Ep 343: 6 to 7 Figure Ecommerce Growth Strategies Prior To Exiting with Jodie Minto

What are the two biggest mistakes e-commerce brands make when trying to go from six figures to seven figures?

Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Olympus podcast, and today I'm speaking with Jodie Minto. She's an award-winning e-comm mentor, founder and seven-figure fashion brand owner, podcast host, and speaker.

She's based in Australia on the Central Coast. She's also a certified digital marketer, a met ad specialist, and a life coach. She started her store online whilst working full time, juggling a young family, living in the Middle East. She says that story until she grew it to seven figures, having multiple stockists and customers worldwide.

Jodie also hosts the Popular Ecom podcast, Online Store Success, which I mentioned in the pod. It's number two in marketing podcasts in Australia for two weeks straight and frequently sits in the top 30 in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. In this pod, we talk about her journey of starting her e-commerce brand.

We don't typically talk about starting and... But we did talk about scaling and why she sold the business. We talk about how she scaled that brand, but then why she de-scaled that brand.

And we talk about why she sold it and a lot of mistakes she made in between, how she lost the forest for the trees in her approach to building out this business to a bigger business than she expected, with far more things going on.

We then move on to talk about something quite fascinating and how she tried to sell the business on Flippa, which actually failed her and the mistakes that were made through just even listing that business on Flippa, even working with a broker through Flippa and then how she did sell that business to an outside party and what that looked like, how she sold it for all cash. Then we move on to talk about the two biggest mistakes e-commerce brands make when they're trying to get from six to seven figures and why.

One foot should go before the other, not what most people do, which is the wrong approach. Then we move into the mindset of scaling too much, working too much, and building a business that actually takes us further away from our goal. Of course, you know I love mindset.

Now, obviously, this is not the only way I can help you free. If you're looking at buying a business like this, make sure you get my due diligence framework. Make people millions of dollars and save people millions of dollars. Buyingonlinebusiness.com for just a free resource where you get that. For now, jump into the pod. Enjoy.

Jodie, welcome to the pod. Thanks for your time.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. So happy to be here.

I'm looking forward to this. It's rare that we have an Aussie guest on the podcast. It's just me as the host.

It's always nice to check all these. I'm happy to help.

Absolutely. Where I live in Indonesia and Bali, sometimes my friends, when there's a bunch of us Aussies together, my friends that are not Australian, when we're speaking too fast, they're just like,, What's going on here? Hopefully, everybody listening isn't feeling that. Yeah.

I'll try not to talk too fast or blend my words as we often do.

Keep the Aussie slang out. Actually, a lot of people appreciate the Aussie slang. Yeah.

There goes. I'm sorry. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, I have a lot of American clients, and I often use silly metaphors and sayings that we have, and I just get a lot of confused faces. Like things like, first in best dress, and then everyone's like, what? I have to get dressed? What are you talking about? You know, so I'll try to leave those out as much as possible.

Now get you a-...

There's so much I want to pick your brain about the growth of Econ businesses, the growth that you've got in your Econ biz. How long did you own your Econ most business for before you sold it?

So I had it probably for 10 years. If you count those, the year or two where you're in that testing phase and trying to figure out exactly what my product is and what my brand name is, because I actually started the business when I was working in corporate and living in Dubai.

Yeah, my e-comm business at the time was more of a, started as a fashion brand. And that was my exit strategy, so to speak, to get out of the corporate job. And I started at market stalls.

And so it wasn't in the form that it is now, the women's resort wear brand. I actually started with like children's wear products and some organic perfumes and things like that.

So if you count that experimental stage, it was 10 years, but the business is now 10 years old. I think it's probably in its 11th year with its new owner. So yeah, it's been a 10-year journey of all of the things.

Yeah, congrats. Being in business for 10 years is tough. Business is tough. Would like people to know that more and more. In my last podcast, we talked about how hard it is to buy a business. It's not as easy, everybody thinks. It's simple, but it's not as easy. So also congratulations on the sale for that as well.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it felt like a real achievement to build something up from scratch and then get to a point where I felt it was complete for me in that I had somewhat run out of ideas and I guess passion for it and that I was able to then pass it on to new owners who then could continue its life and its journey with some fresh meat.

Yeah, from Fresh Blood. So what sort of business model was it? So it's an econ brand, and it was in the fashion niche. And what was the model? Were you selling direct to consumers? Were you selling a 3PL warehouse? Were you selling on Amazon? What was the sales distribution, and what was the marketing picture?

So I actually tried all of those different avenues. Initially, it was selling face-to-face when I first started the business at these weekend market stores, trying to figure out what my hero product was, what it was that I was actually going to zero in on.

And then once I'd had that figured out, I launched my e-commerce site and was selling predominantly just to Dubai customers online. And the marketing then, it was, this feels like a long time ago now, was Instagram.

It was fairly new, and then email marketing and Facebook. That was predominantly how I was making my sales. I hadn't yet dipped into Facebook ads at that time, but then, as I continued to run the business, I thought, Right, how.

This isn't happening fast enough. How can I drive more sales to the online store, and how can I get out of all of these weekend market stores that I was doing to keep things ticking along?

So that's where I dipped into Facebook ads. I hired a coach, and they taught me how to run ads and started experimenting with those. Fast forward, probably I ran the business in Dubai, I want to say three or four years before then, I moved back to Australia.

And at that point, things started to ramp up a lot and I opened up, you know, the ads even just to face, to New Zealand, Australia, a little bit to the U.S, and still to Dubai. But I found once I was back in Australia, the Dubai sales dried up a little, but at that point, then I thought, right, what else can I try? Let's have a look at Amazon.

So I did, I did do Amazon for quite a while, and I actually shipped a lot of inventory over to Amazon's warehouse in the U.S., and it was predominantly just serving the US market, but I didn't find it at the time. It was a great experience.

And this is probably going back. This is probably going back about six, seven years, where I found a couple of things. I think my strategy was wrong. I used Amazon to try and sell down my slow-moving stock. So it was the stuff that people didn't really want so much. That's what I sent off to the US.

So the strategy was a little messed up from the start, but then what I found was that the buying behaviors were a lot different in the US, especially through Amazon, where people were returning things at such a high rate. It had, think, 30, 40, 50 % return rate, which was certainly not what was happening on the e-commerce site.

So I found that exercise at the time wasn't particularly successful, and then I brought all the product back to Australia. I also did quite a bit of wholesale in different places. Initially, it was boutiques and things like that reaching out and inquiring, and selling directly to them.

Then I also sold on some different wholesale platforms like Fair, and we've got a Holer in Australia. And sort of was like just a little bit on the side, though, it was never the main avenue.

It was never the main sales channel because with wholesale, obviously, we're selling it at almost half the price. So we have to sell a high volume of it and then, you know, don't have the profit margins. And then what I was finding was that it would deplete my inventory to sell directly to the customers.

So yeah, it was, it was, I've kind of tried all of the things, and at the peak of the business, just before I sold it, where we were doing seven-figure years, predominantly, I'd say 70 % of our sales were coming through paid ads, and the rest were coming through email marketing and social media. So Facebook ads certainly still played a really big part in it to try and meet that volume of sales that we were always trying to hit.

So yeah, congrats on working out how to just get it to the peak. That's an ongoing process in life and business. So 70 % Facebook ads, 30 % email marketing. Were you dispatching and sending from home?

Where did you, did you manufacture the products? Where did you get the products? And as the main distribution, was it through 3PL into Australia, or were you sending them out yourself?

It was a bit of a mix again. Coming back to the question around manufacturing, I initially was manufacturing all of it, all of the products. And we were known for caftans and kimonos in Dubai. So that was what I found was a great opportunity for me when we were living there to get started, because they had tailors and fabric suits and things like that.

You'd go and buy a few meters of fabric and take it to a tailor with a photo or a very basic sketch, saying, This is what I want to make, and that's how it started. But what I found then is that as sales grew, we couldn't keep up with demand.

And because I was buying ready-made fabrics, if we identified a really good seller, a print that ladies loved, we would go back to try and buy more, and it was gone. So that's when we shifted a lot of the manufacturing to China.

In China, and this sounds probably really dodgy, but we found that if we had a good selling print that we'd found in the market in Dubai, say for example, we could then send it to China and they could recreate it.

So then we could make it en masse. So we did a little bit of that. We also then had some of our own prints designed, and then the bulk of the manufacturing was coming from China. We did test India and we did test Indonesia, Bali as well, but we found China just so efficient and had so many capabilities around, even just different types of printing techniques, being able to provide all of the swing tags, the packaging, that was a one-stop shop and significantly cheaper.

So that's where we ended up manufacturing the most in the end. But as far as the distribution, we tried all of the different options. So initially in the first, probably, even probably the first six years of the business, it was all from home, picking and packing the orders from home.

Which I'm sure, if any of your listeners are doing this right now, it's fine. It's efficient, but it's a headache if you want to go on holidays, or, you know, if you've got to be somewhere else and then you miss the courier driver that's coming to pick up the, you know, the satchels that day.

So it was very haphazard and probably spent too much time doing that when we should have outsourced it through 3PL. I then tried a couple of different 3PLs here in Australia, and it was fairly new at the time, 3PLs, and it was very messy. There were a lot of wrong orders being sent to customers, and it created quite a lot of headaches in that sense.

So then we pulled it back again. Then, in the height of COVID, when things really ramped up, I was at a point where there were, think, three or four of us working in the business from my dining table. And I was like, I can't take this anymore. Like the house is full of products. I've got the house full of staff.

This is just, you know, my whole world of work and business, and, you know, family life is all blended into one. So it was like, I've got to get this business out of my house. So this is probably something I'd never recommend anyone do.

I learned from my mistake that I went and hired an office slash warehouse. I signed a commercial lease and then put all this staff there. And then we were picking and packing the orders ourselves, but through our own space. But that experience was stressful, and I found that we hid quite a big space, and I felt the need to then fill it with stuff ads, ramp up the sales, and I could lose stuff.

Exactly. Like, we've got to make this bigger. And the whole reason for me for starting my own business, which I'm sure is, you know, a very common goal, is to have this freedom and flexibility where we're not chained to an office or a computer.

And by me going and hiring this office space and having staff in it, there was this expectation of me having to be there from nine to five, Monday to Friday. So I got to this point, was like, hang on a minute. This isn't, this isn't what I signed up for. What's happening here?

But then also so many extra overheads that go with an office. Think, no, it's cheaper though than 3PL. It's not really because you have things like insurance, and then you have to have the staff that actually work there, and they're generally all on the books. So you've got all of the insurances that go with that. You've got the electricity, you've got all of the things that all add up pretty.

Quickly and your time managing them and managing the process and then quality assurance and like it's just yeah it's it's but 3PL in Australia is still not as good as America like America it's so it's been forced to be good in America because of Amazon and Australia is only just getting that now where Australia is starting to get more popular to use Amazon purchases versus non-Amazon.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was messy. It was definitely messy, like in the early days for sure. And very frustrating and, now, just creating even more bottlenecks. Um, and that's why we sort of went, no, that's okay. We'll do it in-house. But then, like I said, I had all these staff and then, you know, through COVID, where we had, you know, 2020 and 2021, which were the golden years in e-comm, and then it dipped.

You know, and then it'll pick up a bit, and then a dip again. And I've got this office and I've got all these staff going, I don't need quite so many staff, but now I've got to make decisions on who's going to be let go.

So I found it incredibly, incredibly stressful and had this realization that I'd created this job. I created a business that I didn't actually, you know, want. I didn't want to have to go and work, you know, five days a week in the office.

And, I think that sort of led to a state of burnout, which is when I realized I didn't want to be in this business anymore, and then that's when I started to think about, okay, what's next?

Yeah. Yeah. And so then you sold the business.

And I thought the business wasn't a straightforward of, like, that's it, I'm going to sell the business. I actually got so burnt out and so just done with it that I ended up closing down the business. Got to a point and I'm sure people in the business can relate to this, where you just go, that's it, I am done. I can't do this anymore. I'm just going to blow the thing up. So I actually decided to close the business, which again is this huge process when you have.

I think there were six staff at the time, a commercial lease, all of these customers, all of these different obligations. So it was a very stressful time of then unpicking everything and letting staff go and trying to get out of commercial leases, which is not for the faint-hearted, and all of the different things that went with that. But I was like, you know what, I've just got to do this, go through these steps to get to the very end.

I did have conversations with business brokers and even other business owners, going, Jodie, but you could sell this business. At that point, though, I just was like, I can't, I can't even entertain the idea of what that process then looks like.

So I ended up actually closing the business and I ended up closing the business for, think a period of about two months or so. I had let everyone go. I had a chance to stop and just exhale.

And then that's when again, the voices and even well-meaning folks were coming in and saying, But you could sell it, you could sell it. You've built up this business for 10 years. You have this asset; you could sell it.

You've got this website, this database, know, manufacturers, you've got inventory still. Cause I brought all of it home and left it in the garage. And I thought, okay, fine. So I started having conversations with different brokers, and they said, Yeah, you could absolutely sell it, but you have to turn the lights back on. You have to relaunch the business.

Basically, it's to buy a business that's not operating by buying stock, right? And even when we do buy a business with stock is we need to do an audit on the stock to make sure it's you relevant.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's not depreciated. How did you, how did you go and choose? As you spoke to a few different brokers. How did you choose the broker, and which broker did you end up going with, and why?

Exactly, that's close.

Yeah. So this was another interesting story where I spoke with a broker that I believe was recommended to me, and they were really helpful in helping guide me around. What is my business even worth? Especially given I've closed it down and it's not currently running.

So they were really good in giving me some guidance, but I never actually signed an agreement with them. What I then did, though, was investigate other options on how I can sell it. And I actually listed it on a website, which I believe is called.

Is it a flipper or something?

Everybody on this pod will be laughing because everybody on this pod knows Flipper very, very well. We've had the CEO on multiple times. I've been Flipper podcast multiple times. Yeah. Flipper is very common in our space of buying and selling businesses. Yeah. So you listed on Flipper.

Did listed it on Flippa, but what I found was that a few things, when I listed it on Flippa, really inflated the value of what it was worth. Like I was like, come on. think they-

Is this through a broker, or does a broker do this? I'd better flip a broker, or do you just self-listen to that?

I used a broker; I think I paid a little extra. But I think initially when I put the numbers in there, it's worth like a gazillion dollars. And I was like, no, it's not. But then a broker assured me that, yeah, okay, it's probably a little inflated, but maybe we can meet about here and drop it down a little bit. I had a few inquiries and even had a phone call with someone in Turkey, but nothing really eventuated.

Then thought, you know what, I might put the feelers out even just in my own network. And so I actually, I can't remember exactly how I did this. I might've put it on the website better.

Might've shared it on social media, basically saying I'm taking expressions of interest from people that might be willing to buy it. And at this point, I'd made the decision, okay, fine, if I'm going to sell it, I've got to start running this business again. So I need to find a 3PL and a VA and all these kinds of things.

So I found the 3PL in Melbourne and sent all of the product to them, but I was really transparent with them. And I said to them, Look, this business is for sale. I will encourage the new owners to stick with you, but I can't obviously make any guarantees, but I just want you to, you know, be aware. And, they actually turned around and said, Really?

We've been looking for a fashion brand to add to our portfolio. There was a husband and wife, partners who said, You know, we used to work, I think in country road and fashion and things like that. And they had other businesses; they had post offices in Melbourne and a plumbing business, and something else.

And so they actually said, Well, we're actually interested. Can we, can we chat more? So long story short, they ended up buying it. These people who were actually, you know, the 3PO owners, and we were in business together, and they ended up buying it.

So it ended up being a complete private sale. And I didn't get as much as what Flippa was telling me I was going to get, even at the reduced valuation. But in the end, these guys made me a cash offer and said, You know, we'll close it in, you know, two months or something. And I was like, take it.

Right. It's all Right. Thanks for sharing that because it's very interesting for people listening. Everybody listening to the podcast is looking to buy a business, and they've all been on Flippa, and it's so good to see what your use case is as a buyer, that you knew your business's worth evaluation was inflated.

And what actually happens for people listening is that this is typical that a broker just wants to get as much money from your business as possible. And it happens in real estate, too, where they inflate the price to make their commission and their fee worth it for you.

So they're happy and you're happy, but it doesn't meet the market. And what can happen is it can happen. And it didn't happen for you because you found an outside buyer, but it can create a negative spiral where people see that it's been listed for X amount of time or months, and then it gets decreased, and then it gets decreased again and again and again. And people start to think, okay, this, so this business sucks, and it's not really worth anything that they say it is worth. And then.

Poor person, like say if you stayed with Flippa and you had to sell it for pennies on the dollar because unfortunately it just wasn't priced competitively. Yeah. And the market watches this thing decay. Yeah. It's just very, very unfortunate. There's also for people listening, they're looking to buy, is to understand that just because something's dropping doesn't mean it's terrible. Do your due diligence. Don't just, you know, put it to the wayside because you could be finding a great deal.

I believe I sold my business for a third of what it was listed for on Flippa. That's crazy. I think it's like selling a house, right? You're like, yeah, I'm going to try and get it as high as possible. But in the back of your mind, you're like, I don't think it's actually going to sell for this. So for me, I ended up selling the business for, I believe it was like one year's net profit.

Wow. Wow.

That was the amount, and I was happy with that because my stage in the business was done. I'd already checked out. I was exhausted. I've had my coaching business alongside my fashion brand for about eight years.

So I knew I had something else to shift straight to. You know, someone's like, well, here's my offer, you know, and here are the terms. And I was like, absolutely happy with that. Let's go.

Congratulations on the exit. So it's not much more to talk about to cash offer one year multiple. I want to move into your coaching. So you help people scale the e-commerce brands, and you're typically helping people go from six figures to seven figures.

What is what sort of e-commerce brands do you eat? Is it one type of e-commerce brand, or is it any type of e-commerce brand? Like, what is your coaching?

Yeah. So I specialize in fashion and lifestyle brands. So obviously, I've had that lived experience of creating a fashion brand. I work with lots of children's wear, homewares, even pet accessories, things like that. So very much that fashion and lifestyle-y space.

I have several different programs, but I believe my specialty is getting people from the six to the figures revenue mark in a year. That's where I think it gets really fun and really exciting because we've already got that proof of concept, if they're already doing sort of a hundred K, they've generally got the foundation solid and it's just about figuring out which marketing levers we need to pull and what overarching product and business strategies we need to address to scale it pretty quickly.

Let's talk about that. So if somebody's making a hundred K or a couple hundred K, typically what are the two most common mistakes that your commerce owners are making trying to scale, and then what are like maybe the two things they need to be doing differently?

Yeah. So again, a lived experience of the mistakes that I made myself. When things, when things all of a sudden scale quite quickly, and we are, you know, giving ourselves a high five and going, yeah, this is great. What we often do, well, I certainly did, and I see other e-comm founders and business owners make this mistake, is that then they go and make purchasing decisions for their business based on the absolute high, right?

The height of summer, where then they go and rent a commercial space, they go and fill it with staff, they'll go and buy a Range Rover as a company car, and all these kinds of things, without appreciating that a business has ebb and flow. Right now, we're in a pretty tricky economy.

A lot of people have had like a pretty rough year or two. And when we are running a business and building a business, we have to keep that in mind. Like it might be awesome now, but I want to make really smart strategic decisions, I want to make sure that I'm not stretching myself too thin, cash flow-wise.

And I see this a lot. I see this a lot where people, particularly once they hit the seven figures, they're like, Yes, this is awesome. And then they go off and really make decisions that then negatively affect their bottom line in short order.

So that's something that I see happen a lot. I also, yeah, it's a lot. Exactly. And just know that every big decision should be well thought out, the money on just... Yeah. ...all the sick things.

I mean, chat with your accountant about it. Things like office leases that were so traumatic to try and then get out of that office lease. I think I had about 18 months left. I basically had to pay it out for the whole 18 months, but the hell they put me through.

Were lawyers involved? Like, if you sign these contracts, it's very difficult. Even if you hire, I know in Australia, it's very difficult to let people go. If you hire a staff member, you have to go through and the business sales have dipped.

You have to go through a redundancy process, and that alone is a headache, and you need to get legal advice and all this kind of thing. So just make sure that you have that kind of end goal in mind. It's like, want a profitable business.

Also, do I want a lifestyle business where I can run it from home or Mexico, or Bali? Or do I want to be in a warehouse with lots of staff? So just keeping that end goal in mind, I think, is really important. And a lot of people don't, they get just swept up with what's happening at that current time and make these decisions that they then pay for later. It's pretty common when you're in the entrepreneurial space to just, if you want to grow your business, then you just consume content around growth, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, and everything else is secondary to growth.

And when everything else is secondary to growth, we forget, like, why are we even trying to make this money? Is it so that we just have more money so we can just spend it on things? Or is it actually like, what is our number one value? It's like, you want to be spending more time doing what you love with the people you love?

Or you actually really want that range robot, which means you need to work it more. Know, so not, yeah, I totally agree with you on making sure you remember what the end goal is or what you're working towards versus just more, more, more, more, more, because Hey Jodi, imagine if you just grew your business to a certain size where you had one VA. You're making maybe half a mil a year and you've got a three PL and…

Yeah, exactly.

You have somebody running your ads. This is what I help people with their businesses: they're trying to just do all the things. It's like, no, let's take them all off your plate. And then like, how's the business going to grow? Or like, it's not going to grow if you're tired and you can't make good decisions.

Yeah. And then you end up wanting to blow it up like what I did. To the point where you're just so burnt out and exhausted, right? So yeah, absolutely. And I literally made those mistakes.

I bought the Range Rover, I hired all the staff, I got them the commercial lease, and then I was like left to just unpick it all. And yeah, I have a mastermind program where it's ladies only, sorry guys, but it's, I've literally got a lady in there that is doing seven figures a year. She has three PL, and she has one VA.

She's managing her ads herself, and that's what we do a lot of, like upskilling, and I review ads and things like that inside of my coaching programs. But she's got like the VA helping with the social media, the email, and email campaigns each week.

And you know, the net profit on a business like that is like a dream come true versus my reality, which had all of these staff and all of these overheads that couldn't easily be let go.

You know, her business model is like, yes, this is exactly what is possible. This million-dollar micro business that you can run from home during school hours. And I find that for me, a lot of my clients, that is the dream versus having a big warehouse. But they don't usually realize they don't want the warehouse and stuff until they've actually experienced it themselves and gone, okay, this is no fun.

Exactly. Exactly. I also think it's a paradox that people believe because it's been fed to us so much, which has actually caused me a lot of damage in my life is that you work more, you can earn more money, and you need to work hard.

If I think you get to a certain point where you stop, you can work more, but you can't make more money. If you were to just, I've worked out that if I decrease my hours, then I'm far more rested. Make better decisions.

And I don't have to work as much. And then I use my resources to work for me, versus me working for the resources. It's got an inverse effect. I think that's why, you know, for your person, for your lady in your group, for her to grow from seven to eight figures, she shouldn't have to do more work. It's just about having the business grow to a certain stage where she hires a GM that then hires a C M a fractional CMO, and a fraction.

Absolutely.

So, you know, versus, and then she's even further away from the business and more money.

Yeah, absolutely. And I agree, you know, about the, the, think we all have a level of capacity. Yes, we have X amount of hours in our day and our week, and we could keep working, but we get to a point where we're no longer productive, and we'd end up doing that busy work.

Think, I should be doing this. And as we get more tired, we ended up, we ended up kind of a bit more distracted, and then we're spreading ourselves everywhere and not doing anything particularly well. So yeah, I totally agree on that as well, around, you know.

I, for example, don't take any coaching calls on a Monday. Like Monday is my day for, you know, thinking and planning my podcast episode for the week and doing my marketing, and just getting ready for the week ahead.

And I still have one child in high school. So I, you know, have bookends on my days, right? Where e I have to go and pick her up from wherever? And I think that actually works well. I do work with people who don't have family responsibilities, where they do have the opportunity to work themselves 24 hours a day.

And it's not effective. Their business is no more successful than someone else who is just doing it in a shorter amount of hours. They're just more burnt out and tired, and exhausted.

Yeah. For myself, without all those sorts of responsibilities in my life, I had to force myself to find things to do so I couldn't work, to get myself down to a couple of hours a week, and then have to work with my own mindset to feel okay and not feel guilty about not working. Like, why is everybody else working so much? I don't need to, but I've been tracing this dream for 10 years. Why should I put myself through guilt for wanting to?

Wanted to be in that position. kKnowthat's it's, it's a privilege. I'm very privileged to be able to say that I've done the work to be able to get there. And I think more people should realize that they can do that too. You know, that's, that's what you're helping. You're helping people do what I want to come back to, ads, Facebook ads.

And maybe you've just got these philosophies around marketing in ads that can carry across to other platforms like Google and TikTok and all that stuff. What are the two biggest mistakes people are making with their marketing in sort of paid ads? See, a lot of people view ads and try to attempt ads to fix somewhat of a conversion problem.

So not addressing perhaps what's happening over here with the offer, whether it's the product, the website, the messaging, the branding, positioning, whatever. A lot of people see ads as the fix-all, and the businesses that have a big conversion problem over here generally find that their ads don't work or they're really expensive.

So I see that happen quite a bit, and it takes a little bit of a mindset shift around, okay, ads are meant to be the gasoline that we pour on top of what's already working. If it's working over here, you know, if we're not in an e-commerce space, I generally use the benchmark. If you're not getting a 1 conversion rate on your online store, ads are probably not.

The next step is figuring out, like, can we get more people to actually buy? The people who are coming, whichever channels they're coming through. And then once we've got that sitting perhaps around a 1%, that's then when we go and, you know, pull the lever for Facebook ads, pour the gasoline on top, and then just amplify what's working.

So I do see that as a bit of a mistake. I also see people, and this is hard because there are Facebook ads, there's a lot of moving parts, or any kind of paid marketing. There are a lot of moving parts. Like, what is my strategy? Who am I trying to attract? What am I trying to sell?

And they make all of those decisions, and they get to the ad creative part. And then they just slap something together, which is really ordinary and not appealing and not scrolls. And then people say, But my ads are not working.

And then we see the ad, and it's like, would you stop scrolling in your feed to click on your ad? Probably not. Right. So, not enough time and effort put into the actual ad creative itself is a big mistake I see because meta, particularly, has moved so far around towards AI and broad audiences and things like that, where that part of the campaign structure and the audience selection is a lot easier.

We don't really have to try and map that out as much. It's not as complex as it was, but the hardest part now is making sure that our ads are really good. So I do see that a lot, and people will come to me and say, Jodie, but my ads aren't working, or they're costing too much.

And we go, okay, well, that all looks fine, but what are you actually showing them? And then we look and say Like the messaging is wrong. We're talking about how wonderful your product is, but we're not actually talking to the customer and the benefits to them, and why they should even consider this thing.

We're very much saying, here's my wonderful, I don't know, pen, and it's got four colors. And it's like, well, what's the benefit to the customer? What's that so what factor to them? Because if we're not communicating that in our actual ad creative, people will just keep scrolling on by, which then means our ads don't work or they're really expensive.

Absolutely. So basically, to Facebook, creative or ad creative and conversion rate are first. With conversion rate, are some of the two things that people can typically just fix in their conversion?

What are the two most common things that people are doing wrong? If they tweak it, they can go from maybe a half percent conversion rate to a two percent conversion rate.

So on the website itself, there are certainly different things that you can do to improve the chances of someone clicking through and buying something. I have this sort of philosophy, I suppose, where, you know, it's click, click, buy. Can someone find on your website what they want? Click, add it to the cart, click, and buy it. We want that process to be as uncomplicated as possible. Don't want people to…

Amount of clicks.

Exactly. Minimal amount of clicks because, especially in the fashion space, what I see a lot in websites when people come to work with me, we'll go to the product page, and then there's no size guide. There's no refund policy. There's no information on shipping. They're all off on other pages in the footer somewhere.

People are having to take 15 clicks to get all of the information they need before they can confidently go in and add it to their cart. Streamlining that process, making sure that the product pages particularly have all of the information on them that a customer needs to make that buying decision.

We want the size guides. If you're selling things, we need the fabrication of, if it's apparel, you know, how much does it cost for shipping, and how long will it take, and the return information.

Happens? Yeah. What if this doesn't suit me? What's your return policy? They're generally the main questions people have. But then also do we have good quality product imagery and videos, and a description, because often people will just, especially resellers that are getting images from other sources, from the actual brand.

Then they're just throwing that up, and they're often grainy. We can't really zoom in and see the fabric and things like that. So we want to make sure that customers have everything they need in order to make that purchasing decision.

Sales 101 is just understanding their objections and removing them with all the data and information, which is, like you said, the refund policy, the time to get their size, and the fabric. Then, also, what does it look like on my body? Do I like that look? Do I not like that look? Is it going to pair well with this or that?

Yeah, so that's one thing. Another thing too, is that this is sort of off the websites. So, so to speak, where we're actually assessing the traffic that is coming to the website, where they're coming from, because sometimes the website itself and the product pages might be really great, but then we go and look at, what is this traffic that's coming to the site?

Why is our conversion rate so low? And what we see a lot is that if people have been running traffic ads, for example, from Meta, they haven't actually selected it's a sales ad, they're running traffic ads. What we see is that we're getting a high volume of low-quality traffic to the website, and then that negatively affects the conversion rate.

So sometimes it could be that, versus it could be a problem on the actual website or with the product pages or the product itself. So we need to make sure that we are looking at it from a 360-degree perspective to make sure that we're not trying to fix something over here when the problem's actually over here.

Absolutely.

They're the kind of big things. And then it's even just looking at the product itself. Sometimes, if the product is the product proven, is there, is it viable? Is it desirable for customers? I see some pretty random products, and particularly if people are doing like drop shipping and stuff like that, sometimes they're just buying gadgets.

Yeah, whatever they can. It's like, but do people actually want this? Is there a demand for this? Is there, is this available on Tmoo and 500 other listings on Amazon, for example?

Whatever.

Just really looking at what the product is.

Yeah, absolutely. Product market fit. You know, if you've got 10 or 15 products, what are the top-selling products, and focus on the conversion rate of that first, and then the ads for that, and then apply what you've learned from that to your second best product before you just try and do it all across the board.

Exactly. I don't know, we could go on for a couple more hours, Jodi, but you've got your own podcast on this as well. Where can we send people to check out your podcast?

Yeah. So you can just search my name, Jody Minto, or the online store success in any of the podcast listening apps. And you'll find me over there. I do talk a lot about ads over there and talk a lot about scaling and marketing and everything like that. So yeah, you can find me over there, and you can find my website, JodyMinto.com, and the podcast is over.

Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience in the highs and lows of your business, scaling it, descaling it, and selling it.

Yeah, I really appreciate you and everybody. I'll be putting links to where Jodie said you can go check her out in the pod and on our site, as well, in the show notes.

So again, thanks again, Jodie.

You're most welcome. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks. Thanks for listening, guys. See you at the next one.