Top Digital Marketing Takeaways From 2023: VIP Insights For 2024
Happy New Year, Insider!
As we continue to build and scale our businesses in 2024, it’s important to embrace the top digital marketing takeaways from last year.
In this article, I’ll discuss the top business and marketing lessons we learned in 2023 and how you can use our insights to crush it this year.
But first, we have an exciting announcement:
We’re excited to introduce a new content series called VIP Case Studies. In this series, we will interview successful entrepreneurs (multi-millionaires) about their business and marketing strategies and share their unique and powerful insights with you.
Our top priority at Vavoza in 2024 is to provide you with the most valuable marketing insights you can’t get anywhere else, other than Vavoza Insider Plus. We look forward to serving you this year.
Enjoy today’s insights, and let’s make 2024 your best year ever!
Understanding Stable ROAS
Stable ROAS, a term we coined here at Vavoza, is the return on ad spend (ROAS) you are able to maintain for at least 3 consecutive months(one quarter) of consistent advertising. This is for long-term marketing campaigns, not short-term campaigns such as special deals and seasonal promos.
When determining the stable ROAS of a marketing campaign, it’s important to analyze the data on a monthly basis rather than daily or weekly because fluctuations in performance are typical, and shorter periods do not paint an accurate picture of the campaign’s performance.
For example, let’s say your front-end ROAS was 1.2X for month one, 0.95X for month two, and 1.45X for month three. In this case, your average ROAS for the three months is 1.2X or 120%, but you do not have a stable ROAS yet. Now, if your ROAS hovered around 1.2X for three months straight, then your stable ROAS is 1.2X or 120%.
Why is stable ROAS so important?
It’s critically important to determine the stable ROAS of your marketing campaign in order to properly assess, optimize, and scale the campaign. It also allows you to predict and forecast future performance.
Metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS) can be deceiving at first glance, especially in short periods. Knowing your stable ROAS allows you to determine exactly how well your campaign is performing, whether you are tracking front-end or back-end stable ROAS (or both).
One of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen marketers make in 2023 is being too quick to make changes to their campaigns BEFORE determining the stable ROAS. Making changes too quickly and at the wrong time can lead to an endless loop of improper troubleshooting and low performance, which significantly decreases your chances of successfully scaling the campaign.
As an entrepreneur and/or a marketer, you take calculated risks. So, if you decide to bet on a campaign, give it time to run its course with as few tweaks and changes as possible in the entire sales funnel. Once you determine your stable ROAS, only then should you decide what optimizations to implement to improve performance (and repeat the cycle).
Backend Scale
Do you know what most successful marketing campaigns have in common? They generate most of the revenue on the back end instead of the front end! This means that the initial offer on the front end is meant to convert leads into customers and bring buyers into the business’s ecosystem, who then see additional offers and become repeat customers.
As you scale up to a certain point (and it’s a different level for everyone), revenue and net income are the only metrics that matter. You know you’ve reached this point when you start focusing less on ROAS and other metrics and more on generating volume to get as many conversions as possible.
The most common glass ceiling for scaling a marketing campaign with paid ads is that ROAS typically decreases as you scale up higher. The rule is simple: the more you can afford to lose on the front end, the higher you can scale (which is where the back end comes into play).
It’s easier said than done, but having solid backend offers and repeat customers is essential if you want to scale up high. Simply put, you need to embrace shameless selling and sell more products to your existing customers, or you will NOT be able to run a profitable long-term marketing campaign at scale.
- Pro tip: Take advantage of as many holidays as possible and do special promos to boost revenue in 2024. Holidays are great because they provide people with a compelling reason for why you are offering a discount on your product.
Offering a discount without a good reason can create a negative perception of your product, so always provide a compelling reason for why you are offering a discount in all your special promos.
That being said, nothing in this section means anything if you don’t know how to effectively convert leads into customers. To master the art of converting leads into buyers, study our two-part offer-building series.
Crafting Strategic Partnerships
One of the most powerful things you can do as an entrepreneur and marketer is to collaborate with others to boost your growth. This was one of our top strategies here at Vavoza in 2023, and it served us well.
As ad platforms become less dependable (more on this later), strategic relationships will remain paramount.
In this section, let’s explore some ideas of the type of partners you may want to consider in 2024.
Clients and Customers
Do you have clients who potentially align with your brand’s offers and vision? Start your strategic partnerships there. Your paying clients already know, like, and trust you, which makes it easier for you to craft an irresistible win-win deal they cannot refuse!
Your clients don’t necessarily need to be in the same industry and niche as you to make your partnership work. Ask yourself these two questions:
- Does our client’s audience have a problem for which our product provides a solution?
- Would our client’s audience be interested in the solution we provide?
If the answer is yes, then there is potential for a lucrative partnership. At the end of the day, you are dealing with human beings, and unless you are in a very niche market, you have a high potential of making something work. Be creative!
Influencers and Authority Figures
Influencer marketing isn’t a new concept in 2024, and it’s increasingly becoming the go-to traffic source for many large brands (and for a good reason).
People are inclined to like and trust the popular social media figures they closely follow, and an endorsement from these trusted figures has weight. A good call-to-action from an influencer can significantly increase your traffic, leads, and sales, as well as overall brand awareness and reach.
The key to making influencer marketing work well is to partner with influencers who have an engaged and loyal following (ideally, cult-like) – this is significantly more important than audience size!
You don’t want to spend money on endorsements from influencers without authority whose followers don’t respect them or care for what they have to say – it’s not worth your investment, even if they have a large audience.
The simplest way to see how engaged an influencer’s audience is to “stalk” them a little bit before reaching out to them. Observe how their audience engages with their content (both new and older content).
A good sign of a cult-like following is if you notice the same names engaging with various content they post.
Business Connections / Other Entrepreneurs
Similar to existing clients (although not to the same extent), your business connections probably already know, like, and trust you, and this positions you to win them over with a lucrative win-win opportunity.
The key to converting other entrepreneurs is leading with a win-win deal. In fact, make the deal more attractive to them than to you, especially if you are just getting started.
Why? The strategy here is simple but often overlooked:
We live in a small world, and every entrepreneur knows at least one or more other entrepreneurs, some of whom may be a good fit for a strategic and lucrative partnership with you. Your local small business owner may be connected to the kind of people you would never begin to imagine.
So, when crafting and nurturing relationships with other entrepreneurs, consider that if not them, then someone from their network may someday be your whale client or strategic partner.
But, of course, it goes both ways. If you want to profit from your business connections, be a valuable resource to other entrepreneurs (and other authority figures), too. Build and maintain these relationships continually, and don’t forget to see the bigger picture for long-term success!
Contractors and Freelancers
There are thousands of ambitious freelancers in virtually every niche ready to take your money in return for the services you want or need. Use sites like Upwork and Fiverr to find freelancers to hire.
Freelancers oftentimes get a bad rep because the market is flooded with low-quality “experts” who aren’t worth a dime for their work. However, if you dig through the mud, so to speak, you just might find the gems at incredibly efficient prices.
Look for freelancers with the potential for a long-term partnership. If you are satisfied with their work, take extra steps to build a relationship with them. Go beyond “business talk” and connect with them person-to-person; you truly never know where your relationship might take you.
Remember, the best way to craft a business relationship with someone is to make them money (directly or indirectly). This is true about freelancers, clients, influencers, and other entrepreneurs.
You can’t go wrong with win-win deals!
Future-Proofing Your Business
If 2023 taught us anything, it’s that the future is oftentimes difficult to foresee.
We made various plans for our company back in 2022 for the year 2023, but we had to pivot quite a bit last year. Ultimately, it was worth it, and we learned some valuable lessons that will help us propel Vavoza to the next level in the coming years.
One of the most important lessons we learned in 2023 is that it’s imperative to future-proof our business as much as possible. Meaning, regardless of how much we believe in our abilities to perform well, we must always plan ahead for a rainy day.
Many of our clients learned the same lesson.
Platform Dependency
When relying on a single ad platform, payment processor, email management and automation software, and so forth, you can never be too secure. Our clients and we had to pivot multiple times in 2023, and each pivot took a lot of unexpected effort, time, and resources.
Unfortunately, you can never be truly secure unless you own all the platforms you use, but you probably won’t build another Google Ads, ActiveCampaign, or Stripe for yourself, nor should you.
It’s okay to rely on third-party platforms and tools to operate your business as long as you are ready to pivot quickly when necessary.
Here are some proactive solutions to consider to future-proof your business in 2024:
- Go Omnichannel: Use multiple sources and mediums for traffic and lead generation to ensure you always have new leads coming into your funnel in case one or more platforms unexpectedly stop performing well or experience other issues.
- Have a Backup Plan: Have a backup payment processor ready to go in case of an emergency, such as being put into review or banned by your merchant (in which case, you won’t be able to process new payments and generate new sales). The same goes for all other tools you use to operate your business.
- Know Ins and Outs: Understand every tool you use conceptually and operationally to be able to switch platforms at any given moment and comfortably rebuild your infrastructure if necessary.
For example, we use ActiveCampaign for email management, automation, and deliverability, but if necessary, we can switch to any other CRM and rebuild everything in a day. Why? Because we understand how CRMs work and what we need to do to get back on track. - Save Money: Be liquid in case of emergencies, such as lawsuits or lucrative opportunities, such as spontaneously getting a high return on ad spend (ROAS), in which case you want to maximize your ad spending while the momentum lasts.
In 2023, we’ve seen many missed opportunities by our clients to take advantage of higher-than-usual ROAS simply because they weren’t liquid enough to afford scaling up quickly.
A Solution To Ad Platform Dependency
Our clients relied heavily on Google Ads and Facebook Advertising to generate leads for years. However, whenever these ad platforms made significant changes to their algorithms, our clients’ return on ad spend (ROAS) decreased, forcing them to scale down.
To combat ad platform dependency, we started promoting the idea of maximizing profits on the back end rather than relying on the front end of the sales funnel to generate a positive ROAS.
With this approach, we urged our clients to maximize the volume of low-ticket buyers on the front end (even at a loss) and to boost profits on the back end by selling additional offers to existing customers.
This became a game-changer for some of our clients who took our advice.
Our solution requires a strong back-end sales system with multiple offers as well as a high volume of low-ticket buyers. It requires taking an immediate loss on the front end, but it pays off on the back end when done right.
The best part?
With this approach, your only objective with advertising is to generate as much volume of leads and low-ticket buyers on the front end as possible, and all the heavy lifting is done on your end where you are in full control!
Closing Remarks
And that’s a wrap for our first Vavoza Insider Plus issue of 2024!
The core message of this letter is the importance of taking a deliberate and strategic long-term approach to marketing. Remember, marketing is the bloodline of your business, but it’s also a game that requires skills to win.
Have fun with it, but don’t just dabble – focus, practice, and play to win!
I encourage you to study the content of this article. This edition alone has enough information to transform your business this year.
And we look forward to continuing to share exclusive marketing insights with you to help you hockey-stick your leads, sales, and growth in 2024-2025 and the coming years.
– Vlad
