[MUSIC PLAYING] To understand how to best take advantage of this wave that's happening right now, we got to look at what most big brands have in common. Firstly, they have something good to sell. They have a product that people actually like that is meaningful and adds value. If you don't have that, go do that first. I want you to use my methods to sell something that's not great. So go get a good product. The second thing is they have a means of visibility that is consistent and scalable.
They have a way of getting in front of customers ongoingly. Now in general, most brands have one source of visibility that works for them to generate customers. And so my viewpoint is that, if you want to have scale, you need to consistently be able to turn advertising into profit. That's the game because you can go to the traffic store. I'm going to teach you how and by traffic.
So we want to be able to buy traffic and turn that into sales and that's what this course is about. So if you look at all businesses, all the big ones, you look at what they have in common? They all use advertising as a means to grow their business. It is across the board-- every big Shopify brand, they are running ads because ads work and in particular, they're running ads on Facebook and Instagram because it's scalable and it's consistent and it's easy to implement, and it has a big payoff.
One of the things that you've got to understand is that advertising has changed big time. Since when I got in, when I started in e-commerce, there was only query-based advertising meaning-- you could only target someone based on what they typed in. If they typed in electric toothbrush on Google, Bing, Yahoo search, Dogpile meaning-- you could only target people based on the queries they searched.
If they went to Google and typed in electric toothbrush, you could show them an ad about an electric toothbrush and that was wonderful but it was limited in scope because it was dependent upon people searching. A new type of advertising has come around. Facebook really pioneered this. It's called multi-data point contextual targeting. Now to be fair back then, we had contextual targeting but we had one data point.
We knew the website, they were visiting. If someone was on a website about cats, we could show them an ad about cats. Now with Facebook, they have thousands of data points on you, on everyone, they know what you like? Who your friends are? What you buy? What you're interested in? Where you hang out? They have all these data points and we as advertisers can aggregate these data points to build audience groups that we can then put our messages in front of.
It is really revolutionized commerce. It's revolutionized advertising. It is the most powerful form of advertising to reach the hands of merchants that has ever existed. Because we're able to build groups of people that we believe are going to be interested in our products and then put our products in front of them. So the frame that I would like you to take for this course is that your advertising campaign is simply a collection of conversion assets that are working in concert with one another to achieve a conversion event.
A conversion asset is a video, an image, a bit of text, and they're working together at each stage of the purchase cycle to get people to engage with you and ultimately purchase your products. And I'd say this is a good time to mention that we have a course on email marketing and I have a beginner advertising course that talks about the later stages of the sales process. This course is really about getting new people in the door. I'd recommend, if you have the time and energy go check out our email marketing course, check out our retargeting and loyalty, also known as our beginner course on Facebook and Instagram advertising.
So meet me in the next video, where I will give you my core principles of advertising. These principles will support you in making decisions as you run ads for your business. I can't wait to dive into it. Meet me there. [MUSIC PLAYING]
