How To Properly Reduce Your Ad Spend With William Perry

Alexa Mancilla | June 23, 2022 at 8:30 AM

Why Is It Important To Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs?

No matter what size business you have, it can feel incredibly easy to spend all profits on expanding your business. However, many companies tend to overspend on tactics that will help expand customer acquisition costs. This is where William Perry, CEO of REASON Media and Elite Media Buyers Academy, comes in.

William Perry is an expert in reducing customer acquisition costs. He helps companies of all sizes reduce their ad spend through paid traffic and ad campaigns. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares different ways to properly reduce your ad spend and customer acquisition costs.

EP311 How To Properly Reduce Your Ad Spend

A Little More About William

William Perry is the founder and CEO of REASON Media / Elite Media Buyers Academy. REASON is an e-commerce growth consultancy that increases ROAs and reduces CPA with AI-driven optimization. William has expertise in strategic data-driven ad optimization that unlocks new growth and is a certified e-commerce marketing specialist. William understands how to take products and scale them using e-commerce.

Interview Transcript Highlights

Question: At your core, what is it, specifically, that you do?

Answer: My team and I help D2C brands, coaches, and consultants reduce their customer acquisition costs through our testing and optimization processes, on the agency side. On the Elite Media Buyers Academy side, I help train agencies. We train media buyers founders running their own ads on how to implement our processes themselves so that they can reduce their customer acquisition costs spend more money skilled or their revenue further and unlock that new growth.

Question: When you first sit down with a client, what are the steps that you take them through to figure out how to unleash the unbelievable potential they have for reducing customer acquisition costs?

Answer: There are a couple of simple steps to follow. Really understanding what the goal and the target it so important. As we chat, I'll probably use some meetup stats and examples, just to give people some ideas. I'll have people come in and tell me that they need a 5x return from our marketing. Before I start to battle them on all the reasons why this may or may not be possible, we essentially go into a deep discovery in understanding their targets and desires. Then, we do a data deep dive (a pretty in-depth analysis) to see whether or not their goals are capable of meeting realistic expectations. We then do an exercise that I call the Ad ROI Formula, where we pull all their historical data. We actually run statistical models to be able to find out if their goals are actually possible based on industry standards based on their own KPIs within their own business so that that way, at least, we know if we're setting ourselves up for failure, from the beginning.

Question: You've mentioned the importance of thinking of the big picture in terms of what it actually costs to sell a product. How do you have this conversation and train people on this?

Answer: I'm just very direct and honest with them. I kind of take the viewpoint that I'm a little bit of a bull in a china shop here; I'm a big believer that to get to where we want to go, we have to do what hasn't been done. At the same time, we have to be willing to say things that might be uncomfortable in order for our customers to actually grow. With that, I usually will say something along the lines of "look, it's better for us to talk about this now because you're probably going to fire me 90 days from now when you realize that all of this doesn't make sense to you, so it makes more sense for me to be upfront and honest with the client, which is consistent with our values of authenticity, honesty, and integrity. It will just cause pain for me later if we don't address the right things now, and that only comes with experience. The only way that any of us know how to talk about anything like that up front is because we've experienced that pain 100 times and we don't want to do it again. We're just very straightforward and direct with them; we don't make big grandiose claims like telling clients we're going to get them a 10x return. We don't promise that we'll deliver the world to them because we'll underdeliver every time. If anything, we try to really hard set baseline expectations, so that everything that we over-deliver on is something that they're just completely happy with. Obviously, there are always those that you can't satisfy but we try, of course, especially in marketing. We just have to be very direct with the client from the beginning.

Question: When you start working with a brand-new client, what's the first step that you do in order to get things on the way so that's going to have these massive success stories?

Answer: We really go at the root of how we reduce traffic costs. In order to unlock new growth, we implement a very detailed testing procedure with ads. This is what I train in-house marketers and media buyers and agencies on: our fourth phase testing approach towards paid social and paid traffic. We either directly do this for them or train them how to use it, themselves. All in all, it's a straightforward process that's almost impossible to replicate, unless you've had a significant amount of training on it. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's a bulletproof testing procedure, but it's probably the next best thing. It really allows those who are running the ads - the marketers the media buyers the agencies - to gain absolute clarity on what exactly is working with their ads and why, down to the individual level of detail of an individual ad element, like a hook, a text overlay, a headline, or a variation. That process has been wildly effective for us in spending tens upon tens of millions of dollars on ads.

Question: What are some of the common mistakes you've seen made by agencies in their efforts to reduce ad spend?

Answer: Definitely in not having enough creative to scale when you're scaling, and not testing. One of the biggest downfalls is when people sort of get complacent; they think that they're properly scaling and that they can just ride the rest of it out. But this is the exact time to be testing; when the going is good. This is when you should be putting in the most work to find your winning ad, because you don't want to be at liberty to win; if that ad starts to decline, people realize that they're not being proactive with their actual ad management and the way that they buy paid media. When those ads start to decline, that revenue declines or leads decline, and then you start to get unhappy clients. In reality, we were 7, 14, or 30 days behind because we should have been testing new angles, new messaging, and new creative so much further in advance to prepare for the fatigue, so that when they have fatigues we just simply replace it with the next winning ad. But, like most things in life, you know it requires work, and when you don't put in the work, that's when things you know start to hit obstacles.

Check Out The Podcast!

William has so much great information from his experience in reducing ad spend and creating successful ad campaigns. Check out the podcast below to learn more about best utilizing your ad spend!

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