like to use 30 days because within 30 days of connecting with you, leads probably receive some kind of offer.

Next, look up how much you’ve made from those specific leads. Once you know that, you’ll be able to determine your value per lead (VPL). For instance, if you earned $1000 from 100 leads in the last 30 days, that’s a VPL of $10.

If you’d like help getting this figured out for your business, or you want to find ways to increase your VPL, I’d love to help. I can strategize with you and create a plan to make that a reality. Just go to workwithnic.com and fill out the form, and I’ll be in touch!

How Much to Spend On Ad Campaigns

Once you know your VPL, it’s time to decide how much of that you’re willing to spend to get your next lead. That percentage varies from business to business, and it’s all about what works for you.

The bottom line is that on average, each dollar you spend should get you more than a dollar back.

Once you have your percentage, you have a dollar amount per lead you’re willing to spend. Let’s say you decide on 50% of VPL, so that’s $5 in our example.

Now examine each ad set. Is it getting you leads for $5 or less per lead? If so, you can increase the amount you spend on it. If not, stop or refine the ad.

What if you don’t have information? If it’s a new offer or you don’t have leads yet, the amount to spend is the amount you’re willing to lose to get the data for the first month. You expect the first month of a campaign to lose money because you’re paying the “school of data” to give you the information you need.

I like to drive at least 1000 clicks, and a few hundred leads, to get a starting point.

If you want to increase your VPL and revenue, not by doing more work but by doing smarter work, go to workwithnic.com. I can talk to you about exactly how to do that and create a clear plan for you to follow. I look forward to hearing from you!

Setting Up Retargeting Objectives — The Right Way

It’s no surprise that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the most profitable days of the year, especially for businesses focused on eCommerce and information marketing.

Customers save money for weeks to buy from their wish list.

Let’s dive into how to use retargeting to maximize your results!

Run Consistent Prospecting Campaigns

Advertising regularly is essential to getting great retargeting results. You should be focusing on driving people to your pages and promotions, building awareness and creating an audience.

As you start to approach holidays, you’ll notice your sales will dip. That’s because people are beginning to mentally shift into “saving for big deals” mode. Don’t stop prospecting and driving traffic though — these folks are still creating a wish list!

Up to a major promotion, you want to focus 70% on cold-traffic prospecting, and 30% on retargeting.

As you get close to the big promotion, it’s time to switch the ratios. Focus 70% on retargeting and 30% on new, cold traffic.

Next, we’ll look at how to set up those objectives. But first, if you want to work directly with me to create offers and campaigns to ensure everything is correct and you get maximum returns, I’d love to help. Just go to workwithnic.com and fill out the form. I’ll be in touch!

How to Set Retargeting Objectives

So, now you have some custom audiences. But how do you know which retargeting objective to use?

It’s simple — just look at the size of the audience and the source of the audience.

For a large audience, perhaps made of website visitors, you’ve already been working on traffic. For this group, you want to choose the conversion objective.

Large, general audiences do best with conversion.

What if you have a medium-sized audience, maybe coming from leads or opt-ins you’ve had from your website? This group is a bit smaller and you’ve already optimized for conversion by getting them to opt in. As a result, you should focus this group with the traffic objective.

Finally, what about a small audience? Maybe you have a list of customers or email subscribers, or new folks from the last week. In that case, choose reach as your objective. You want as many people as possible in this small audience to see your ads.

Are you ready to make this work for your business? If you want to personally work with me to design great offers and get a great business plan over the next 30–90 days, let’s connect. I can help you get maximum revenue from leveraging what you already have in place, so you don’t have to do a ton more work.

To work with me, just go to workwithnic.com and fill out the form. I look forward to hearing from you!

We all want our marketing campaigns to bring in the best results, right? As someone responsible for some of the highest campaign ROI’s in the world, I’ve helped several businesses scale their revenue by bringing in more clients or customers with the help of Facebook ads.

Let’s take a look at a few tried and tested tips on the easiest ways to achieve accelerated results with our marketing campaigns.

If you’d like to personally work with Nic so he can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com.

Allow me to take you back to Vilfredo Pareto, who came up with The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule). The rule states that 80% of any result typically comes from 20% of effort. Be it regarding our business or marketing, 80% of our revenue comes from our best clients.

This rule was proven to be true across various modalities, especially marketing. Instead of trying to reach 100% of our customers, it suggested to attempt to reach the best 20% of our ideal prospects, and focus 80% of our efforts on them.

At least, that’s how it used to be — times have changed.

While this could have been true about three decades ago, the same Pareto proportions no longer apply — this is mainly due to the invention and proliferation of social media.

I don’t need to stress on the fact that social media is an extremely busy place with all platforms engaged in some activity or the other. Therefore, I suggest that before we start writing an ad, coming up with leads, and engaging in the communication language of our marketing, let’s be very clear on what I call “the 4%” or “the 96/4” rule.

My advice is to think about your market and cut it down to the 80/20 rule, to see which is the 20% section that we can serve best.

Then, go ahead to slice the 20% further into another 20%, which is essentially 4% of the entire market.

Obviously, there’s a big difference between reading up on this information and applying it. If you’d like to personally work with Nic so he can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com.

Think of the people who’ve been with us the longest, the customers from whom we have made the most money — this will give us an idea of who could be our 4%.

Here, I want to present you with the example of the beer company, Stella Artois. The company had a tagline stating that they were “reassuringly expensive”.

Therefore, they knew who their target audience is, and they were unapologetic about those who didn’t fall in their 4%. They also said that they don’t believe in cutting the costs to produce good-quality beer and that they then transfer that cost to their customers.

Going for a general approach is usually the death of all things in social media.

Being specific, on the other hand, is what helps us gain more traffic. Seth Godin, the reputed entrepreneur, calls this “being famous to the family”.

Therefore, let’s create our marketing campaigns in a manner so that we can cater to that specific 4%.

All the lead magnets we create, the content we generate, the ads we write, and the offers we construct should be geared towards that 4%.

This is what makes the difference in being a small fish in a big pond and a big fish in a small pond.

If you’d like to personally work with Nic so he can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com.

Today, I want to talk about how to identify ideal prospects and find ways to communicate that makes them feel like you’re only speaking to them.

Remember, as you think about your ideal prospect — before the ad, campaigns, blogs, and more — you need to identify the very small pond you want to exist in.

You know the saying about being a big fish in a small pond? That’s the goal for your business. Unfortunately, a lot of people act like a small fish in a big pond, trying to appeal to everyone.

The truth is, if you are everything to everyone, you are nothing to no one.

Instead, find the 4% you really want to speak to. Be very specific about who you help.

Before we dive into this topic, if you’d like me to work with you personally to help you get even better results than you currently do, and you want specific advice about how to leverage these ideas to benefit your business, I’d love to help. Simply go to workwithnic.com

Ideal Traits For Your 4% Pond

Narrowing your target customer makes a huge difference to your business. Think about the difference between a great general doctor and a great cardiac specialist. Who is doing more marketing? Who is chasing clients? Who is making more money?

The specialist!

You want to be the specialist for a very small group. It’s a great way to establish authority quickly. All you need to identify your group is look for two traits.

Underserved. You don’t want to compete against everyone in your industry. Instead, find a segment of folks that are being underserved. When Facebook ads first came out, everyone was doing t-shirts, so I decided to help influencers and those who sold information.

I was able to own that space quickly, and did very well helping those folks. Once the niche became flooded with competitors, I pivoted to another underserved group.

Affluent. If at all possible you want to make sure that the pocket you choose is affluent enough to afford your services or products. That way, you can focus on fit instead of finances. When your niche can afford you, you can focus on discovering if you are a good fit for them and they for you.

Now, information is great, but if you want some help to discover this in your specific industry, let me help. If you need someone like me to be in your corner to tell you exactly what to do to execute on these strategies, fill out the form at workwithnic.com today.

Three Questions for Current Clients

How do you find you 4%? By asking three simple questions.

1. Who has paid me the most? Lifetime value is a great indicator of who is well-served by your products and services.
2. Who’s been with me the longest? Long-time fans who have bought stuff forever and championed your brand are a great clue when looking for your 4%.
3. Who has given me the least headaches? The best clients are the easiest ones. Clients that are hard on your business are not worth having!

Once you find these groups within your customers, you can find commonalities.

What traits do they share? Are they in the same industry, geographic area, or have other things in common?

Then, make the commitment that everything you send out is geared only toward your 4%.

You’ll attract the right folks and repel the rest.

If you want Nic as your cornerman, a tactical strategist and advisor to give you specific goals to help you implement these strategies in your business, visit workwithnic.com to connect today.

In the last article, we talked about how three ways to get more revenue without having any additional traffic. Now, there is definitely nothing wrong with getting new customers! However, it’s not the easiest way to grow your revenue.

It’s much easier to get additional revenue from your existing customers. But how do you do it?

Previously we talked about increasing conversion, average order value, and the frequency of purchases. Today we’ll do a deep dive on that last strategy: Frequency.

Before we dive in, if you want me to personally look at your business and dissect areas of opportunity you can capitalize on, go to www.workwithnic.com.

Increase Frequency With Monthly Revenue

One of the best — and easiest — ways to build your revenue is to move your current customers into a monthly-payment model. If someone has paid you once, they’re much more likely to keep paying you, so take advantage of that!

There are two ways you can go about that. First, if you have software, develop a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. When your customers give you a monthly fee, they get the latest model of the software, excellent support, and everything else that makes using the product smooth and effective.

Secondly, you can create a membership for almost any type of business. It works most efficiently with an information-based company, but you can sell information for any kind of business. Consider a paid monthly newsletter with updates, news items, and exclusive deals.

When you have a monthly membership model, not only do you get more revenue with the same traffic and customer base, you have a predictable monthly income. It’s a real win-win!

If these ideas sound interesting and you’re wondering how you can implement them in your own business, just go to www.workwithnic.com. We’ll hop on a call and I’ll show you exactly how you can do this in your company.

Selling Additional Products to Increase Revenue

Let’s say you can’t use a monthly model right now, or you want something to go alongside to really superpower your earnings. Why not sell additional products?

There are three great ways to do this.

First, consider splinter products. What related items do you have in your product suite that you can offer to current customers? What do you have in other parts of your business that you can repackage and resell?

Second, look into affiliate products. If you don’t have the product, use someone else’s! You can recommend items that your audience is interested in and get a commission or portion of the sale.

Finally, consider buying the rights to sell underperforming products that you think your audience would love and benefit from. The publisher can get a royalty or licensing fee while you build your revenue with great information.

Are you interested in putting increased buying frequency to work in your business? Let me help. I can give you a fresh set of eyes and identify areas of opportunity that often don’t require that much extra work. If you want someone to look at your company and give you a 30–90-day plan you can execute one, go to www.workwithnic.com today.

Do you often look at your business results and think, “Man, if only I could get more traffic! Then I could meet my revenue goals!”

Well, I have good news for you — you can increase revenue WITHOUT getting more traffic. Using the three strategies I’m about to share, you can leverage your existing customers to boost your bottom line.

Before we dive in, if you’re looking to grow and accelerate the results in your business but you feel stuck and overwhelmed, I’d love to help. I can help you break through and give you a 30 or 90 day plan that will allow you to use underutilized assets to give you even better results, often without having to do any more work.

If that’s something you’d be interested in, visit info.workwithnic.com/mdm30

Strategies to Increase Revenue Using Current Traffic

There are three primary ways you can use your existing traffic to build up your revenue. I’ll quickly explain them all to you, and then do a deep dive on Strategy #2.

Increase Conversion Rate. Increasing your conversion rate even from 1% to 2% will double your revenue. The easiest way to do this is by using “Godfather offers”, or an offer so good your customers can’t refuse them. The better the offer, the better the conversion rate.

Increase Average Order Value. We’ll go deeper into this in a minute, but think of this as getting your existing customer to buy more using add-ons or other boosts to the order value. The more a single customer spends, the more you can make without any additional traffic.

Increase Purchase Frequency. The more often a customer buys from you, the more you make. We all know that paying customers are an easier transaction than a new lead. Get someone to buy from you every month, or offer multiple products.

If you want me to help you implement these strategies, I’d love to work with you. I can help you craft the perfect irresistible offer, build order value, and more. Just go to info.workwithnic.com/mdm30

How to Increase Average Order Value

Order value can be increased easily using bumps and bundles. These allow you to approach a customer when they’re already at the buying stage — on the order page — and give an opportunity to buy more with a single click.

An order bump should be a very congruent, complimentary add-on that makes sense, and can be priced between 50% — 150% of the original order value. A bundle allows a customer to buy more of the same item, such as adding two more bottles of supplements for the price of one.

A client of mine was able to get a 30% conversion rate on an excellent order bump — you can imagine the positive impact on revenue!

You can also use upsells and downsells to offer higher-ticket items. An upsell will need more explanation and may not be as much of a no-brainer, so use a separate sales page or video for these. They can be priced between 200% — 400% of the original order value.

The downsell is a follow-up when the customer rejects the upsell. It’s a smaller, “lite” version of the upsell with a lower price and commitment.

You can combine order bumps and upsells, but don’t overdo it. One bump or bundle with one upsell/downsell combo is perfect.

As you can see, these strategies simply involve offering relevant opportunities to those who have already said yes to your product or service. You don’t need more traffic, you need a better process.

If you’d like me to personally help you get accelerated results by looking at each of these three strategies in your business, just go to info.workwithnic.com/mdm30.

Using online ads is a great way to get people to connect with your products and services. You can use extremely targeted audience groups to reach precisely those folks who are most likely to be interested.

When they click to your landing page, you might think you’ve gotten what you need. Unfortunately, a lot of folks who click on your ad won’t take the desired action.

Don’t worry, though — there are three ways to use retargeting to improve your ROI. Here’s what you need to know.

Before we dive in, if you’re interested in working with me personally to accelerate your results, go to www.workwithnic.com.

What it Takes to Convert

According to the most current data, it takes 16–32 touchpoints before a person makes a transactional decision. That means that to get someone to buy your products or services, you need to get in front of them 16–32 times.

Online today, trust is at an all-time low. Everyone knows that prospects won’t buy from someone they don’t know, like, and trust.

It takes a lot of touchpoints to build that trust and encourage leads to engage with you.

The question is, how do we set up a program that builds the know, like, and trust factors without turning someone off? The answer is to diversify your retargeting.

Three Types of Retargeting

When someone clicks on an ad and doesn’t take the desired action, what do you do next? Where do you send them using the retargeting pixel?

There are three answers to this question. One is very common, but the other two are rarely used. When you combine them, you can get incredible results.

The first option is back. You can send someone back to the page they visited but didn’t take action on. After all, life happens, and maybe they got distracted or just weren’t ready the first time.

The second option is forward. This is rarely used but can be very effective. When someone fails to engage with the first landing page, send them to the next step in the funnel. If they visited a sales page, use retargeting to send them to the order page.

If the page is well-written with testimonials, social proof, and guarantees, you may be able to get a high conversion rate.

Finally, consider sending prospects across. This means presenting them with an equivalent relevant offer that they may be interested in.

If you’re interested in working with me personally to accelerate your results, go to www.workwithnic.com and fill out a brief application form.

How to Implement: The 7–7–7 Rule

How do you implement a mix of all of these retargeting strategies? Simply use my 7–7–7 rule.

Start with sending prospects back for seven days. If they don’t take action, exclude those and send them forward for days 8–14. If they still don’t take action, exclude those as well and send them across for days 15–21.

If they haven’t taken action after 21 days, send them to your nurture sequence and continue building the relationship.

You never know when they’ll be ready to buy!

With intelligent retargeting, your online ad campaigns will be unstoppable.

If you’re interested in working with me personally to accelerate your results, go to www.workwithnic.com and fill out a brief application form so we can talk.

Today I’m going to dig into the importance of Bonding. My focus will be particularly for Facebook ads, however, this formula is applicable for any sort of media.

Anytime we meet someone new, it essentially follows a certain transactional formula/pattern.

It follows: Know, Like, Trust.

This three-step formula is the essence of our topic. In any relationship, first a person goes from not knowing you, to knowing you, from not liking you to liking you and from not trusting you to trusting you.

If you’d like to personally work with me so I can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com

Although these are three separate processes, we can tackle them in parallel. I'll ask you one question, ‘Which of these factors do you consider when making a purchase?’

Really think about the answer.

Done?

The first and most instinctual answer that comes to our minds is “Trust”. Can I trust this person? Can I trust the services or the product?

If your consumer trusts you, they will transact with you.

But in reality, a consumer can have equal levels of trust for you and your competitors. This is where the next step comes in… “Like”.

This is when consumers (subconsciously) think, “I trust them all, but whom do I like?”

In today’s social media world, it is crucial for you to resonate with your audience. In any buying decision, chances are that the consumer will go for a brand that’s more relatable than someone who has a finely crafted content engine.

If you’d like to personally work with me so I can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com

I’ve found a simple languaging pattern that you can apply to your Facebook Ads. One of the most important aspects of a good ad is the ability to create a rapport. The easiest way to do so is by following a language pattern that I call, ‘Feel, Felt, Found’

I once heard it said that…

“A great message is not when one understands you, but when one feels understood by you”.

This languaging pattern should start like this,

1) I know how you FEEL

2) I have FELT the same way too

3) Until I FOUND a solution

You don’t have to use these words as is, the point is that through your languaging you can walk through this conversation with your consumers. When you work on implementing this idea, I want you to think about your personal story, your human journey narrative and present it to your ideal prospect in your Facebook ads.

If your prospective client feels connected, if they feel a bonding (by implementing this formula), they are much more likely to engage.

The perfect way to transition from recognizing their situation (Feel) and sharing your experience about being in their position (Felt) is providing a solution (Found).

Imagine starting from a question to creating a bond and having the person feel that you know how they feel and then leading them to a solution which is your product or service. That’s a magical media journey.

So the next time you write a Facebook ad, remember the importance of bonding and how this simple three-step formula can create a great impact on your audience.

If you’d like to personally work with me so I can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com

In the sales process, the most important element on the table is the offer.

There are bad offers and then there are great offers. And if you deploy the four core elements of a good offer, you’ll start to see even better results in your campaigns because your offers are just plain good.

Let’s take a look at these elements and break them down.

The Four Elements of a Great Offer

1. Discount

Discounts are extremely lucrative. Just look at Black Friday sales and Amazon Prime Day!

The real question is, if it works with our brand, how can we have a discount offer? How can we offer a discount for a short window of time for someone who is prepared to take action right now?

Discounts could be anything from a penny to a 99% discount. But, in general, there’s just something about a 50% discount that tends to be very attractive to consumers. This may or may not work for your brand. But think about what can you discount from your core primary offer — that’s going to allow a fence sitter to make the move.

2. Stacked Bonuses

Stacked bonuses occur when one offers an additional bonus on top of an offer for purchasing a product in a short timeframe.

The combined value of your stacked bonuses should equal to more than your primary offer if possible. So, if your primary offer is worth one hundred dollars, and that’s the offer that you are making available to someone, your stacked bonuses should be worth more than one hundred dollars. Some people might actually purchase your offer for the bonus more than the actual offer itself.

If you’d like to personally work with Nic so he can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit http://info.workwithnic.com/mdm27

3. RRG

This stands for “risk reversal guarantee.” This goes beyond the typical guarantees you’ll see businesses put out. If one offers a money-back guarantee, the consumer still has to deal with the hassle of packaging the product, paying for postage, going to the Post Office, etc. An RRG essentially means you are taking on full responsibility for the product — if they don’t like it, you’ll pay for postage and make it easy for them to return it. Even though RRGs aren’t physical bonuses, they are additional services you can provide and count as a type of offer.

4. Why?

The reason why you’re offering incentives is a part of the overall offer itself. Brands are making all of these bold unsubstantiated claims, all these crazy promises, and the trust factor between businesses and consumers is at an all-time low.

Establish the “why?” and make sure it makes sense. Make it clear why this offer is mutually beneficial.

This can involve overstocked products that need to be cleared out, or if one’s warehouse needs to be cleared for a new product.

If you’d like to personally work with Nic so he can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit http://info.workwithnic.com/mdm27

What do you think about the offer as the most important part of the sales process? What do your offers look like? We want to hear from you in the comments below!

Have you ever sat down at the computer ready to write your Facebook Ads copy or any ad copy but you didn’t know how to get it started?

This problem holds many entrepreneurs back, and in this article, we’re learning about how to start a great ad. We’ll be focusing on the exact things you need to do to get your ideal prospect engaged in your ad and following through to the rest of your copy.

If you’d like to personally work with Nic so he can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com.

Each portion of your ad is ultimately there to get your prospect to move on to the next portion right?

With that said, you need a great opener to kick things off and get your leads to open their eyes and ears and listen to what you have to say.

One of the best and my favorite way to do this is by using a “yes” question. You want to ask a question that implies a yes from the prospect.

I don’t mean any yes question either. You could say something like, “Do you want to write better ads?” That’s a yes question because if you’re targeting the right audience, their answer will be yes, but it doesn’t pull any heartstrings. You need to touch them on an emotional level.

“Are you tired of low conversion rates and a high cost-per-click on your Facebook ads?”

This question would work better because you’re hitting them in the heart with the question. Yes, they are tired of this, and it probably keeps them up at night if you’ve targeted the right audience.

Questions like these succeed for two primary reasons:

1. The brain cannot resist the urge to find an answer to the question. You’re drawing them in which forces them to seek an answer.

2. When someone internally or externally nods their head, you’re creating a subconscious bond. They now agree with you which aligns you with them psychologically. This builds trust.

People do business with us because of resonance. When someone feels like we understand how they feel, they become more connected and ultimately are more willing to work with us.

Rather than simply coming out and saying, “do you want this?” or “do you want that?” You’re on a whole different emotional level.

Another example we used for an eCommerce brand that sells melatonin spray is, “Do you ever lie in bed wishing you could fall asleep?”

There may be so much pain associated with this issue in their life, and you’re providing the solution. The right audience will answer yes to this, and they may even feel a little emotional themselves.

Starting your ads this way makes them irresistible, and it makes your target want to continue reading, move over to your landing page, and eventually do business with you.

If this speaks to you, then I would love to help accelerate your results. Whether it’s Facebook Ads, conversions, funnels…most people are so consumed by their work that they often overlook the things that will skyrocket their results.

Here’s your main takeaway for when you go and sit down to write your next ad. Think about:

A: Who is your ideal prospect?

B: What are their problems that I can solve via lead magnet?

C: What is a question I can ask that would get them leaning in to read the rest of the copy?

How do you start your next ad? With a YES question!

If you do this, you’ll benefit from the psychological benefits of asking a yes question and in turn, benefit with more conversions.

If you’d like to personally work with Nic so he can help you accelerate the results of your business, visit www.workwithnic.com.