How do I know if I need more cold traffic?
Have you ever struggled to drive more traffic to a funnel? If you’re at the stage where your funnels need more cold traffic, it can seem like an expensive addition to a marketing strategy.
Fortunately I’m going to show you exactly how to attract cold traffic the right way AND how to do it without wasting money.
Cold traffic is defined as:
“Cold Traffic: People Who Have Never Heard of Your Business”
We need to find MORE people who haven’t heard of our business, and introduce ourselves to them.
Wasting thousands
Most people buy cold traffic, treating it like a water tap. They expect to turn it on and get exactly what they need.
Unfortunately most businesses invest in cold traffic the wrong way, and waste thousands of $$$s because they didn’t take the time to set up their cold traffic properly.
When a business spends too much on traffic and it doesn’t yield a result, they’ll deem it a waste of money and think that all traffic is expensive. In fact, it’s often because they neglected to build the cold traffic system properly, that makes the traffic unprofitable.
It’s the people, not the picture
When most businesses need to drive more traffic to their funnel, they’ll focus on the advert or offer, rather than the audience. When traffic campaigns fail, it’s usually because they’re sending the wrong people, to the wrong part of the funnel.
Cold traffic has a very specific function and purpose. Lots of businesses spend hours on the advert and creative, without thinking through the audience and platform they’re advertising on.
With organic cold traffic, such as SEO and social shares, many businesses neglect the importance of killer, high quality content.
Traffic costs are rising
Paid traffic costs WILL go up. It’s a fact of life. Every advertising platform in the world increases it’s costs as their audience size increases. As more and more people discover the internet (it’s estimated another BILLION users will discover the internet in the next 2 years), ad costs will always rise.
New platforms will offer lower costs, but as they become more popular, they’ll increase in price too and the cycle will continue.
If businesses with online marketing funnels refuse to start investing in cold traffic now, they’ll find it becomes too expensive to drive new visitors to their site.
Businesses that invest in a wise cold traffic strategy from today, will find remarketing (warm traffic) more affordable in future.
Driving cold traffic to a funnel
We’re going to look at the fundamentals of cold traffic campaigns for customers. We’re going to look at why your cold traffic campaigns to landing pages don’t work.
We’re also going to explore turning cold traffic into warm traffic (and why that’s more affordable in the long run) and sources of cold traffic. We’ll touch on the maths of a cold traffic campaign and why you shouldn’t care about cost per click (CPC).
Why your landing pages don’t convert
This is single biggest source of frustration for many marketing funnels. You have a very nice, very beautiful landing page set up for your business.
Maybe it’s a squeeze page offering a lead magnet, in exchange for an email address. Maybe you want people to sign up to a webinar. It might even be a sales page offering a product or service.
You’re driving cold traffic (remember, people who don’t know you) back to a landing page and you’re asking them to give you something. You want an email address, a name or even a purchase.
That’s like asking someone for a date (or even marriage) before you know their name.
This is where cold traffic can either become hyper-profitable, or a waste of money. And you have 2 options.
- Build a landing page offer for your cold traffic audience, which is SO relevant, compelling and valuable that they can’t help but optin (even if they’ve never heard of you before).
- Drive cold traffic to content like blog posts and videos and remarket your cold traffic (now warm traffic because they’ve heard of you) to landing pages.
The huge mistake businesses make is focusing on the landing page first, then building the advert and finally the audience.
Incredibly, we didn’t hire a professional illustrator for this
If you’re going to drive COLD traffic to a landing page, you MUST build the audience first. You need to know everything you can about the audience you’re driving, before creating any ad copy or landing pages.
We’ve seen pretty basic ads and landing pages convert much better, when the audience is hyper targeted. What businesses do wrong is create their advert and THEN look at all the different things that people might be interested in.
Instead, we recommend building audiences based around ONE interest and creating an ad for that audience. Yes, we’ll test 20 – 30 audiences at the same time, with the same basic ad. But I want to choose my audience first, before I create the landing page or ad copy.
You’re better off building a remarketing list
Which brings us to our second cold traffic strategy. Remarketing is simply showing an advert to someone who has already been to your site.
We all know that it takes 6-8 interactions before someone takes action. It’s why BMW and Audi advertise 4 times an hour in one ad spot. They know you have to see them a few times before anything sticks.
With remarketing we can show someone a landing page when we KNOW they’ve already been on our site.
With our cold traffic audiences, we can drive them to blog posts and other content on our site. SOME will convert into leads (yay!) but most will leave. We can keep costs low with driving traffic to blog posts.
Then, we can keep costs low by remarketing our landing pages to the same audience who visited before. Now, they’re warm traffic and they know who are. Not only are they more likely to convert because they know us, but we’re only showing landing pages to those who have seen our content.
Even better, we can build remarketing lists of customers/visitors/leads based on certain topics. For example if we drive traffic to a blog post on dieting, we can build a specific remarketing audience around diet. So when we show them a landing page on diet they’re more likely to convert.
THEN when we have a dieting product, who can we promote that too? That’s right, a warm traffic audience who we KNOW are interested in dieting. Clever right?
Sources of cold traffic
Personally I believe that cold traffic requires a blend of platform content (YouTube), organic SEO, social groups (Facebook groups etc.) content on your website AND paid platforms like Facebook.
Facebook, YouTube and Google offer lots of options for cold traffic.
However it might be wise to set up a remarketing campaign first. Before driving new, cold traffic, you’ll want to capture all the people who don’t convert.
Focus on one free/organic cold traffic source before you expand into multiple areas. Think about regular content on your site or on YouTube to build an audience. Then use remarketing to keep that audience engaged. When that loop is closed, think about driving new cold traffic through paid channels.
Why people think traffic is expensive
Anything is expensive when it doesn’t cost you any money.
Businesses believe that traffic is expensive, because it doesn’t result in any leads or sales.
What most businesses don’t realise, is that it’s usually their lead follow up or sales process that let’s their traffic down.
There’s also an order of priorities for traffic that many funnels neglect. They focus on quantity over quality. Even businesses that INSIST they’ll only want high quality traffic, will still opt for cheap traffic.
Let’s say we have a funnel for an accountant. They’re UK based so need local businesses. If they believe they need more traffic, they might just buy a load of visitors.
First, are they even local to the area? We can target geographic regions but many businesses fail at this first hurdle.
Second, do they NEED accountancy services? We CAN find this out. But most skip this step in order to get volume.
Third, will they take action? It’s no good driving 10 000 clicks to a website where people can’t contact you OR you don’t give them the option.
Can you see how traffic would be expensive if we focused on the volume, rather than the quality.
I’d rather have 1 person visit a day that buys, than 10 000 visitors who aren’t interested in my services.
Don’t worry about CPC (cost per click)
Finally, a note on cost per click. Keeping CPC costs low isn’t as important as everyone thinks. And we can prove it.
Let’s say you have a $100 product, with a $1000 product on the back end. You know that for every 10 x $100 purchase, 1 person buys the $1000 product. How much would you be willing to spend on finding a $100 customer?
If 10 x $100 sales = $1000 PLUS your next $1000 sale = $2000. Then I would happily spend $100 per customer.
If it costs me $100 per customer, and I know it takes 10 visitors to that sales page then each visitor costs me $10. All of a sudden, I’m happy to pay $10 per click, because I know 1/10 will buy.
My initial costs are $100 per $100 sale. But if I make $1000 for every 10 sales, then I’m in profit. My customers and leads are free.
I know I can continue to sell to those other customers also. AND if I can keep my costs below $10 per visitor I’ll be MAKING money on every lead/visitor.
CPC is a good indicator of your conversion rates. Those numbers above are simplified, but the model is exactly the same for all types of traffic campaign.
Cold traffic campaigns for marketing funnels
So we’ve talked about the maths of a cold traffic campaign. Why your landing pages don’t convert and how to turn cold traffic into warm traffic.
If you’re serious about creating profitable cold traffic campaigns for your funnels (or your customers), then you need our Facebook Audience Cheatsheet. Build audiences super fast and use our checklist to create the perfect Facebook audience.
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