Hey y’all! I hope you’re doing great and staying happy and healthy.
I wanted to make sure you heard about my new web show!
It’s called Mondays with Molly. Every Monday you can tune in on Facebook or Instagram as I go live to give you an update about where I’m at and answer some of your questions.
To keep the show well-rounded, I’ll be covering both marketing-related questions and more personal questions related to traveling and other experiences I’ve had. I want this show to be as beneficial as possible not just for your business or career, but also from a broader perspective.
So feel free to ask me anything!
(Have a question? keep an eye on my Instagram stories to submit it.)
Every once in a while, we’ll also write up a blog post (like this one) to put this information in writing and give some of our blog readers a reminder to check out the weekly videos.
This week we recorded the second episode of Mondays with Molly. You can watch the recording here:
• Watch it on Facebook (& like my page to be alerted of future episodes)
• Watch it on Instagram (& follow my page to be alerted of future episodes)
Or keep reading to get my perspective on these questions:
• Tell Us About Larry! Does He Go Everywhere with You?
• Is It Possible for a Beginner to be Successful at Digital Marketing?
• What Have You Learned About Yourself Since Moving to Amsterdam?
• A 6x ROAS for an E-commerce Brand…How Likely is That to Happen?
• Can I Use the Conversion Objective to Cold Traffic?
• When Is the Next Train My Traffic Person?
This week’s show comes at you from a beautiful hotel in an old monastery in Maastricht, the southernmost town in Holland. I was driving through here on my way back from Austria, and I was so charmed by this medieval city that I decided to stay a little while.
Location independence FTW!
So with that said, let’s dive into the questions I answered in this week’s episode.
Tell Us About Larry! Does He Go Everywhere with You?
If you’ve spent much time around me, you know my pup Larry is a big part of my life. This adorable little guy pretty much goes everywhere with me.
I got Larry 7 years ago at Austin Pets Alive, a no-kill shelter in Austin. I had such a great experience, and the message of that place resonated with me so much, that it makes me want to start my own no-kill shelter someday in my home state of Kentucky.
One day I drove by and saw Larry in a pen on the side of the road. When I picked him up, he let out a big sigh and rested his head on my shoulder. It was pretty much love at first sight.
He’s a Chihuahua mix, he naps a lot, and he’s grumpy about 40% of the time. But I wouldn’t have him any other way. There’s just something calming and grounding about the way animals can love you so innocently and unconditionally.
Is It Possible for a Beginner to be Successful at Digital Marketing?
The short answer is: YES. Absolutely you can.
Especially if you know your customer avatar really well.
When you have a good handle on who your customers are—their pain points, their dreams, their doubts, the questions running through their head—then you’re in a great position to speak to the issues that matter most to them.
And when you can do that, you can succeed at digital marketing even if you don’t know the ins and outs of all the different disciplines like media buying, copywriting, analytics, and so on.
At the same time, there’s a LOT of time, work, and experience that goes into being a top-tier digital marketer. I don’t think anybody ever truly masters digital marketing, since the field is changing so fast that we’re all constantly catching up, but with years of study and hard work you can foster an extremely rare and valuable skill set.
So while you CAN succeed as a beginner, there’s also a lot to learn that can help you to achieve even better results as you learn and grow as a marketer.
What Have You Learned About Yourself Since Moving to Amsterdam?
So far my life has taken me from Kentucky to Austin to Amsterdam, with a lot of stops in between. I’d go so far as to say that traveling is my greatest source of education.
There’s just something so insightful about seeing different parts of the world and connecting with people from new environments and cultures. I’m fascinated by this idea of how life experiences, like traveling, help mold us into newer and better people.
And those experiences aren’t always positive ones! It’s easy to glamorize travel when all you see is someone’s carefully curated Instagram pictures. But traveling isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. (Yesterday, for instance, someone broke into my car and stole some electronics.)
But you learn from that too. From the good and the bad.
So far, my biggest takeaway from all the traveling I’ve done is just how important it is to get back to appreciating the simple things. To focus more on living a complete, well-rounded life, and being a little less focused on my career and business.
Don’t get me wrong: being successful is great, and I work incredibly hard to achieve the things I do. But at the same time, it’s easy in today’s digital era to fall into the trap of focusing on what we think we should be doing based on what we see in social media.
That kind of focus can lead to anxiety and burnout if you let it. Moving to Amsterdam has helped me see that more clearly, and I’m a happier person today as a result.
A 6x ROAS for an E-commerce Brand…How Likely is That to Happen?
I’m going to answer this question in two ways.
First, the literal answer to the question is: yes. You can absolutely achieve a 6x ROAS (return on ad spend) for an ecommerce brand. Which means that for every $1 you spend on ads, you generate $6 in revenue.
But the second answer, the deeper and more important answer, is that you should never actually strive to achieve that kind of profitability in your campaigns.
Confused? Let me explain.
Getting a high ROAS is always a great sign; it means you’ve found a good audience and you’ve got an offer that resonates with them. But a high ROAS is also a sign that you haven’t scaled that campaign to its potential.
Your goal should never be to make as much money as possible on every sale. When you focus too much on profit, especially with a front-end offer, you end up hurting yourself from a scalability standpoint.
If I had a 6x ROAS in a campaign, I would scale that baby up until the ROAS was much lower—maybe 1.5x to 2x—and we were reaching a lot more people. This approach helps you grow your business bigger, and faster, through repeat purchases and retargeting on the backend.
Can I Use the Conversion Objective to Cold Traffic?
“Optimize for Conversions” is the objective that I use for about 95% of my cold traffic campaigns, especially now in 2020. As long as your ad sets have a reach of around 500,000 people or more, you should have no trouble using the conversion objective—regardless of whether you’re promoting a webinar, a lead capture page, or even going direct to a product.
In fact, it’s actually the retargeting campaigns where the conversion objective gets tricky. If you’re retargeting to an audience smaller than 5,000-10,000 people, it makes it hard for the Facebook algorithm to optimize. It just doesn’t have enough data to work. In that case you may be better off optimizing for something else, like landing page views.
When Is the Next Train My Traffic Person?
If you aren’t familiar with Train My Traffic Person, it’s our 4-month live mentorship program that we run twice a year. I’ve had a lot of people asking about it lately, so I wanted to address it here.
Currently we’re in the middle of class, with the next cohort slated to start at the end of January 2021. So if you’re interested, check out the TMTP sign-up page in a few weeks and follow me on social media to get updated when we open up the gates again.
We offer two versions of the class:
The mentorship is a 16-week-long program where I teach live weekly lessons, along with live critique calls each week. All the lessons and calls run for about 60-90 minutes each. Because the training is all live, you’re guaranteed to get the most updated information possible.
In addition, the critique calls are immensely valuable for people because it closes that feedback loop that so many other trainings don’t address.
The digital version is the other way to take TMTP. This is a less expensive program that’s self-paced. You get the training videos, but not the Q&A calls.
Train My Traffic Person has become our most popular program, and has already generated some tremendous results for so many of our awesome students. You can take it as a business owner, as an employee, as a freelancer or agency, or you can sign up your team to help level up their skills in Facebook, YouTube, and Google advertising.
Join Me Next Week For Mondays with Molly!
I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of Mondays with Molly as much as I enjoyed shooting (and writing) it. If you want to keep up with me and follow along as I answer new questions about business, marketing, traveling, and all things Molly, your best bet is to follow me:
Follow me on Facebook
Follow me on Instagram
Thanks so much for your time, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you. And I look forward to answering more of your questions next week. 🙂
