Did you know that January through March is the cheapest time of the year to run ads?
Which means it is the perfect time for us to send what has been one of your favorite emails for the past two years: our Top Lessons From The Accelerator Going Into 2025.
These are the lessons you should focus on now more than ever when it comes to your ads and funnels.
Let’s GO!
Lesson #1 Advantage + is thriving
Targeting, targeting, targeting. This has always been a big question for new and old school advertisers.
Do you focus on broad targeting? Lookalikes? Interest based?
Here’s the thing friend: they all still work.
However, Facebook dropped the “advantage+” option into the mix last year and it works exceptionally well when you have a seasoned pixel.
“Seasoned pixel” = lots of data stacked on it over time 🤓
If that sounds like your account we highly recommend you dip in and try this with proven creative!
Lesson #2 | Conversion First, Beauty Second
When you’re in a mature market your offers/product/copy/creative needs to be…well, better.
That’s because there is always going to be another business that “offers what you do”.
But they may not do it in your unique way, with your magic sauce and to your special cohort of people in YOUR niche.
Make creative and copy (headlines, body copy, calls-to-action) that stand out and call out your people.
The biggest takeaway from the year: focus on conversion over beauty when it comes to your ads.
This can be hard for visually appealing brands (think interior design, graphic design, photographers, etc). I promise that you can have a mix of both in your creative but it should always be conversion over beauty.
Otherwise, you’ll be funding Zuck’s retirement fund.
Lesson #3 | Putting your customers first in 2025 continues to be more important than ever
What do I mean by first?
I truly mean to advertise and market to them in a way that feels good to them. That feels like an invitation and just what they’ve been looking for.
What this means is that you’re going to be investing into getting their attention, interest and love before you make a sale.
In 2019 – 2022 fully direct to consumer brands like Allbirds were crushing it in the ads space. They were raking in sales and revenue. Then over the years of 2021 – 2023 many more competitors entered the space combined with the changes in how you could advertise (think ios updates) their revenues and ad results plummeted.
Why did this happen?
Because they were overly reliant on sales ads only (aka “hey buy my thing!!” ads). They weren’t investing in their customer journey like we teach you how to inside the Accelerator.
They spent the next few years implementing a strategy that focused on investing in their customer journey and revenue returned.
This is normal. This is how brands build for years instead of just a month of high revenue and then nothing the next.
Invest in your people. They will invest in you 10x back.
Lesson #4 | Learn your seasonality
This is a huge lesson – especially for mature businesses.
Most businesses have seasonality to them. You have high months or quarters and quieter ones. What you want to do during the quiet months is prepare for the high months.
You want to optimize your funnel metrics, keep your ad results steady and at the highest spend possible while maintaining profit. Then when you are in your high season you capitalize on all of that effort in the quiet season and scale.
Example In Action:
One of our clients is in the permaculture space and sells a DIY course for homeowners. Q1 and parts of Q2 and Q3 are her high seasons.
What we did in November and December to prepare for Q1:
- Optimized her landing page from a 16% opt-in rate to a 28% opt-in rate
- Increased webinar sales rate from a steady 1.2 -> a 2.5% (this is a huge change in profit)
- Added upsells and downsells to increase lifetime value and overall sales
The last week of 2024 we saw an immediate increase in return on ad spend as we entered Q1. What went from a 2x ROAS for parts of Q4 is already at a 6x return on ad spend with a ton more profit due to optimizing the funnel.
Learn your high times and spend time optimizing during the low times
Lesson #5 | Focus on lifetime value and revenue over immediate ROAS
Take the previous lesson and think of this as a step 2 to your seasonality.
As you grow and mature as a business you’ll want to think farther ahead and focus on overall profit and revenue from your ads instead of just immediate.
If our client in the previous example only focused on daily/weekly or even monthly return it would be shortsighted and cause a loss of profit year over year.
Instead, we invite you to think about quarterly and annual goals. Take the average of the quarters and years accounting for your seasonality. Turn your ad spend up or down depending on the seasons for your customer journey.
Think of ways to optimize your funnels on the back end and how to retarget for increase in lifetime value.
Lesson #6 | Facebook is still the most profitable platform – don’t sleep on it
Surprised? With the rise of Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest over the years a lot of people dismiss Facebook as an “older generation’s” platform. The one where people post photos sometimes of their family and friends.
This couldn’t be more wrong.
Across niches and industries Facebook consistently is the top performing platform. While it may not be as alluring as being Insta famous or chasing the high of beautiful images and reels on Instagram – Facebook is still the standard for high returns.
Don’t get distracted by trends – focus on what consistently works.
Lesson #7 | Knowing your numbers changes the game
This comes on the tail of Lesson #6 for a reason.
Once you know your numbers, ads become immensely less “scary” and way more fun. Mainly because you can trust them (who’s ever felt like they couldn’t trust their ads?).
When you know your conversion rates, your lifetime customer value (the key to profits, friend!) and what you can afford for each purchase, running ads is a game.
Also, if you run a SLO (self-liquidating offer) you may want to dig deep into what a loss leader is. Depending on your market (B2B or B2C), your niche and your average cart value you could have a profitable SLO or what we lovingly call a loss leader.
Definition of a loss leader: is a pricing strategy where a product is sold at a price below its market cost to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services. With this sales promotion/marketing strategy, a “leader” is any popular article, i.e., sold at a normal price.
You as the business owner need to know your numbers, what you can afford and the customer lifetime value of your customers with your product/offering suite.
Lesson #8 | Focus on ads that drive action over attention only
You’ve probably heard all the rage like “reel ads are crushing!” or “Camera facing manychat ads are where it’s at!”
While that can be true for some brands, we’ve found that the most important factor is the actual content of the ad itself
On a call with one of our Accelerator members yesterday she was sharing an epiphany she had.
She had been running ads that had a mix of both Reel style ads (think watching her work with copy layered over) and static image ads.
What were the results?
The reel ads performed better than the static images by about 40% in ad metrics – so she did what she thought was best and turned the static images off.
But after about 3 days she went to look at which drove the most SALES….
And found out it was the static images 😬
Why is that happening you ask?
It all comes down to preframing (something we cover inside the Accelerator). We encourage you to focus on front end ad numbers of course but also we often say we’d rather “overspend’ on leads when the preframing is right compared to “cheap leads” aka attention.
