Create Winning Facebook Ads and Quick Sales with Adrian Morrison
Retail ecommerce is one of the fastest-growing markets in the worldâexpected to top $4.9 trillion by 2021. But itâs a crowded and competitive space. Many business owners struggle to find the time and resources to develop a plan that will differentiate their customer experience from the rest.
Even though entrepreneurs are ambitious and may know what they want to do from a marketing perspective, most tools are either too basic or require more time and resources than their teams can afford.
The way to succeed in ecommerce if youâre just starting out is to either experience a lot of trial and errorâwhich means money and timeâor learn from others about strategies that work and the tools that help them.
When his fatherâs retirement stock plummeted, Adrian Morrisonâs family lost everything. Adrian and his big brother, Anthony, left college at that time to pursue online marketing.
Who is Adrian Morrison?
He turned a few dollars from Facebook ads into a multimillion-dollar marketing company. Heâs also a public speaker and the author of the books Social Media Profits From Your Home and $20K Per Day Ecom Secrets.
We talk to Morrison about his start, his strategies for success on Facebook and in the future.
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For those who are not familiar with you, can you tell them a little bit about yourself and what you do?
First off, itâs great to hear that the students Iâve sent to you are crushing it.
As for me, Iâm 31 years old, about to be 32 in November, and I have been doing this since I was in college. So I think now itâs been about 10 years. I was trying to get into law school and I was having a very, very tough time, and I turned to internet marketing and I started doing very, very well.
Originally I was not doing ecommerce. I was doing affiliate marketing, so I was promoting other peopleâs products, digital products for commissions. And about two years ago, I started doing ecommerce after doing very well in other avenues online. And it just exploded for me. So my business with Shopify is all drop shipping. I donât keep any stock. I never see any of my products and never touch them. I never ship them. And itâs just been really amazing because a lot of people that do ecommerce, they often keep a warehouse full of stock. Thatâs what I guess intrigued everybody about what I was doing and the numbers I was able to put up.
Iâve been able to really simplify it for myself because I do have various different businesses other than ecommerce. I travel the world, and I teach at live events. I teach Facebook marketing and ecommerce and affiliate marketing. Iâve written two books that sold around 200,000 copies. I am someone who does a lot of different things, but ecommerce has been really amazing.
How did you start with affiliate marketing?
My entire backstory is actually quite intriguing. My father was pretty wealthy in terms of real estate. And I went to a school called Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi. And his dream was for me to be an attorney and for my older brother, Anthony, to be a doctor. And he ended up investing a lot [in the stock market]. Well, actually, 95% of his money was in WorldCom stock, and anybody that knows anything about WorldCom knows that it completely busted. So he went broke overnight. And that kind of sent our family into a tailspin.
So weâre in college, both my brother and I, and my dad has lost all of his money. We didnât have school loans. My dad was paying cash for college. So we had to do something quick. And that got my brother and I looking into other ways to make money and supplement our income.
My dad was around 65. Nobody would hire him. The only job offer he got was selling Cracker Jacks at the Triple-A baseball stadium in Jackson for $7 an hour. So that really made me shift focus from being patient to impatient. I did not want to wait eight years to make money by going to law school and getting into a bunch of debt. I wanted to make money right nowâand make a significant amount of it. And thatâs when I found online marketing and I started doing affiliate work and from there, my eyes opened to this massive world of cash flow and instant gratification. And Iâve continued to grow from affiliate marketing all the way now to ecommerce.
How much did your dad losing his money affect your jump-start?
I used to sit around and kick myself in the butt every day. I played video games all the time, and I thought I was just going to go through law school. My goal was to make $100,000 a year if Iâm lucky. I had this whole system planned out that most people do. I thought that was going to be my life.
This event with my father made me get up off of my butt and realize Iâve got to step up and Iâve got to do something right now.
So we always kind of joke around that it was a good thing that my dad lost all of his money because that event made us pivot to online marketing. Itâs far more significant the amount of income we bring in now versus what he lost in the stock market. And heâs very much a part of our business now, too. He runs all of the financial aspects of our businesses. So itâs really fun. Weâve turned it into a family business.
What paradigm shifts did you go through during that time?
It made me realize that anybody can achieve their goals without having to follow everybodyâs brainwashed ideas of work. Go to school, get into debt, go to a 9-to-5 job. I mean, that was my mindset, right? And now, I believe that anybody can wake up, regardless of their age, where they live, or the amount of education they have, and get online and actually earn money.
But one of the biggest shifts is youâre your own boss, at least in terms of mindset. And everybody speaks about how itâs so great to be your own boss and you can wake up whenever you want to. But it takes a real entrepreneur, and it takes somebody that really has a deep desire to succeed, to be their own boss. Because then you actually have to tell yourself, âYo, wake up. Itâs time to get online and make some money,â right?
And for me, that was a massive shift, becauseâno lieâI was really lazy. I had straight Ds and Fs in college. And then I went to building this massive business and becoming my own boss and actually making myself get up and work. I say work like itâs hard. Itâs quite simple, but itâs still about the discipline of being on this computer and building these big businesses.
How did you get into ecommerce marketing?
I love that question. Iâve been preaching this now for over a year. The reason I chose ecommerce is because I wanted total control. When I did affiliate marketing, I generated insane amounts of money. I was spending up to $30,000 a day on Facebook ads promoting diabetic affiliate offers, and the one thing that I didnât like about affiliate marketing was that I did not have total control of my business.
At one point, I was running a diabetic ad and was paid every time somebody would sign up to get a free diabetic meter from a company called OneTouch. I was doing about $200,000 a month in commissions. Mind you, there are zero product costsâand so for me, that is straight-up commission. And one day they called me and they said, âAdrian, we love you. Youâve made us a lot of money. We really appreciate your business, but things have changed and weâre turning this offer off.â
And so overnight, I went from making $200,000 a month to zero. And it made me realize very quickly, âIâm making a bunch of money, but somebody can still pull the plug.â Thatâs no different than having a million-dollar-a-year salary at a regular job. Somebody can fire you. Youâre not safe. And with ecommerce, I have total control.
I can build a massive email list. I now have an email list of over 400,000 customers. And when I send out email promotions, I make thousands of dollars, and nobody can ever take that away from me. And I know that [CM Commerce] knows a lot about that, because you all have a lot of really amazing email integrations in your app now, which are really, really cool. One of the big things that made me shift over to ecommerce is being able to own my own data, control the offers that Iâm promoting, and really be running a real business.
How did you begin learning about ecommerce?
My older brother, Anthony Morrison, actually mentored me. The story goes really deep with us. He started doing ecommerce and had success with it before me. We were just kind of shooting at the hip, buying programs, trying to promote things and make money. And my brother hit it all really big. I asked him if he would mentor me on exactly what he was doing. And he did.
There are so many options online. Youâve got Google AdWords, Facebook ads, youâve got email marketing, and solo ad promotions. My brother became one of the biggest email marketers on the planet. And I became one of the top Facebook marketers out there as well. So we both do different things now, but I have to say for me it was a lot of trial and error.
I risked a lot to get information and figure out what does not work. So I remember back in the day, I had a job that paid $5.15 an hour. That was minimum wage when I was in college. I would save up my money, and then I would have an advertising budget for the month. And if I spent that budget, that was it. So I had to use it wisely.
So one of the methods I came up with that I teach all of my students is that I start all of my advertising campaigns with a $5-a-day budget. Now when I was new, thatâs all I could afford to do. Other people would start out with $100, but I couldnât afford to lose more than $5. And Iâve discovered that with a $5-a-day budget, if you run your ads properly, set them up properly, within three days I can tell if an ad is going to be a winner or a loser. So Iâm able to teach everybody how to use maximum risk of $15 on ad spend.
How do you determine if an ad is going to be a winner or loser in three days? What measurement do you use? Is it about traffic or brandingâor just sales?
With affiliate marketing, everything was direct response. You immediately generate a sale when you get a click. So for me, Iâve built up a massive brand online for my ecommerce store. But when Iâm looking at sales, I look for them within the first three days. If it doesnât pop in that timing, then itâs a dud. Because if youâve got a hot product, youâve targeted your ad properly, and youâre hitting the right audience, you should see a sale immediately the first day. You shouldnât have to wait days for sales to come in.
There are so many options for all of us to market things online, especially with drop shipping. There are hundreds of thousands of products to sell. Instead of trying to force something to work, I just look for the things that immediately take off and give me instant gratification, and then I scale those as large as possible.
It sounds like youâre saying if a product is not having an immediate response, it means that either youâre selling the wrong product or youâre targeting the wrong people or using the wrong message.
I donât think that they need to reconsider the business, but I do think they need to find a different product. Iâve seen too many times over and over and over again where people try to force something to work that just simply isnât going to work in terms of product or audience.
Hereâs what I tell my students, and this is a rule that I live by: Most people are programmed to want to market their passion. As a matter of fact, youâve got all these gurus out there that say, âTurn your passion into a profit.â Well, thatâs phenomenal if you can do it, but not everybody can do that. And let me tell you whatâs easier than turning your passion into a profit: Itâs turning other peopleâs passion into a profit.
It doesnât matter what I like. It doesnât matter what product I think is cool. Nobody cares what I think. What matters is what everybody else out there in the world wants and what they think and what theyâre willing to buy. One of the reasons so many of my students have become six- and seven-figure earners is because I teach them to listen. Listen to what the people want onlineâand not what you think. Donât try to force a square peg into a round hole. Just find a product that has something I call âthe sizzle effect.â People are passionate about it and immediately it takes off, and then youâve got a winner and you can grow a massive business out of one single tiny product overnight.
Thereâs one burning question about the three-day time limit: If I had a store, how would I know if the problem is the product, a lack of buyers, or a bad advertisement? Am I not targeting the right people or maybe not using the right copy?
The great thing about Facebook is that you can see what everybody else out there is doing. I am no genius when it comes to product selection. Iâve learned everything from experience. I look at what other people are doing. I look at other products that are having success. And then I go out there and find a similar product or maybe even the same thing. Because a lot of these drop shipping companies, they have their products open to anybody and everybody that wants to do business with them.
So Iâll see whatâs already working. You can just look at the market and tell whatâs working. And then I try to find something very similar.
Now, if I know that I have a product that other people are selling and theyâre doing well with it, but Iâm not able to sell, that tells me that my audience targeting is wrong.
I created a formula. I call it the four phases of targeting, and I teach it in a course I released earlier this year, called eCom Success Academy, and it walks students through how to properly target their ads because proper targeting is an issue. Typically, itâs why a lot of people have issues. They have a really good product but canât get sales to it. Itâs because theyâre not targeting the right way.
Can you summarize the phases?
eCom Success Academy, the course that I put out, had over 150 training videos in it that I personally developed. The phases are a small little piece of it. Phase one targeting should be very precise, using very passionate keywords. So when you go into Facebook and you see where you can type in the interest or the keywords, letâs say dogs, youâre going to see the keyword âdogsâ come up. Facebook will show you all the interested people that match to dogs. Youâll likely see 28 million people in the U.S. that will match to that keyword. That is a massive audience, right?
But if you were to type in a keyword phrase like âI love dogsâ or âdogs rule my lifeâ or something like that, that is a more precise, more passionate keyword. So phase one is finding those smaller, more long-tail, super personal, super passionate interests. And thatâs where youâre going to find your most passionate buyers.
Phase two happens after youâve had success with phase oneâand thatâs when you want to scale a little bit. So you want to be able to hit a bigger audience, because the precise keywords may end up serving you, like, 2 million people in the U.S. Phase two is all about going broad. So then you would go in and you would target the bigger keywords like âdogsâ or âpit bullsâ that give you bigger audiences.
And by then, something called Facebook intelligence has kicked in. Everybodyâs Facebook account has a pixel. And that pixel that Facebook gives you tracks everything thatâs happening on your storeâwhoâs clicking, whoâs buying, whoâs not buyingâitâs all learning. So by the time youâve had a little bit of success, your Facebook pixel should really have a good understanding of what type of people are buying your products. So then when you go to phase two and you hit a bigger audience, your odds of hitting the more qualified customers within that massive audience are going to be a lot higher.
Phase three is about similar audiences. Facebook calls them âlook-alike audiences.â Facebook allows you to go in and build, with one click of a button, an audience based off of everybody thatâs ever purchased from you or visited your website. So theyâll go match people to your previous visitors. And theyâll say, âWe believe this audience that we just created for you to be a really hot audience of prospects.â If the look-alike audience from Facebook is converting for you, then youâre really winning.
Now, the fourth phase is zero targeting. That means I literally set up an ad for a product. I do no targeting. I had 18-plus-year-olds worldwide, and I generate a massive amount of sales at extremely high return on investment. And the reason Iâm able to do that is because I walked through these other three phases, and Facebook began to learn who my buyers were. So eventually, if you follow these four phases, you might not have to do targeting for your ads at all. Now, thatâs not guaranteed. But thatâs what Iâm seeing and so many others are seeing if they follow through and do it the right way.
What is your specialty? If you had to pick one thing, what is it?
Iâve always said Facebook is my bread and butter. Iâve been marketing on Facebook since the very first right-column ad came out so many years ago. The first day their self-serve ad platform was there, I was on it, marketing products. Iâve gone to Facebook headquarters. Theyâve asked me to sign their wall at HQ, which was really cool. Iâm very passionate about Facebook marketing.
I also am passionate about teaching other people how to do what I do, which is why I travel and speak at conferences, why I wrote my books, and why I released my courses. But at the end of the day, Iâm a Facebook marketer. And I actually do what I teach people how to do, which is quite refreshing in todayâs online world.
On that note, what are some common bad pieces of advice that are going around right now with Facebook ads?
There are many ways that you can do something right, and there are many ways you could do something wrong. I believe that one of the worst pieces of advice on Facebook is to try to find an expensive product and adding advertising. If youâre just starting out, you donât need to start out your first ad promoting a product that cost $100 or $50. The cheaper the product is for the customer to purchase, the easier itâs going to be for you to actually get a conversion.
So I tell my students: Donât go for the big ticket items right out of the gate. Find something cheap in any niche and start with that. Youâre going to see that itâs easier to get sales, and itâs going to boost your motivation. Youâre going to see that it actually works, and itâs going to get you more excited.
A lot of people are still saying you should do manual bidding. Facebook gives you the option to let them judge how much your ad impressions should cost. Or you tell them how much youâre willing to pay. Automatic targeting works the best. It has been my personal experience over the years, and in the past year where we did $3 million in revenue. Facebook is smarter than I am. Theyâre smarter than everybody else out there when it comes to their own ad platform. I always tell people you should not be going and manually bidding because you donât even know whatâs going on behind the scenes in the Facebook auction.
Start out with automatic bidding. Facebookâs system is built to do the best it possibly can to get you conversions and sales. So let them take the wheel. Those would be the two pieces of advice I would give that go against the grain.
Do you think itâs possible to create a brand or presence online for a new business entirely on Facebook and skip everything else such as SEO and other tactics? Can you just focus on Facebook in the beginning?
Yeah, Iâve taken so many people that have tried SEO and I have turned them into straight-up Facebook marketers. Thereâs many different ways to build your business. You know, youâve got SEO, Google, you can do many things, but you get what you pay for. And thereâs one thing that is guaranteed: If I build an ad on Facebook, I am going to get a massive amount of traffic immediately. Iâm not going to have to hope that Google, Bing, or Yahoo indexes it on the first page. I know for a fact Iâm getting immediate, massive amounts of traffic to my product. So I definitely am a full-time believer that Facebook has the highest-quality traffic in the world.
They have the most amazing targeting that Iâve ever seen in my life. And itâs literally at all of our fingertips, and itâs so easy to use. You read, point, and click what you want. So yeah, I definitely believe anybody, even if theyâre brand-new, can start their business or take their current business, even if itâs a brick-and-mortar business, and scale it to the moon and back with only Facebook ads.
Whatâs next for you? What are you hoping to see with your business in the future?
My ecommerce businesses exploded a lot faster than I had expected. And I have offers from people that want to buy my ecommerce stores. I am thinking about actually selling one of my ecommerce stores because I want to document the experience and I want to show my students what to do and what not to do, what mistakes I might make, and what things I could have done better. Because with ecommerce, youâre actually building a real asset that has value.
I had a company evaluate my ecommerce business. After 10 months of being in business, weâre at $3.5 million. And that really got me excited. So the next thing on my list is to strike a good deal with somebody through my private broker and maybe sell one of them and start up some more.
But Iâm always moving forward and becoming more and more passionate about teaching other people how to do this the right way. And let me tell you why. When I was in high school and college, I had terrible grades and very low self-esteem. My teachers and schools said that I was slow, that I was the kid that was always looking out the window. In all honesty, I thought that I was destined to be a loser and be brokeâuntil I was forced to make internet marketing work.
And now all of a sudden, Iâm this successful internet entrepreneur that still can barely do any math. Thank goodness for calculators. But I get really excited when I take other people that were in the same position as me, or theyâre in a rut, and help them. Maybe they donât have anybody to lift them up, or they donât have anybody thatâs got their back. They donât have anybody telling them that they can do something. Everybodyâs always saying you canât do this and you canât do that. I really enjoy being the guy saying you can do it. I was there, and I did it. And I want to show you how to do it too. And for me, that is probably one of the most exciting directions that Iâm moving in right now.
Where can people contact you or learn more about your services and what you do?
I have a website at adrianmorrison.com. Thereâs some information about me there. Thereâs a free download for a book that I wrote called $20K Per Day Ecom Secrets. And in there, I outline the four phases that we spoke about earlier a little bit. Thatâs a completely free book. Anybody can download it. Thereâs no catch to it or anything.
Iâm on Facebook. Iâve got a Facebook page that I started just maybe six months ago thatâs grown to over 30,000 likes so far. So Iâm very active on that. I do a lot of Facebook Live sessions and Q&As and hang out with other people that aspire to do big and great things on the internet.
Wrap up
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Find out more about Adrian Morrison:
- Official Website: AdrianMorrison.com
- Twitter: @AdrianMorrison
- Facebook: @AdrianMorrisonOfficial
Credits:
- Music featured in this episode was “Celery Man” by Birocratic and can be found at www.soundcloud.com/birocratic.
- This podcast was produced by comealivecreative.com.