All of the ways I’ve wasted money trying to bring traffic to my site

BACKGROUND

About 6 years ago I launched a brand of skinny ties. The brand was never intended to sell direct to consumer, it was a wholesale business with one anchor account called Jackthreads.com. Business was great for the first few years until Jackthreads decided to move in a different direction. This decision had nothing to do with me or my product, it was an internal decision on their part. At that point I needed to pivot. I had a handful of small wholesale accounts that helped pay the bills but it wasn’t enough. At that point I was getting about 1000 monthly unique visitors to my site and conversion was about 3%. I did not know where those visitors were coming from but I presumed they were people who bought my ties from Jackthreads or another wholesale channel and decided to come directly to my site to orders more ties. Keep reading and I’ll tell you how I was dead wrong.

MARKETING MISTAKES

With my anchor account out of the picture I decided to put some time and money into testing out various marketing channels. Some things I executed myself and others I outsourced to agencies. In effort to keep this article efficient I’m going to use a bullet list to outline the mistakes I made:

· FACEBOOK ADS – I tested them myself and I got some orders but my campaigns were not profitable. I hired a few different agencies to manage my FB ads and they were even worse. Some charged as much as $1000 per month. With a total spend budget of $1000 it was an impossible challenge to think they could make the numbers work. I was spending $2K per month ($1K in ads and $1K in agency fees) with a goal of $5K in revenue. We weren’t even close. Furthermore the FB ad traffic that we did receive only converted at 1%. My takeaway was that while Facebook is a great platform to reach a desired audience, it’s too difficult to advertise a single product and be profitable. Facebook users are using the platform to do everything except shop, and this brings me to my next failure:

· GOOGLE AD-WORDS – I thought I’d have more success here considering people are searching for things like “Cool Skinny Ties for my Wedding”. Unlike Facebook, with Google Ad-words there was a pre-established demand for my items. People were searching for various terms and finding my site. The problem was that it was too expensive. I managed the campaigns myself but they were not profitable so I then hired Google themselves to run my campaign and they were even worse. This was shocking! Google spent $1000 dollars in ads and only got 4 conversions (avg order size of $32). I fired them immediately and also called out that they were using an image of a bow tie in their ad while my company specialized in skinny ties, not bow ties. They refunded me a small amount.

· INFLUENCER MARKETING – This was all the buzz in 2016 so I jumped on the bandwagon. I signed up for a platform that charged me $500 per month to connect me to influencers. From there I had to negotiate payments with the influencers. Most posts were $50-$150 depending on the size of the influencer’s audience. I started with Instagram because it was cheaper. This was a total bust. I paid a bunch of influencers to take pictures of themselves in my ties and post on their IG accounts. The influencers did a great job with the images but the engagement didn’t leave their profile. They had call outs to my website and my brand’s Instagram page but not even a single person would visit. The followers had some great comments but zero interest in purchasing the ties or learning more about my brand. YouTube was a little better but also more costly. We sent some ties to YouTube reviewers and got a tiny bit of traffic to our site but no conversions

· GIVEAWAY CAMPAIGNS – Didn’t work for me. The opt-ins were bottom dwelling deal seekers, not people interested in my brand. I participated in a 5 brand giveaway campaign. It cost me $300 plus a few ties that I had to send to the winners. In the end I received 3,000 emails. A few weeks later I sent a newsletter (through Mailchimp) to this list and several people unsubscribed, very few opened the email, even fewer clicked, and zero purchased. I tried a few more campaigns directed toward this group but the results (or lack thereof) were the same. I noticed that this new infusion of 3,000 subscribers was putting my Mailchimp account into a higher more expensive bracket so I promptly deleted the list and went back down to the lower priced tier.

· MEDIA PLACEMENTS – These weren’t too bad. I paid $1000 for a spot on a high traffic site that had an audience that I thought would have interest in skinny ties. We received a large amount of traffic and conversion was decent. After factoring in our cost of goods, warehousing, and shipping the overall campaign was close to profitable but not quite there.

· PUBLIC RELATIONS – Most agencies want north of $4K per month which is just absurd since there are no guarantees or deliverables when it comes to PR. I found one agency that took on my brand for $1000 per month. Most months we’d get a few hits from some mommy blogs and very small media outlets that would lead to tiny amounts of traffic and no conversions. Every once in a while we’d land a medium size media outlet that brought in some decent converting traffic but it wasn’t enough to justify the cost. PR sounds fun and everyone thinks getting a celeb to wear your product will get your brand known but it’s not that simple. Hiring a PR company to build out a campaign for your brand is extremely expensive, can take several years, and doesn’t come with any guarantees.

LIFETIME VALUE OF A CUSTOMER

Every single marketing firm that I spoke to over the years told me I need to look at the lifetime value of a customer and not the dollar amount of the first transaction. These people clearly have not bootstrapped a business before. I had a decent customer retention rate but there was no guarantee of when a customer would come back. I can’t control when the customer has a wedding coming up or if he needs a tie for a job interview. When looking through my various cohorts and their behavior in terms of repeat orders the data was not consistent. I told marketing agencies that I want to be profitable on the first transaction from a customer acquired through paid ads. The agencies told me to not worry about that. They said if I’m confident that the customers will spread the word and come back to my site then we’ll be profitable in the long run. One major problem with that logic is that it doesn’t account for cash flow. I can’t afford to spend $20,000 now in hopes of it yielding $100,000 in 5 years. My business will run out of cash if I have to wait several years to see the return. For paid ads to work for my small business I need to be profitable on transaction #1.

DID ANYTHING WORK?

Yes, SEO worked. Those 1000 monthly unique visitors that I mentioned at the beginning of this article were finding my site because it ranked on page one of Google for the search term “Skinny Tie” and “Skinny Ties”. I did nothing to try to make this happen. My URL includes the words “Skinny Tie” and after having the site up for a few years it got recognized.

Email marketing works. Over 6 years the email list has 2,300 subscribers. This number is tiny. I did nothing to try to get these subscribers, they are all true opt-ins, fans, and/or customers. When I send out an email to announce a sale we usually see a 35% open rate and several conversions. This list is great but it’s small. I’d love to grow the list but not at the expense of diluting it.

CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS

Paying for traffic is expensive and often doesn’t lead to conversions. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying it didn’t work for me. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up. This means I’m giving up on the things that didn’t work and focusing on the things that did with a slightly different angle. One of my takeaways from my FB and Ad-words fails was that there are too many brands trying to market their products online. Some brands can make their conversion funnels work but most cannot. My next strategy is to scrap my conversion funnel completely and approach my brand as if it’s an ecosystem. My goal is to have users pierce the bubble of my ecosystem and enter it in a way that is meaningful to them. I don’t want to be overly aggressive and try to force my ties down people’s throats. I want them to see what we’re doing and decide if they’re feeling it or not. So how do I plan to accomplish this?

SEO friendly content. For my brand it means creating a series of “How To Tie A Tie” videos that are an update to the boring ones out there already. I hope the content is useful and entertaining to viewers and that people will enter my brand’s ecosystem through a different door than the traditional FB product ad. Currently there are several searches for “How To Tie A Tie” and there are several results. I want my videos to have their own personality that sets them apart from the others. Not all viewers will like the brand personality but they don’t have to…I’d rather land a few loyal followers than a bunch of meh followers. I might have to spend a few bucks on drawing traffic to my videos but it’s worth a shot. All of the marketing fails that I listed above cost money and I don’t regret doing them, I had to try. For my new plan to work I may have to outlay some cash without any direct correlation to sales but I’d much rather try this route than continuing to waste money on the marketing channels that did not work for. I’ll keep you posted!

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