For the first time ever, Meta Platforms (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) is going to surpass Google in digital advertising revenue this year.
The world population is 8.3 billion. Meta’s daily monthly user base is 3.9 billion.
No matter the business, market, or product, as long as you sell to humans, the people you want to reach are accessible in one place.
Here’s how to win at the biggest game in business, even if you have zero experience with online advertising.
The “good ole days” are here today
Before I started in online marketing, people talked about the “good ole 5-cent click days of Google,” in which you could get super cheap clicks on the new traffic platform.
Then there was easy and cheap search engine optimization.
Then I helped lead people into the Amazon gold rush starting in 2012.
Facebook launched its advertising platform in 2007.
Yet, advertisers are still achieving insane results with it.
Gruns, the vitamin gummy brand that just sold to Unilever for over $1 billion, sold its first product only three years ago.
Launching a ton of high-performing Meta ads helped grow its sales to $300M+ per year.
That’s NOT NORMAL.
In the history of business, it has never been this fast or simple to scale a business from $0 to hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
NOT NORMAL.
Scaling a business to $100M+ in 3 steps
Step 1: Pick a product. Enter a huge market with a uniquely differentiated product. At first, appeal to a niche within the market, but make sure your appeal can scale to the broader market. With Meta ads, it pays to have the broadest audience possible.
Step 2: Create good ads. Use Facebook Ad Library to see what other successful brands are doing. Create similar ads for your business. At low spend levels, create at least 3-5 new ads per week. Aim for widely diversified ads, not just small variations of similar ads. At higher spend levels, scale your creative output to dozens (or more) of new ads each week.
Step 3: Cut the weeds, water the flowers. Cut the ads that aren’t performing (i.e., aren’t producing sales at your target cost per acquisition (CPA)). Spend more money on the ads that are performing (at or below your target CPA).
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Why people fail at Meta advertising
Reason 1: Low conversion rate. If your product sucks, nobody wants it, or you can’t position it in a way that’s appealing to a large number of people, you’ll fail to convert the avalanche of traffic you can get from Meta ads into paying customers. Either fix your messaging or choose a different product. But don’t give up.
Reason 2: Low lifetime value (LTV). The worst business to be in is selling a low-margin one-time-purchase product. Instead, you want to sell either a high-margin one-time purchase product or a consumable product people buy again and again. Both options give you a high average customer value. That high customer value gives you the margin to scale on Meta.
Reason 3: Laziness. It takes work to create good, unique ads each week. It takes work to tweak a funnel until it’s converting. It takes work to create a new product when you find out the product you have won’t scale. As Jocko Willink says, “GOOD”. While everyone else quits because it gets too hard, those who persevere build massive businesses.
The AI gold rush is right here
Companies are investing trillions in AI.
The company that’s likely benefited most from its investment so far is Meta. It invested over $70B in AI last year, much of which went toward improving its advertising platform’s ability to find the right customers for businesses.
The better its advertising platform gets at finding customers, the more its advertisers spend.
I guarantee you that in 5+ years from now, people will look back on today and say, “Remember when people built $100M+ businesses in 3 years, putting silly ads on Facebook? Ah…those were the good ole days.”
—Matt
P.S. So you don’t think I’m a Facebook or AI evangelist…I just released this video minutes ago, revealing what Neuroscientists have discovered about how AI use is affecting our brains. Use AI to move your life forward, not to destroy your ability to think. Watch this now:
