Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall: Recent Episodes
Blake Beus & Greg Marshall
Blake Beus 0:00 All right, so I sent you a text while you were vacationing,
Greg Marshall 0:03 I was at my mountains, I
Blake Beus 0:04 didn't even I didn't even know you were up in the mountains. But it was just a random text that I sent you about a thing that which
Greg Marshall 0:10 is why my response was so delayed. I got it. Like, I remember getting like, at a random time when I had searched for like two seconds.
Blake Beus 0:19 But I thought it was super, super, super interesting. And it was about tick tock and an internal practice they have called heating, like heating something up, right, bringing the heat, bringing the heat and, and my initial thoughts of this is, and we talked about this all the time. But my initial thoughts were this is why you shouldn't try to go viral. Yep. You shouldn't even put any effort into that. Because you may have literally zero control over you could be have, you could create the best content, most entertaining, whatever. And you just might not be one of the chosen few who gets slow, who was allowed to go viral.
Greg Marshall 1:02 When you sent me this. And I took a look at the article. I was like interesting that they actually do a practice like this. Because I feel like off camera, we've discussed how these algorithms seems it's like there's it's almost like no rhyme or reason, in a way and organically to like, go viral member and we've done a podcast we were talking about going viral. And it's like, why going viral doesn't automatically increase business. And if you think about it, if platforms, I'm sure tick tock is not the only platform guaranteed, that does heating, right. And if you think about it, they're not going to pick stuff to go viral that has anything to do with selling anything, right? They're gonna pick stuff that gets more visibility, that can drive more behavior for the audience that they want to stay on the platform longer. Right. And so that's why going viral doesn't automatically translate into sales. And that's why if they do heating up, what do you think they do about sales type videos that are promoting Friday holding them down? Probably?
Blake Beus 2:09 Right? Probably cold. Yeah, cold. So let's talk specifically about what heating up is, and this particular article, and this article was all about tick tock, but I'm sure there's something similar, maybe not so blatant in the others, but essentially, internally inside tick tock. They would have meetings where they would choose which content and which creators, they wanted to heat up, aka, go viral. Yeah. And they made those decisions purely based on how it would benefit the platform itself, and how it would benefit the growth of their own platform. In general. Now, if we take a big step back, and we talk about algorithms, right, a lot of people talk about algorithms as this like, cold calculated computer software, whatever algorithms are built and tuned by humans for the benefit of the parent company. Yeah, like, that's the whole point of them, it's not to benefit you and me, is to love us. Right? And I'm not. I mean, there's a lot of things we can say negative or positive about social media companies or large businesses, whatever. And I have a lot of strong feelings on that on that subject. But the point is, is having a good understanding of the incentives, why they're doing what they're doing whatever can help you in your marketing efforts play in their sandbox, because for the benefit of you know, you and your your business, but essentially, they would choose which content which content, they wanted to go viral. Yep. And so you could create great content, and it might even be better than the content that's going viral. But if you weren't noticed by the heating up team, and you weren't one of the Chosen of the heating up team, your content can fall flat could just never go anywhere. It could never get
Greg Marshall 4:03 anywhere. Well, you want to know some interesting is? Do you listen to the podcast value? tainment at all? No, Patrick, I always say PVD. Patrick, but David, he actually had an episode. You guys should check this out on YouTube. He tested this. He said that on tick tock. He said that he figured out that there was some level of this happening when on his content when he started sharing things about US government that opposes the Chinese government. His content started to get he was normally averaging I think he said a couple 100,000 views on like every video and then he said all of a sudden his account like went from that to like 1000 views like significantly smaller and he shares the exact numbers. But he did actually say it's like they tested it within the team to figure out what types of content gets the most views and he noticed kind of this He grew, and then it didn't like a shark fin. He grew and then it liked his tank. And it never has really, like, come back. You've got a black mark. Yeah. And he discuss how he believes that in the background. This is happening. And so what, what do you do with this information? Number one, you have to understand, don't take it personally, if your stuff isn't going viral, or just because a video is going viral does not mean it's actually better content, or that they're doing a better job. The other thing is to not use the views or engagement purely as a vanity metric to think that the content is working or not. Because you and I have shared before Remember, I said, some videos that I make will make me money, and it has barely any views. But it goes to the right person, right. And so you want to base if you're using, you know, we're talking about marketing, right? You're using content to build a business, always keep the main thing, the main thing they say right, which is focus on how is it helping you generate your business versus getting caught? I think in the going viral trap, which is, let's be honest, the stuff that's gonna go viral, usually has nothing to do with building or growing businesses. And it's usually kind of seal your content.
Blake Beus 6:20 Yeah, it, it's, it's super interesting, just how, I mean, you talked about it before, with the addictive behaviors, right? This is not news. There's a lot of Addictive Behaviors built into social media intentionally, intentionally to try to get people to spend more time on the platform. And we talk about from the marketing perspective of part of your marketing efforts is to get people off of the plateau. Yeah, into your email list or into your shopping cart or onto your purchase pages. And so you have to overcome some of these addictive behavior, barriers. But in addition, that you need to really understand how a lot of these things work and how you might feel amazing that you had a piece of content go viral. But that went viral, maybe because you got heated up. Yep. And you didn't get any sales from that. Yep. And so you've got to balance that and really think about what your oops, I hit the table that I think about what you're doing, and, and why you're doing it. But the platforms are doing this because they want I mean, all of these platforms have a cycle, right? So Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter are are all huge. They've been huge. And then tick tock came in, tech came in and they needed to get adoption. So one of the ways they decided to do that was through this heating up, someone could show up, they could choose they liked that their content works, and they make them explode. And now this person is essentially a goal or we talked about a little bit earlier. A rabbit Yep. Right. So like the Greyhound races, they have a rabbit that goes around the track. And that's what they're all chasing. And well, now everybody's like, I want to be like this person. Look how many views they got and everything. So I'm hopping on Tik Tok. This person got that many views and, and so they were able to get just a ton of viewership and pull people away from the other platforms. And that's how, that's how they did it. But that doesn't necessarily translate over into money. And we're a we're a business marketing podcast here. And that is our goal. And so having something go viral and tick tock might equal $0 I know you this wasn't tick tock, but you told me and we talked about this on the podcast, you had someone that had I think they were on Instagram and they had 600,000 Plus Oh, yeah. followers and, and you had reached out and they had reached out to you for marketing. And I think your quote was they had made zero sales. They literally zero they were getting comments and engagement, likes followers were growing. But zero sales. So they did all of this stuff. And they weren't literally weren't making any money,
Greg Marshall 9:11 which basically tells you that, be careful what you're measuring as success, right? Like, make sure you're keeping, the main thing is you're trying to either generate a lead or generate a sale. If you're using these platforms for that reason. Make sure that's what you're measuring, and not getting caught up in like, how many followers you have, or, you know, how many likes or comments you have, because, you know, I can tell you like, I run ads for myself I you know, put content out myself. I don't have nearly the engagements, the comments, the followership as some other businesses Yep, my stuff works and does translate directly into business. And so I'm okay with that. Like, initially I wasn't I'll be honest, like initially I'd be like, Man, I'm only getting so many views. No one's gonna take me serious because everyone's judging on how many people are following and engaging and all that. But I finally got over that and pass that where I said, but it's generating me business. So why am I not excited about that? Because at the end of the day, that's the goal is for it to generate business, not just to get reach.
Blake Beus 10:21 Yeah, right. Yeah, well, and think about it this way, depending on the nature of your business. And let's talk about maybe a coaching or coaching or a consulting type of business where you're, you have a simple funnel, where you have some sort of way to generate interest and get your name out there, then people sign up to book a call or something like that. And then you sell them a service. And if it's consulting, could be something that's like maybe $1,000 Consulting package or, or $1,000 a month, or $200 a month for XYZ, whatever, depending on what your business is. But let's just say it's, you're selling $1,000 Consulting package, which is a very low price consulting package for a consultant. You have a video that gets 20 views, someone sees it. They're interested, they book calling you make a sale. That's $1,000. Yeah. That's completely feasible. That's the kind of stuff you do with with your marketing. And in your sales. I think he told me once you had a video that had 20 views, someone approached you and ended up being a client, they said, Well, that's the video of yours that I watched.
Greg Marshall 11:26 Exactly. And I was shocked, because I'm like, that's when the light ball hit, you know? And I was like, Oh, it doesn't matter how many views you get.
Blake Beus 11:32 Yeah. And but you have this person over here with 600,000 followers posting content two, three times a day putting all of this effort into that with zero sales. Yep. Which strategy is better? Yep. The one where you're getting the actual sales, but you don't, you don't feel cool. You're I mean,
Greg Marshall 11:51 bingo, you just hit exactly what I'm gonna say is that one looks cooler than the other. Right? It looks cooler to say, hey, I have 600,000 followers, you know, 30,000 likes, you know, 40,000 comments. And then the flip side is, yeah, I have 400 views. Two comments. And again, one fall right, buddy, in the last,
Blake Beus 12:14 I lost a follower. But I got two new clients for like a monthly, you know, monthly consulting, or something like that. And that's obviously way better. But it's not. It's not cool. And I think, trying to put words to what I'm thinking about here, I almost feel like the social media platforms have intentionally or unintentionally got us all to buy in to the followers views, all of that as being this really, really, really important, like, life changing thing for our own, like personal life and everything. And so that's why I'm sure you get this. That's why people that are making sales and making money with their current strategy still feel like they're failing. Yep. Because they aren't getting hundreds of 1000s of subscribers and they're not getting those million views on Tik Tok. Yep, yet they're running a profitable business that's growing yet, but they still feel like they're failing. And I feel like the social media companies have imprinted that concept into our head.
Greg Marshall 13:27 Yep. I agree. I think that's, it's obviously it's something that is consistently post, right. It's all about engagement. It's all about this, sorry about that. And they're like, but if you chase that, you'll start doing things for the wrong end goal. Right? If you want to get more engagements you can do go jump off a really high building that will get unbelievable engagements or do bungee jumping or go swim with a sharp, that will get you a ton of views. But how does that translate into actual like growing your business, right? I mean, it doesn't. And so that's where that it can be a trap, because it can drive your behavior. That's why you see so many crazy things on social media, because it's like, it drives that behavior because other people see, look how many views and likes, this got this crazy material that I did. Let me put a bunch of tattoos on my face. Let me try to smoke five things instead of one. Let me try to, you know, and you're doing like this really crazy behavior? Or what do they call it all for the cloud, right to get these likes, and these follows? And it's like, what is that actually? It's like, we've been duped by the social media companies to think that all that actually matters. And in fact, you know what, here's another example. There's a rapper that I remember seeing has millions of followers, okay? And he's, he's very well known people will know who he is. But He's younger. He's The younger demo coming up anyways, he has all these followers. And he found his his record sales were extremely low. And his social media following is all about the sensationalism he's doing. You know, he's doing these crazy things on there. And it gets all this Hey, man, look how crazy he is. He's so cool. But then his record sales were almost non existent. So what does that tell you? That tells you just because you have this following, and you're acting the dancing, monkey or whatever, doesn't mean you're going to actually translate to sales. And that to me is like the perfect example. Because this guy has tons of reach tons of notoriety, no sales.
Blake Beus 15:44 Yeah. And I guarantee you in you know, we're in Utah right now, I guarantee you in Utah, there is a business that has maybe two or three employees that no one's really ever heard of. Yep, that is making a million plus dollars a year. Yep. Because they're focused on business principles as their focus. They're focused on business principles and delivering product or service that might be boring, but it's super useful. Yep.
Greg Marshall 16:14 And they're making,
Blake Beus 16:17 they're making great money, but they haven't had to do all of this crazy stuff to get notoriety, because it just doesn't always translate over. And that's why that's why you really got to think about a plan and think about your strategy for getting out there. Because we're all about getting out there. We're all about running the ads, having a presence on social media, even if even if you're not focused on organic growth, just showing up there. But yeah, because that adds some authority, but having a plan to align the content and the people that are following that content, align that with an offer. Yep, that is maybe either either book a call or check out this purchase, or check out this product or whatever. And then getting them on an email list and start building that relationship of a cost a customer for life.
Greg Marshall 17:11 Yeah, I think that's that's the key is basically being okay. With not don't feel the pressure of hitting these big numbers, like I know, I felt I needed to do when I first started. Because it doesn't translate it to what you think is going
Blake Beus 17:27 to try. And you might not have control over those scenarios, like we just talked about with this tick tock. They literally chose which people they wanted to go viral, that would be a shining star that other people would want to be like or look at, or whatever.
Greg Marshall 17:41 Well think about that you have no control on that. Right. So since you have no control doesn't even mean that your talent alone, or the content alone actually even drove this behavior. So there you just got chosen, which that's not a long term, long term play, to be honest.
Blake Beus 17:58 But what you do have control over is putting some effort into getting some ads in front of the right kind of people putting some effort into your messaging, your first offer, putting some effort into the follow up and the actual sales process, which we talk about here, where he you know, you've talked about, you've bumped into some businesses where they are great at getting the people in the door. Yep, terrible at the close. Yep. Right. But putting, but you have control over those areas. So instead of just putting time and effort into this area of views and engagement and all of that, where you might not have control over it, put area put put the effort into the areas where you do have control over it. Now, if you're a well established business away to scoop up some more, you could hire a social media team or a full time social media contractor that could help you create that content. And then you can grow your reach org and that would make sense. But if you aren't to that position yet, you're I would say 99 times out of 100. better off putting $50 a month in ADS. Yep. Yeah, into a direct offer to call you or get on the phone with you or to sign up for something. Yep. I think you're better putting that 50 bucks a month in ads than you are trying to come up with a daily content strategy for organic,
Greg Marshall 19:12 I would agree. And I think that's it's all about investing. We all have limited time, right? So you want to invest your time in the most leveraged way possible, that will get you the result you're going after? And in this case, we're we're after business growth and sales and, and profits, right? And so you want to think what behaviors can I do now, that will give me the best chance to hit my goals, and spend all your time on that. And don't get sidetracked with going after the wrong goals? Because what you end up doing is wasting a lot of time. And if you're losing all that time, you're also losing opportunities to generate revenue. So you really have to, you know, choose wisely. And I'm just saying from personal experience, early stages I thought you had to do that. And now I'm like, I don't think it has any correlation. So. So yeah. So choose wisely, make sure you're doing things that actually drive your business.
Blake Beus 20:11 And final thought here, I just while you were saying that, I think we're seeing a resurgence of people moving away from social media platforms in the way that they've been using them in the past, I guess, I don't think social media is going away. But I think people are reevaluating what they're using social media for and how they're using it. Yeah, especially in the marketing aspect of things. And, and I think, I think now's a good time to be on the forefront of that mental shift. And it's going to be literally a shift back to the basics, where you're going to see people starting to really go back to the email lists, and that might manifest into text message lists, but with high quality, good content on text messages. So who gets spammed or blocked. But But But moving back into that kind of older technology, where you can have that conversation with people and not worry about a heating up algorithm. But people are opting in to hear what you have to say. And you're not, you don't have to worry about the weird political relationship between US and China and where tick tock sits in you don't have to put any mental effort into that because people have opted in to receive some messages from you. And you're putting effort into high quality relevant content for those people. That leads them into getting a service or a product that is extremely useful for them and high quality for them. I think. I think we're seeing the days of the garbage. Yeah, products like the hacky, the hacky the FBA businesses where you're just selling dropship kind of SCONUL garbage like and moving towards smaller businesses rails that are focused on delivering quality at a profit at a profit margin, but not exploding up to becoming bajillion airs. Exactly. I think I think that's that we're new way we're moving away and honestly,
Greg Marshall 22:13 I think thank goodness,
Blake Beus 22:15 it's it's a much healthier place to be for nearly every business and there's so many businesses out there that can do extremely well. But never explode on Tik Tok or, or Instagram and that's okay.
Greg Marshall 22:30 That's totally fine. Just build a strong good fundamental business.
Blake Beus 22:35 And yeah, focus on that. And And yep, I mean, that's all I have to say about the
Greg Marshall 22:40 subject. Yeah. So I think I mean, so yeah, as we wrap this up, Blake, how do people get ahold it's like, you start calm, and they get a hold of me at Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session call. And until next time, see you later. Bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 Alright, how do we start this one off?
Greg Marshall 0:02 We're talking about micro lead generate. Right,
Blake Beus 0:05 right, right.
Greg Marshall 0:06 And maybe I don't even know if that's a name that someone has come up, you know, somewhere else, we're or you want to take credit for it, because technically you call it, which is micro lead generation is, well, why don't you explain kind of what we're talking about with micro lead generation? And how you came up with that name? Yeah, yeah. So
Blake Beus 0:25 I mean, everybody in their dog talks about lead generation, getting them, you know, off of social media or off of wherever and onto your email list or your text messaging list. And all of that is great, everybody thinks about that talks about that, always putting effort into that. But there's like a little mini step before that, that you can do that works really well, under certain circumstances, that that should be considered. And it's this micro step, where you're basically basically generating leads that you don't know much about them yet, you don't know their name, you don't know, their email address you met may not even know exactly how many people are on that list. Yeah, but you're putting, you're putting concerted effort into building that list of leads, that you can then follow up with an offer for either, you know, a solid lead generation, or a product purchase offer or something like that. And so essentially, what we're talking about here is building audiences via whatever means that you can, that are much, much, much more likely to be interested in what your next offer is, that you can then target with traffic or with paid ads. Yep. So you're building a list of leads, but you don't know anything about them, other than they got on the list through whatever you were doing to get him on the list. So yeah, that's that's the concept there?
Greg Marshall 1:54 Well, here's, here's a question. And you can actually do this both organically and paid. You can, you can utilize content and put money behind it to build this micro audience. But I'd like to get your opinion on. Why do you think not as many people talk about this audience? Proactively building right?
Blake Beus 2:13 I think it's because it's it, it's hard to conceptualize what's happening there. It's not necessarily tangible, like an email list, I can go in there. And I can see oh, hey, we got x more leads on the list. My list is now you know, 15,000 people big Yeah, I spent this money to get there. I have all that information about them. And oftentimes, like business owners, whatever they want the hard numbers, well, they should want the hard numbers. Yeah. But sometimes there's these more intangible things you have to think about. And frankly, this used to be way more common. Back in the mail marketing days, the all of that stuff 50 years ago, because you just didn't have access to the data. Yep. But I felt my gut is telling me, that's why we don't have people talking about or not talking about it in this this way, per se.
Greg Marshall 3:10 Yeah. And I think with these types of audiences, too, I think you're right, with the tangible, right, you don't have a tangible name, phone number email, to kind of control the, where the direction of the nurturing goes. But the tools that we have available now are, you can actually retarget or run ads towards people who have watched your videos who have liked your posts, or commented, and those people, in my opinion, if you were to define, like, you know, when you have this conversation, should I do paid? Or should I do organic, and there's always like one side, that's like, it's all about pay the others, it's all organic? Well, on the organic side, if, if you're willing to invest the time, effort and energy to build this organic following to grow your business, then that would mean that would mean that you believe that these audiences are valuable. Right? Or else you wouldn't do it right? Right. So why not proactively both organically and pay try to grow these audiences so that you can go ahead and try to get them involved in whatever it is that you are offering? Right? Right. And that's kind of where I see not everyone is even ready to give you their name phone number email right away. Some people need to see a little bit more ago. Can I trust giving my name or an email to this company because I don't want them hounding me or, or emailing me all the time or calling me right
Blake Beus 4:39 or maybe they're not quite ready to purchase not because they don't trust you, but because they're not to that point. Yep. They need a little bit of leveling up. So you're capturing people kind of pre you know, pre being in the market ready to buy and you It's still a strategy that works.
Greg Marshall 5:01 And I think it's a more long term strategy as well, because you're building these audiences of people that obviously aren't ready to buy right now. But if you think about it, there's only a certain percentage of people that are ready to buy or take an action today. Right? Right. But there's a much larger percentage of people that are at least starting to become aware of what is out there to help them out. So when they are in that moment, they can make a decision. And if you start early enough, you can become that first go to person and they're like, in fact, I have someone that I'm talking to you, where they said, Yeah, I've seen your ads for six months. You know, in your mind, you're like, wow, six months, that's a really long time for you to take action. But that means he fits this profile, right? The person that at the time of seeing it was not complete in market, right, not in the need that day or that time, but now is, and because I was in front of him this entire time, he decided to reach out. And it just gives you a because it almost removes the like the sales part of it at that point. Because they're basically saying, like, I'm ready to buy, just what do you have to offer? Right. But it takes the patience, yeah, to do that, over a long period of time, which is, which is challenging. Yeah.
Blake Beus 6:22 Which is the reason why starting and stopping your tactics, campaigns, even even your organic is so harmful to a strategy, always, always having a little bit of something in the works me, maybe you're crazy busy, and you don't have time to put effort into organic posts. And organic is a big part of your strategy. Just phone it in and show up couple of times a week to at least have something, right. Same thing with ads, maybe your ads aren't quite working, and you need to revamp the strategy rather than shutting everything completely down. Maybe shift, you know, shift 10% of the budget you're spending into just some sort of awareness campaign or, or some, some getting some videos out in front of somebody that maybe isn't a specific offer, just to kind of keep people seeing seeing what's going on. And you're spending this much while you revamp the other parts of your strategy or something. And I
Greg Marshall 7:22 do think that having a continuous marketing plan, it's almost like you can't measure outside of E commerce, right? E commerce is pretty straightforward. When people see something they typically want to buy or their cycle isn't, you know, they're not waiting 90 days to write a t shirt. Right? But if you're in the service industry, right, or you're selling something more expensive, people take much longer to actually commit and buy something, right. So you have to like, keep doing things. And it's almost like you have to It's like investing, right dollar cost averaging. It's almost like you have to have $1 cost averaging mindset of like you're investing over and over again. To get those people that when they're ready, they're ready to buy is making your job easier. Because if you stop Yeah, then you lose the potential that compounding interest or compounding revenue.
Blake Beus 8:13 Yeah, it's the reason why you don't see say, Coca Cola. We're making enough money, stop all that. Yeah. Like everybody knows who focus. But they're never going to stop their ads, because they know that you gotta remind people keeping and reminding people or whatever it it keeps the momentum going. So yeah, let's talk about some specific strategies. We'll talk about the concept, right, like, how would someone actually put this together? Well, I know my kind of several different ways, but I want to pick your brain on death. What are the ways you would have someone implement that maybe for different types, like a service or a product or whatever?
Greg Marshall 8:52 Yeah, I mean, basically, I'm a big proponent of video, because I think video, you can, you can target pretty pretty well with video as far as like, how long people are watching through on most social media platforms. You can't do that on YouTube yet. But I hear that that's coming.
Blake Beus 9:10 But you can target them after they hit a threshold
Greg Marshall 9:13 can use Yeah, you can talk to them after they watch at least 30 seconds, at least 30 seconds
Blake Beus 9:17 of your video, but you can't target like on Facebook, you can target if people watch 10% 50% 90% 90% But YouTube, you basically have they've watched 3030 seconds or more of your video or ad or they haven't. Exactly that's how you go.
Greg Marshall 9:33 Okay, and so, but with that being said, that gives you information that can you can pretty much figure out like who's really interested
Blake Beus 9:41 well in 30 seconds is a long time as for a video ad Yep. You can almost guarantee that the person is quite interested if they haven't hit the skip button. Yep. And they've watched your ad for 30 seconds or more. And
Greg Marshall 9:55 I mean, and the biggest strategy I like to use is to develop the Killer, deliver value upfront and you know you're here to deliver value all the time. But really, all that really means is give them something that they can tangibly use immediately. Yeah, right. Like, after they watched the video, they should be able to take an action and either solve a problem or entertain themselves to do something. But they have to walk away with being able to do something with the content. And I had this conversation with a client yesterday, we were talking about, she has some content that's working really well. And she switched up her strategy. Two, this new strategies working really well. But she was like, I'm not really sure why it's working better than the other one. And the main shift that she made that maybe she didn't realize was, in her videos, she actually created to where the person could take the content that was given to them, and immediately implement it, versus the other one was almost speaking a little bit maybe over their heads, right? Not not to be like condescending, but just, you know, you get stuck, kind of like in your own space, and you're talking and your language versus new customers language. And that's why it's working. I think the key is, when they watch something, they should feel like, oh, I can actually, it's almost like they're testing you before having to commit to buying from you.
Blake Beus 11:19 Yeah, I would say one of the differences, because we can even illustrate that with this podcast right here. The difference in those types of content is first we talked about the concepts. Yeah. So we're giving people concept ideas, but how to actually implement those concepts is where the actionable piece comes in. So if we wanted to deliver value up front, based on what we're talking about right here, I probably wouldn't start on an ad with the concept. Yeah, I would start with the, here's a very specific strategy you can use to build these micro lead lists. Yes. And we've talked about that. So you've talked about video and retargeting. That's one of my favorites. Like, if I were a local business, you're going to do globally, but local businesses, oftentimes don't think about the strategy. And it's super cheap for what they use. But if I were local video business, the easiest way to do this is to just create a video ad and deliver some value up front. We've, we've talked about, I'll give you an example in a minute, but deliver the value up front, run ads on all the platforms for video views, but just in your local area, and you can get super cheap video views that way. And now you're building retargeting lists or micro lead lists on each of these platforms. And then you follow that up with either a lead list based on your business model or a purchase based on your business model or something like that. It's a very easy strategy where you can saturate an area locally for not a lot of money. Yep, and start building these micro lead lists that you can then convert into leads or sales.
Greg Marshall 12:53 Yeah, and I think the the benefits of doing this right is everyone, I believe, should use this because it's valuable. But the benefit is, it doesn't remove anyone out of using this strategy. Because of cost. Right? Anyone can do this, you could start as little as like $1 a day, and start building the so. So even if you don't have a big budget, you could start this strategy immediately. And even if you have a big budget, I still believe you should use this strategy to keep yourself in front of the target audience that you want to work with. Because that's to me, it's like, you're investing in the long term, and you're trying to get market share, right, and you're trying to get people to want to do business with you. And sometimes it for some people it takes longer than others to decide if they want to work with you, or because everyone's getting courted, you know, yeah, every day, all different types of ads and things like that. But if you keep showing up and giving them things of value, where they can tangibly take what you talked about, and use it immediately. And you just keep doing that. Over time, they're just gonna say it's almost like they've tested out your product on their own without utilizing you yet. And they have already had success, they're gonna be more prone to listening to what you have to say, than someone that's like, hey, I can make a million dollars in one day, but you got to buy for me, right?
Blake Beus 14:23 Yeah, absolutely. And it gives you it's really just one of the simplest strategies to set up as well. You don't have to create any complicated funnels or anything like that. And literally, anybody can do this, even if you're not an ADS expert, or whatever. In fact, it's a really good way to kind of test out an idea also, you you run some ads about something and see how people respond to that ad. You can spend 50 100 bucks to test out a concept before you actually build out the whole funnel and everything like that. So it's really one of the easiest strategies, however,
Greg Marshall 15:02 yeah, it is. And it's it's cost effective. It's easy. It's it's actually so simple, that it's easy to not do. Right. It's one of those tactics where it's like, it's so simple that you overcomplicated, right? It's like, well, you can if you just did it, yeah. And repeatedly did it, it will
Blake Beus 15:21 work. Yeah. I think another reason you don't see this happen very often, is probably because of how media buyers and marketing agencies show that they're delivering value. And what I mean by that is, if someone goes and hires a media buyer for, you know, $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month, or $10,000 a month, whatever their business is, and wherever they're at, those media buyers now feel, rightfully so an obligation to show what they're actually getting done for the client. But because of these micro leads, you don't have a lot of data about them, you don't have their email address, their name, their age, you have you know, nothing about them. Other than that the list is there. And the list is maybe this size, you don't even know how big the list is. It's hard for them to say, well, we have all of these micro leads, lists and in about, you know, in a few months, you're gonna start seeing more sales, they want to start delivering value now, which is fine, but having these conversations so if you're working with a media buyer, or marketing agency, and they're not doing this, I would definitely say talk with them about this and say, Okay, let's implement this. And let's put a percentage of our budget towards this as part of a long term strategy. It doesn't have to be a big percentage of your budget, it could be a small percentage of your budget should be part it should be part of your budget, and it should run continual continually.
Greg Marshall 16:44 Yep. And I think too, because you're right on the money there with, you know, with marketing agencies, you have to show ROI, right? And the ROI is like, basically, how much money am I making? Yeah, but it's almost I mean, yes, you need to have that metric. But it's almost like you should be focusing more on the process. It's kind of like in sales, right? When I would sales, train people, I would say, don't focus on your sales goal, like what your your quota is supposed to hit focus on every day, did I do the amount of activities that are correctly necessary for me to get there, right. And it's the same thing in marketing, you have to be thinking more? It's almost like you should be focusing more on how do I get the activities done, to make sure that I'm getting a return and measuring that versus just the end result and return? Yeah, right. Because there's a lot like, for example, I was listening to a podcast yesterday, where they talked about when they scale clients, they know a client is not scaling aggressive enough. If their return on adspend is too high. A lot of people true. Leave. Yeah, that's good, too. Like, yeah, you're getting a 30x return on adspend. You're probably not spending anywhere near the amount you should to grow.
Blake Beus 18:03 Yeah, yeah. Cuz think about it. Think about it. A 30x return on your ad spend is not sustainable, long term. Like it just doesn't happen. So if you are getting a 30x on your ad spend, you can't be thinking, You know what, it's gonna be great making a 30x on my ad spend for the next 10 years. Yeah, it's going to be amazing. It won't work. It's not going to happen. So if you're getting a 30x right now, that means there's a lot of market share that you can kind of scoop up and start building those lists, internal lists, building customer lists, whatever. So you actually have a much stronger foundation for the next five years for the next 10 years or whatever.
Greg Marshall 18:37 Yeah, it's it's funny, because I think when they I had, I've never heard it said that way. And I was like, that makes sense. Because like, for me, if I looked at something and just said, Well, I'm getting X return asthma. Right? Or, or the infamous I'm getting very low cost for purchases. It's like well, those usually do come from retargeting, right? People who are warmed up already. Yep. And the issue is that audience is only so big.
Blake Beus 19:06 Yeah, it's, yeah,
Greg Marshall 19:08 you'll run through it pretty quick. Yeah, if you want to, like grow, you need to go outside of that audience. And if you were able to find a 30x return on cold traffic, you probably will get shut down on these platforms, because they would be like, That is way too high. You're doing something you ain't supposed to
Blake Beus 19:25 run into that was running my stuff. We were getting really good return on adspend. And Facebook kept saying, We're shutting down your ad account because clearly, these guys are scamming the system. And I'm like, we're not scamming anything literally running ads to this landing page and selling a thing and delivering it.
Greg Marshall 19:41 The sad part was that to the same, the same offer that we have been running the whole year, the whole year, and so yeah, but I think you know, when you think about basically your returns, you almost need to think more about and I'm seeing this shift a lot actually even on economy stores the lifetime value versus customer acquisition costs instead of customer acquisition costs to average order value. Right? Right. So selling one off thinking more about selling the customer over and over and over again, which I think I came into marketing differently because I came from a different industry, the gym industry where that's kind of built into that. So you're almost trained to think that way. But in E commerce is the opposite, right? Before it's, can I get a cost of purchase at 10? Get an average order value 35 And make the difference and make that like, split, right. But now with acquisition costs going up? And you know, there's less tracking, let's target all that. It's more challenging, and there's more competition. Yeah. Right. And with that, you need to figure out
Blake Beus 20:49 if you're thinking like, oh, I cut you off, go ahead.
Greg Marshall 20:51 Do you need to figure out? No, you just need to figure out like that model. Edit, like if you're trying to scale like, and when we say scale, that's kind of like a generalized word, right? When scaling really means like, you're trying to absolutely destroy it. When it comes to growing your business. Like you're trying to spend 1000 2000 5000 $10,000 a day to like really capture market share, at those numbers, you're not going to be able to sustain what you're getting at 50 bucks a day. Yeah. Right. And so it requires a different kind of thinking.
Blake Beus 21:25 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Before we wrap up, I want to talk about one other strategy I've seen people do that I think can work pretty well, given the right circumstances. So if someone already has a pretty strong organic strategy, right, so they're posting good content regularly organic, and this can be on literally any platform, yep. And they're seeing some growth and things like that. But organic is already part of what they're doing. And they're very consistent in getting those posts. One way you can start building these micro lists for that type of a business, is to literally take every single post and put five to $10 of ad spend on each one of those. Yep. Right? Whatever, whatever that works. And just target an audience that is similar to your existing followers. And just put that out there and just make that part of your strategy. So I'm posting every day. You know, if you put five $5 on each of those every day, five times 30 is in a month is 150 bucks a month? Yeah. Right. So to, to some businesses, that is not very much more what they're spending. But it can can over time over a period of year or two years, or three years, can just explode your micro lists your retargeting audiences everything,
Greg Marshall 22:47 and you'll see greater, like, all of a sudden, they'll have more reach out having questions, and they know that so. And that's the point of marketing is really to kind of generate that demand. Yep. Right. And then once you generate the demand, then it goes into sales. Yep. How do I monetize this? Yeah, man. So
Blake Beus 23:05 and if you're, if you're that seems to work. If you're on a tighter budget, what I've seen people do is they say, Okay, I have a good organic posting strategy on whatever platform, but my budget doesn't really allow for an extra 150 bucks a month, because we're kind of just starting out whatever been there got it makes sense. What you can then do is take last week's best ad, which had the most reach and those comments, whatever, and then put five or 10 bucks behind that one. So you only have to do that once a week. So $10 Each week, for a month, that's an extra $40 a month. Now, for some businesses, that makes a whole lot more sense. You're still getting a lot of benefit out of out of that. You're still executing the strategy. But you know, you instead of 150 bucks that month, you're only spending 4040 that month, and that's for some businesses, that makes a little bit more sense.
Greg Marshall 23:52 It's start where you're at, but with the intent of always trying to grow if that's your goal to grow your business.
Blake Beus 23:58 Yeah. So well, let's wrap this up. I think we think we've covered it pretty well. Greg, how can people get in touch with you,
Greg Marshall 24:05 Greg Marshall Dotco, and you can book a free strategy session and Blake Blake beus.com. Alright, so next time later, goodbye.
Blake Beus 0:00 So we talked a lot about split tests. Yep. And we've talked about it a lot in the past and everything. And I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast episode recently called, is Google Search getting worse? And in there, they talked with some actual representatives from Google, about some of the things and I wanted to bring up because I thought it was relevant in the fact that the interpretation of the test results is incorrect. And even Google did this. Yeah. And so I kind of wanted to point this pointed out. So it's, it's I don't know if you feel this way. But I literally feel that Google search is getting
Greg Marshall 0:40 worse. As far as being accurate. Yeah, what
Blake Beus 0:43 you're looking at feels harder for me to find what I want. I don't know. Have you noticed? Is that been similar to you or your, your good,
Greg Marshall 0:51 we know what I'm not. When it comes to Google search, and like, maybe I'm looking for somewhere to eat or products or something like that. I don't use it a ton outside of like researching marketing stuff. But it does feel a little bit less like integrated. Like, it does feel like I do have to, like, look a little bit deeper for what I want. Part of it could be the ads above six or eight or 12. Yeah, search ads before he can even get to the camera. And so yeah, you know, I probably haven't been paying attention as close because I'll just keep scrolling. So I find when I look, right. But if you're talking about immediacy, like I'm typing something, and it's not right there, I would say yes, it has gotten worse, because I'm not, I didn't notice I am scrolling more on Google. Yeah, what's the cause of that? So
Blake Beus 1:41 there's, there's a lot of different causes for that. One of the things I do for a lot of my clients as I help find solutions for them, right, so, so, right now I have quite a few clients where we have data integration issues, right. So they want to bring their marketing and advertising data, and pair that and merge that with their email marketing CRM, like HubSpot, or or any of those and merge those things together. So they can actually have actionable data. And so, so I deal with a lot of these kinds of data integration things, but I have to do a lot of searching to find, maybe they need a tool or something like that. So I'll search for a tool or an integration system or whatever. And I would say over 50% of the articles that I find these days, are something along the lines of, you know, the top 10 tools for this. Yeah, and it's just regurgitated content. And then at the end, the paragraph is almost identical on all of them, it says something like, so as you can tell, no matter what you choose, you're gonna find a good solution. And it really depends on your needs. And I'm like, I want an opinion. Yeah, I want you to and you could tell that whoever danced, take a stance, and you can tell it, whoever wrote the article, didn't write the article to actually help you make a decision, they probably haven't even used any of the software, they're just kind of regurgitating things. And you're getting a lot more of that content on Google. In addition, you're getting Google adding things like they have, they have, depending on what you're searching, they'll have like a box along the top with some information, or they'll have the sidebar box, like a little widget on there. You see that if I search for like a movie star or something like a little box, there, they'll have like, if you're searching for a restaurant or something, they'll have like a widget with placements and things like that. So what kind of the end result is that when you search for something, you could have widgets, ads, another widget, a thing on the side, and then your organic search results, you literally have to scroll down under everything. Now, I don't hate ads. So obviously, we talk about ads all the time. I think ads are a very, very important part of running a business and marketing and everything. But Google has done a lot of different things to try to maximize their profits, get more people to stay on their system, as opposed to like bouncing off on to something else, and whatever. So that's a this is some foundational knowledge. On this podcast, they interview the person at Google and they shared this person had been with Google for a long time, 15 years or whatever. And, and essentially, they ran an accidental split test, okay, for 10 years. So they had 10 years of Google search data. And here's here's what the test was they had a test where some people would not get anything other than just the search results, and a few ads on top and then everyone else would get all the new bells and whistles. And as they added new bells and whistles that got busier and everything. The person who wrote that test was the person they were actually interviewing saying she had moved on been promoted whatever. And then 10 years down the road, someone comes to her and says, Hey, we noticed a glitch. And she's, they start talking about it. And it was her test that she wrote the code for and never got turned off. She got promoted. moved on, and everybody forgot about it. Yep. And so she said, Well, before we actually turn that off, yeah. Let's analyze the data. Yep. And in the podcast, she's she, the, because the question asked was, by the podcast interviewer was, do all of those widgets and things actually make Google better? Yeah. And this was where and when, when they asked better? Are they referring to user experience or business better for the user? of Google? I want to clarify, yes, yeah, that's important, better for the people who are actually using Google, because those are the people you're best paying for those of your customers, right. And so they did an analysis of 10 years worth of data. Now, that's trillions and trillions of data points and searches and things. That's a lot of data. And the conclusion they came to was that there was a significant, let's see exactly how she put it. And this is where I was like, No, you're wrong. She said that, we found that people that had all of the widgets, and everything did, I think it was like three to 9% more searches in Google than people who didn't. And the conclusion she came to was that, therefore, people like the widgets, and all of that more than they like not having them.
Greg Marshall 6:46 So now it just sounds like you got lost, so you just keep searching,
Blake Beus 6:51 right? That was my exact thing. I said, as soon as I heard her conclusion, I was like, or, you know, people were frustrated and couldn't find what they were looking for. So they had they were forced to search for. And so the whole reason I wanted to tell this story and bring all of this up is that we need to make sure we're interpreting, interpreting the results of our split test correctly. And we need to follow those up with other tests to confirm what we believe, you know, we need to think about that.
Greg Marshall 7:25 Here's a couple of questions I have for you, since you're heavy in the data world. Yeah. What is like? And this is, like a personal question from me, as far as I would like to know, your opinion? What's the statistical relevance? What's like the minimum amount, that you really should be able to say, this is relevant, right? Like if you run an AB test, and it's like, you had, you know, five purchases? And maybe the ads been seen 2000 times, right? That, that seems a little bit less accurate than if you were like, you had 50 purchases. But the ads we're seeing 400,000 times, right, right, is there like what's kind of that threshold of like, where you where you can actually take the data and say, this means something.
Blake Beus 8:14 So the there are actual math equations to measure this, and it's called the standard deviations. It's a statistical thing. And it's been a long time since I've taken my stand, and actually done the math. But statisticians actually use a mathematical formula to determine the relevance of a data point. But essentially, it takes, it takes into consideration the sample size. So in the ads case, how many impressions it got, and how many people it was put in front of, because those are two different things, impressions versus number of unique impressions or number of unique people. So you would measure it based on impressions versus based on people and run the analysis that confirm compared to how many conversions or objectives were met. And then you you run some statistical analysis. And then if it's within a certain standard deviation of the, everything's measured on like a bell curve, right? So the relevance is right there in the middle of the bell curve, and the standard deviations are measured off to the side and the relevance is determined based on how far you are, how far you are from the center, but also how quick the bell curve goes up and down. If it's a slope that's like this, the relevance you need a wider standard deviation in order for you to say okay, within the standard deviation, we have a 90% relevance because we're getting 90% of the people but we have more variation that relevance right. Whereas if you have a very sharp curve within within like a half deviation, you get a 90 or a 95% row relevance because as that gets 95% of God's statistical significance, I'm going to I'm going to take out to answer your question as a real, central really quick to answer your question is, with Facebook ads and things like that, unless you're running very, very large dollar amounts, what I would do is kind of go on gut feelings and then follow up with a test. So for example, 4000 impressions with five conversions is more significant than 400 impressions with five conversions. Yep. Even though you have the same number of conversions, that might just be you happen to hit the right people at the right time, right up front. Which can be misleading. It can be mislim. So if you were to shut that off and be like, Oh, okay, let's just bump the budget up. 10x. Yeah. It might not scale appropriately. So you got to use your gut, and then run follow up tests on whatever you're testing.
Greg Marshall 10:48 So basically, to what I'm gathering is, the more kind of data you have, the better as far as like the sample size, right? It's going to be more accurate when you can actually make better decisions versus small decisions. And another. Here's another point, the reason the reason why I asked you that I so a lady that I really respect in the marketing world, she heard she had put out a tweet the other day that I was like, that's an interesting point, because I have seen that, but I've never been able to, because you taught the opposite. So I've never been able to like, figure it out why that is. And she had mentioned that click through rate really isn't as important as people think, especially as you scale. As you scale, the click through rate goes down. Yeah, but you're still getting the returns and purchases, she used the sample size, where she had a client that had a click through rate of like maybe 1%, or like point eight, zero, right. And I was getting a two to three row as at I think she said $500 a day in span. And she had another client spending 15 grand a day click the rate was like, point oh, eight or like really low. But still, they were maintaining a two to three return on adspend. So she had used that data point to basically determine this should give you an idea that click through rate is probably not the real metric to measure the success of an app. Yeah. And I thought, well, that's interesting, because I have seen like ads that scale really well that are below the 1%. Click through rate.
Blake Beus 12:25 Yeah, I would definitely say that. You what you need to do is look at the metric that makes the most sense, given the circumstances. And this is where I want to say gut or intuition. But But think about it. So for example, if you have a campaign that is new and doesn't have really any conversions, or the conversions are pretty low. Yep. conversions are a difficult metric to determine the successful of the success of that ad, because there's some bottlenecks elsewhere. So that's when you kind of move closer to the top of the funnel. And say, okay, maybe click through rate is the most important metric for us to look at right now between these two ads, because our spend is a little low, maybe it's a new ad account or so we don't have an established audiences or anything yet. So let's kind of look closer up. But as the campaigns get more mature, as the ad account gets more mature, as the offers get more mature, as the offer alignment with the audience gets more mature, yep, then you can start looking saying okay, click through rate is now maybe not the most significant thing, because we have a consistent record of sales and conversions. Now, the conversions is the most important thing. So we can kind of ignore click through rate, as long as our conversions are where we want them to be or improving.
Greg Marshall 13:47 Yep. So I think with that, with that being said, it just helps me understand because I've always been taught, click through rates important. And I have seen some level of correlation, but I always do like to challenge my initial beliefs to see if Do they still hold true? Or are they true, up to a certain point or economy. And so one of the things that I picked up from that too, was when she's discussing the click through rate, because I always thought like, well, you can kind of manipulate that if you want. Yeah, just put a cat video up with something really funny or something that's like, you know, you can you can almost
Blake Beus 14:26 force a click or a clickbait or something or whatever you can, you can game that number,
Greg Marshall 14:32 but that doesn't mean I'm getting the end business result that I want. Yeah, so that can be misleading. And I think that what she's mentioning is it's almost you could, I mean, obviously, you'd have to test this with relevance. But I want I would love to see the correlation between what if you Your goal should be the opposite. The click through rate would actually be you want it to be lower? Because you're pre qualifying people more If you are getting the conversion, right, like,
Blake Beus 15:03 Yeah, but you could manipulate that number to by just having the wrong audience. That's just so my click through rate is low, because I have the wrong audience,
Greg Marshall 15:11 assuming, right, that you're targeting the right person, right.
Blake Beus 15:15 And so I would say, that would be an interesting thing to look at, given, you're very comfortable and confident with the alignment of the audience, the messaging in the ad, the messaging on the landing page, and the offer that they get at the end, if you're confident in that, in all of those things being aligned, then I would say, Yeah,
Greg Marshall 15:37 well, and based on you saying that I was making the assumption, yeah, that the funnel is proven. Yeah, we've seen it work over and over and over again. And then you would test the click through rate and add to see, that would be something interesting, because I wonder if there is any, like, reverse correlation or something, you know,
Blake Beus 15:58 very likely could be definitely have to
Greg Marshall 16:01 take it out. You know, that's, that's where you start geeking out about like, well, you know, what, if you, you're looking at a different metric to try to prequalify more, because you would think your click through rates, assuming everything else is working, and it is a good offer, and you're targeting the right person, your click through rates would be lower if you're pre qualified, more meaning, let's say I'm going after an audience of entrepreneurs, and I say, my product, you know, you would say it's an apple, you say, like my product is for if you're making 10 million or more a year, and you're looking to spend, you know, 100 grand a month on ads, right, click this to talk to me, you're gonna have a really low click through rate because there's not as because they're very, very small. But if you're delivering
Blake Beus 16:46 on that product and offer and the people in that group are really criteria, that criteria, you can be wildly profitable on the kind of an app.
Greg Marshall 16:57 So that's kind of what I mean is I wonder if like the level of pre qualifying in the app, like makes the click through rate go down, but the return go up? Right? You got me? Yeah,
Blake Beus 17:08 absolutely. And I think I think some of these things are, some of the ideas and concepts we have with which metrics are important, are kind of old school carryovers, from the golden days of Facebook ads, when you had so much visible data on everything, which has been shut down or hidden behind algorithms for privacy reasons. And I think that's a good thing. But you know, seven, eight years ago, with Facebook ads, you could literally target people whose income was over a million dollars a year and lived in this place. And in their first name was Adam, and they had a dog named Gary, right? Like, you could target it was almost creepy levels of targeting, which
Greg Marshall 17:50 isn't that crazy to think like, now, when you think about that? Doesn't that sound crazy? Yeah, like, that's probably a little bit too much knowledge of an individual, but at one point,
Blake Beus 18:01 but yeah, we were run out a lot of gurus, for lack of a better term come out of that space. Yep. And, and teach people a lot of their concepts and ideas. But as things have changed, some of those concepts and ideas are still carrying over like the click through rate. Of course, I could have a 20% click through rate when I could target literally the exact person in my ad, I could say, hey, hey, Adam, with a dog named Gary, this ads for you?
Greg Marshall 18:31 Yep, click here. You're gonna get way higher click through rates.
Blake Beus 18:35 But, you know, now we can think okay, click through rate maybe is not the most important metric. We need to think about our campaigns and our business business, and our offers and everything more holistically, which I think is a good move, saying has so many people abusing that system?
Greg Marshall 18:53 Well, I also think to looking at your business holistically, will make you have a better business and actual business. Yeah, because, like, I don't remember who I think actually perpetual traffic. And I'm a big fan of they mentioned that if a lot of people don't have business, they have an offer. Right? So they have like one thing, they're selling it but then there's no upsells and down sells and like continuation right? And I feel like that back in the day, you could really just have an offer. And it worked just fine. Granted, the targeting was very tight. Yeah. But now you do have to like think of, you know, as Dan Kennedy mentioned, now, acquisition costs are more realistic. Yeah. How they really should have been just there was this golden age of where you could get like $5 Commission.
Blake Beus 19:45 Well, and it's it's important to note that every business starts somewhere. So if you have a side hustle or something like that, you're gonna have it's very likely that you're gonna go through the My business is literally just one awful Yeah, ads. And you're gonna go through that you have a you have you have to get there and you have to figure out okay, how do I turn this single offer business into an actual business that's going to last 2030 4050 years. And that's part of being an entrepreneur is figuring out okay, how do we go from from this little tiny thing to something that's more substantial that has some foundational elements that can grow and stay around long term?
Greg Marshall 20:30 Also, just to clarify, by no means? Am I saying having that first offer is not valuable? Yeah. Or it's part of the stairsteps. I think what he meant, and in the podcast also was not that that's bad, like you're less than you have it, but that there were a lot of businesses that maybe he probably ran into that were running. Maybe not so morally correct, or Yeah. Just bad offers, that they just were building these offers and taking advantage of all of that privacy that? Yeah, that we did not have back. Yeah, right. And so, but yeah, when you first start, every business has to begin with, well, what's the first thing I'm going to sell? And who is that customer? And why do they need this right? And you and you build on top of that. And I think if your goal is to only stick to like just, you know, because you see marketers out there that they just do like random launches or wherever they're not really like trying to grow a business or just doing like quick revenue. He's trying to do sales, right, quick revenue hits, I'm in and I'm out. Right. I think that with all this privacy gone is been mostly eliminated.
Blake Beus 21:45 I think so most, I definitely think so. Because it's hard.
Greg Marshall 21:48 I mean, how do you do that? Now you actually have to build relationships with people. That group I think, was not really interested in the note. And
Blake Beus 21:56 you have to actually, like, get to the point where you're hiring actual staff, right? Because there was a lot of those businesses that had an offer, and it was like them and a couple of vas. Yep. And a Facebook page and a landing page software. Yep. And that was it. And they had an app to create some PDFs or whatever. And, and it's okay, that that's where you start. But if that was their entire end goal, yeah. It's not I yeah, very, I see very few of those ads anymore. I just don't think they're working anymore.
Greg Marshall 22:27 I know. The types of ads I see are much different. Like I remember, and I'm sure even on TV, I remember just getting hammered by Google ads, like 24 hours a day, like every time I open a Facebook. Yep. Is the new guys like math or see that guy? But I don't see as many of those in our and so I think, I think yeah, the future. I do believe that based off the topic of stats, there will be a new set of metrics that you'll have to measure things off of as when the game changes. You need to evolve with it right? And we no longer have that precise targeting that you did before. That's not a bad thing. You just need to work around it. Yep.
Blake Beus 23:09 All right. Well, let's let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall 23:13 Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy call and like bs.com Alright, so next time, we'll see you later. Okay, bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 All right, leads like you were you're talking about, I don't know, a new way to do leads or leads or a new way to at least look at leads. Yeah, so
Greg Marshall 0:09 I actually got the inspiration from listen to a podcast yesterday, which I respect, so shout out to perpetual traffic. But basically what they were discussing a case study that they did where I was like, that makes sense, because lead generation, sometimes can be challenging to do for companies, because of the quality of the lead. Okay, right. So you can get a whole bunch of leads, but then they're like, well, these leads aren't very qualified, or they're just kind of looky loos. And that's like, the nightmare of every business owner is to just generate a bunch of like, people that actually are not qualified. And so what they had discussed was because they were in a highly competitive industry, and everyone is offering the same thing, right, like a free consultation, or a free, whatever. Uh, huh. What it was doing was it was attracting and training the audience to get this free offer, it's kind of like not really commit. So what they did is they changed it to where they renamed the offer, and actually added more to it. So instead of just like a free consultation, they gave it a name where it was like a, I think they call it an integrative wellness plan, okay. And what it was was a multitude of things to give them a full plan, right? Not just like, we'll just take a look at you and see what's wrong.
Blake Beus 1:31 So it was a free consultation, right? Yep. But now, it's which the consultation, to be honest, is almost always some sort of a sales call it which is fine doesn't mean like, it's a high pressure sales type thing. But it's like, hey, we want to make we want to see if we're a good fit for one another. And here's what here's whatever. But everybody calls that a consultation. Yep. So that still that still exists. And, but this is the consultation called plus, which is more than a plan, it actually maps out like, we're gonna look at this, this, this and that, versus coming for a free consultation, and they gave it a name like, they named it the packet.
Greg Marshall 2:10 And I don't think it's 100% Prep, I think they said something like the integrative wellness plan or something like that, right. But then they went one step further, what they did was actually charged for it. And they said, instead of it being free, it's $9, to get to get it going now, to actually do it. And they actually found, they tested the free consultation to that, they actually noticed they had an uptake of like phone calls and actions on the site, people purchasing. And the type of person that was actually coming in, was more like ready to go. So they're just like, well, here's my $99. And we'll go ahead and, you know, move forward. And let's see what this plan is about. And then they were more open to purchasing. Right, right, versus the other one, they said they kept running into the problem of the show rate was really bad with the free consultation, right? Because there's no commitment, right? $100, you will show up. And then the other thing was the person that came in for the free consultation versus the integrative approach, they typically had a bad taste in their mouth, because they just felt like they've come in for this free consultation, and they would do a bait and switch.
Blake Beus 3:20 Right. So they felt bait and switch. And honestly, it's like, kind of keeping a finger on the pulse of people out there, your your customers out there. And And if people are starting to feel like these free consultation calls are just a bait and switch. They're starting to look at you or even the industry as a whole kind of like used car salesmen that I was just driving down the road and it said, you know, get into your car for 77 cents. Yep. You know, and everybody knows. That's stupid. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So so they started charging for it, they charge $99 They added more things to it. The consultation call had a purpose. Now, were they trying to make that $99 purchase their profit leader, or profit a lot like loss leader or just, they weren't trying to necessarily make that profitable? No, no, they were just using it to qualify leads. Correct. So if they lost money on the $99 care, they didn't care because you're still looking at cost per lead. Correct. As opposed to I need to make this ad profitable. Exactly. Exactly. I love that shift in mentality. And sometimes that's all we really need. I worked with a company A while ago that they were thrilled if they got a qualified lead at $150 a lead. Yep. And I know some people aren't $150 A lead but these this company had a service that was started at $1,200 a month. Okay. And the service was great. And once people signed up, they were with them for years and years and years. Yep. So $150 lead was was for qualified leads was very, very, very profitable for them. And but if you're thinking with this type of an offer, I spend $100. Or, or I spent, let's say, I spent $100 on an ad and to get one purchase yet I'm breaking even, I got a free lead. Yep, I got a lead for free. That's and fantastic and qualified, pre qualified or even if you spent, you know, $100. And it costs you two $200 to get that lead or whatever, your instead of 100, but it's still at 100 bucks for a lead. And that's a qualified lead. And if your next offer is very profitable, you're you're still doing well,
Greg Marshall 5:37 well. And I think that's the biggest challenge with the service side, I was actually explaining this to one of my other friends that does marketing that only does on the service side. And I told him well, I typically prefer to do e commerce, even though a lot of other advertising agencies do not. And it's simple. The reason for me that I like it is because it's very cut and dried. So I spent X amount of dollars, I made this much back, and there's not very much discussion on is it working or not right versus a lead? Gen typically, what makes it challenging is you don't know how good of a salesperson or sales team they have, how good their sales process actually is. Yeah. Do they follow up to like there's there's too many things that the easiest person to blame with lead generation is the marketer? Well, yeah,
Blake Beus 6:21 as a as a media buyer agency and things like that. You have to make sure that those back end processes are working, and you have almost zero controls, and you can drop hints, and you can say, hey, let's dial in this back end process. But if they have someone on the team that's like, Nope, we're good. Everything's working great. And you know, it's not Yeah, you're going to get blamed for spending their ad money. Yeah, when they're not. They're not capable of closing the deal.
Greg Marshall 6:50 And they'll typically say, well, these leads aren't very good. Oh, yeah, blame the leads. But here's the thing. I'm a media buyer, but I think, slightly different than most media buyers. And the fact that I started reverse, meaning I originally came from the sale, right? From the sales side and running sales teams. And if there's one thing that I know, is that sales teams are full of excuses, when it comes to what sales sees want is they want to call someone on the phone one time, have them answer, have their credit card ready and buy the most expensive highest commission product possible. But if that scenario doesn't work that way, immediately, the lead is bad. Yeah. Right. And I know that and so anytime I hear that I almost will view the business like, Hey, I've heard this story before. Right? Every person who's selling will always say the leads are not very good. If they're not buying
Blake Beus 7:50 instantly, right? Yeah, well, it's so it's so interesting, because I've been on sales teams. Before when I was going through college, I worked, worked in sales, and it was pretty easy for me to fall into the mentality. When I started that the person over there that is consistently number one, or number two for the month in sales, and I'm over here like number eight, out of a 10 person to it was easy for me to fall into, well, they're just getting all the good to get the good leads. Which was stupid, because we had a bucket of leads. And they were just pan it out. They were just handed out because they were from lead forms or whatever. And we had to follow up. Yep. Turns out I was the problem. Yeah. And I needed to get organized with how I followed up with people. And then I started consistently getting up to the number two number three spot. Yep. But
Greg Marshall 8:42 that's that's really typically the case. But with that being said, there is times where there are times when the leads are really not qualified. Sure. And coming from the sales back on, I remember that too. Like we're, if I have a list of 10 leads, I never was of the belief that it's purely a numbers game, like sales managers that I've worked with before in the past are like, it's just get on your phone call any phone number. And if you call 100 times you're close, whatever. And I always thought, Well, how do I get them a little bit more pre qualified to where like, if I if you're going to sell something that requires you to have a bank account, which I've run into this before, and I'm talking to a person who doesn't have a bank account, they're, they're not qualified, right? Doesn't matter how good of a salesperson like that lead technically is not qualified. Or it's the same people in real estate. You can't sell a home to someone has a 100 credit score. Yeah, right. Like it's just it's not going to work. They do have to be qualified. And so I do I do like their process of taking it one step further. Implementing the they're paying for this, you know, integrative approach. They changed the language, they changed the offer, and they started to get an increase in leads and one of the big things that they were talking about is don't necessarily worry about the cost per lead, worry more about the qualified lead coming in. Because you can get kind of fooled and to going after cheap leads, but not they're not really qualified.
Blake Beus 10:14 I mean, you want cheap leads, it's so easy you get leads for 10 cents a lead, if you don't care about qualified leads, it's very easy. It's very, very easy. And, frankly, there are unfortunately, marketing and media buying agencies out there that that's what they do. And they just kind of burn through clients. And they, they their case studies are oftentimes like, these guys were paying $50 to Lea, we got it down to $1.50 per lead. Yeah. And they brag about that they sign up a new client, they spend a bunch of their money they make they make the agency makes a bunch of money over the next six months or a year, they usually try to get them to sign some sort of time period, long term contract, and then they burn through that. And then they move on, they move on to the next thing. And I don't think those types of companies are more media buying agencies as they are sales teams that sell their services. Exactly better than they do anything else. Yes. Yeah. They're they're essentially just better salesman. Yeah, than another for their own products. Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, you know, you could have an argument for that, which is, it's just not good. As far as like, if you're truly trying to grow,
Greg Marshall 11:26 you got to get a good qualified leads for them to grow. And I just think this approach is slightly different. Also, in this case, it was a locally based company. So a smaller market, but I still think like, if you focus on trying to get more qualified leads, which does from the media buying standpoint, you almost do have to train the business owner, you have to be okay with a high because it will cost you more, there's no doubt about it. Yeah, it's going to cost you more than like, hey, just put your email in, versus fill out a little bit of a longer form. And prequalify your so there's no doubt it's going to cost you more. But you almost have to not be fixated on cost per lead. It's more of cost per sale, right. And if you can think of it more in that standpoint, you could get a little bit more aggressive. And you'll and you'll basically feel better, because emotionally, it's just tougher to go, Well, I got these leads for five bucks with this other marketing strategy. And then this, the current one is 150. But I'm getting sales with the one with 150. But getting nothing with the $5. But it plays a mental game with you because you're like, am I overpaying for leads? Right? And it's like, Well, no. If one is if they're buying thereby Absolutely not. And the math word Yeah.
Blake Beus 12:46 And there's a huge, huge, huge commitment and self qualification difference between someone typing in their email address, versus pulling out their credit card, and paying 100 bucks for something that is directly aligned with your big your bigger offer or service or whatever that is, yeah, there they are, you're basically going to a big room of 10,000 people and saying, everybody who is a perfect fit for what I'm selling, raise your hand. And they're pre qualifying themselves, the sales process is easier because the people have already said, I'm interested, that's me, I want to buy, as opposed to you just giving getting everybody's contact info. And now you got to call them. Yep, so the sales process is easier. running ads is easier and less stressful. Because something like that you don't ever really need to scale up to $2,000 a day, $3,000 a day to make it to make it profitable. You could be very, very profitable depending on your business at a $200 a day ad spend or a $500 a day ad spend with just a couple of campaigns super simple, very, very simple structure, simple to manage, simple to keep an eye on simple to diagnose. Just it's easier all the way around. I'm laughing
Greg Marshall 14:04 because I have a personal experience with this, which is in the beginning stages of like running ads for my personal services. I noticed there was one word that if you changed, it made a difference on the quality of the prospect and it's it's interesting because you would think one word wouldn't make that much of a difference like, like everything considered the same way or I'm saying the same thing. But I added one word and it changed who spoke to me, like the type of person that would reach out and that one word was I would say I did social media marketing. And then the second one that improves on social media ads. Okay, and one would attract someone that was more like beginner stage, looking for organic Anik type route, how many times a day do I post? Right? That kind of an audience? And the second got, and this is my fault, right? It's, I didn't clarify, because really who I services people who run ads, right. And so I might, but social media marketing technically falls under that umbrella. But that's not what the consumer notice, right. Here's
Blake Beus 15:23 what you're getting in. And again, it's it's a pre qualifier, yep. If someone looks at that ad and says, and it says, you know, Greg Marshall helps with social media ads. Yep. And they think, oh, that's for me, that person already has an established business. Yep, that person is already making sales. That person already has a product or a service or whatever, probably already has a website. Yep. All of those things, which you can't help them with their ads, if they don't have the exact, exact. Whereas if it's social media marketing, they might just have like, a couple of social media accounts. And literally no website, no ads. No, no, even registered business probably not might not even have a business bank account.
Unknown Speaker 16:09 Exactly. And that's just that one word made a difference on because I was sifting through things like, why is it that this campaign that looks exactly the same?
Greg Marshall 16:22 Is getting me who I want. And this other one is not. But when I say the same, I'm talking like the same video that I mean, everything is essentially created equal. So what I finally noticed on one campaign, I was using the word ad. And then the other I just left it out social media marketing. Yeah. And I was like, interesting. That's really all it is, is and then I started going back into my customer database. And people who came in through I had different forms. But they pretty much said the same thing. And the ones that came in through one form, closed very high. And they were all like, Yeah, I've been running ads, or like, they had that kind of a backstory. And then the other one was like, the I have a Facebook, and I'm thinking about starting a YouTube channel. And as you can see, those are two different types of people, one that has run ads, who we can serve and serve as well. And the other one is theirs, they have not made it to the advertising for yet, they're still kind of in startup mode. Those are two totally different people who can serve us. And we can serve as both. But we serve as one much better than the other. And it's much easier, and we can get them more profits. Like there's there's a much better alignment. So it's like, it's like a doctor, right? Like a brain surgeon could probably help anyone. Yeah, like anyone has like a health issue. But they're what they're really good at, is people who have a brain, right? Have a brain, right? Like, that's, that's what they're really good at. And so it's it's similar, it's like, you just have to focus on where you can deliver the best results. And like live right there. And I discovered that just with one word, and so to like wrap that back into this whole offer thing. Yeah, how they switch just the naming of the offer, and then had a price point attached to it changed everything, even though they're still dressing
Blake Beus 18:23 the same horse, right. One thing I wanted to bring up about that is, is giving it an offer, giving it a name. And then putting a price tag on it makes everything feel much more tangible, even if it's just a digital deliverable. And what I mean by that is, if I if I'm going to have a free consultation call, I don't know what I'm going to walk away with gaint Well, I don't know what I'm going to gain from that consultation call. Even if I list out, we'll talk about this in this in this in this. I still don't know what I'm going to gain out of it. And it makes it easy for me to blow that meeting off or whatever. Right? And but if if it has a name, it's it has, you're going to get a download with it, you're buying it is much more tangible, like buying a shirt. Yeah. And so people who are a good fit are much more likely to take action on that. And it's going to be easier to upgrade them because they're a good fit for your service and service is going to benefit them and they've got a little taste of it. You only got to work with you on something and they got something out of it. Yeah. And I
Greg Marshall 19:31 think that's that's a key lesson that I learned. And I remember I used to almost discount like, are people paying attention to the message that much. But that shows you they are right, because literally changing one word know made the difference between who reaches out who doesn't. Right. And, and I think that if anything, if you can take anything from the case study of lead generation, it's really focusing more on how do I repel have the wrong person and attract the right one. And usually, if you repel one, it will naturally attract the other. Right? And it's very easy to forget that because you get the feeling of a why want everyone? Right? There's this fear. I want everyone I might miss out, right? versus saying, Hey, we don't really want to work with these types of people. We want to work with these types. Yeah. Right, because they're the ones we could actually help and help successfully. Right. And the other point that they made in a case study, which really resonates with me, especially early on in my career, even in fitness, fitness market doesn't matter. The ones that like they, they associated, like, you can almost train people to be like Groupon buyers, where they're never fully committed. And so even if you get them, they don't stick around long. Like they're they're gone quickly, right? And that's not really sustainable business. No, you have to have people who stick around for a long time. And that really resonated with me, because I was like, Well, if you get the right person who already fits that mold, you're going to keep them. Yeah, for a long time. Because it's like, you're like you said the word alignment. Your line is like, perfect. So therefore, you're both going into this kind of knowing, like, Hey, this is a long term play here. versus the other. You can attract a person that's like, Yeah, I'll just like dip my toe in and kind of see how this works. Yeah. But I'm not really that committed. Yeah. So it's kind of like online dating. Right? Where people are, like, they're not really even committing because they haven't even met you in person yet. Right? So just by saying, yes, on Tinder, or whatever the other apps are now, that doesn't mean there's any kind of commitment. It's very like, yeah, that sounds today. Sounds good. And if I have absolutely nothing else to do tomorrow, I'll meet up with
Blake Beus 21:54 it. I mean, swiping right, is a much.
Unknown Speaker 21:58 It's not even really a commitment, but actually showing up to go to coffee or whatever is is and we want those people. Right. Will that show up to coffee? Yeah, knowing we are meeting this person with the intent of potentially pursuing a relationship. Yeah, versus just, you know, swiping right or doing the group or I'm just gonna put my toe on there and see
Blake Beus 22:22 you bringing up Groupon gives me another thought. I think this is a potential trap people could fall into if you're not careful trying to implement this, in that. The big problem I see with Groupon is the offer the product is literally just a discount. Yeah. Right of something that someone might buy anyway. And that's why people buy Groupon. And then they never go back there. Again, no matter what Groupon says, that happens all the time. And you can talk to any business, that's lunch, a Groupon deal. That's almost always exactly how it works, you get a bunch of people come in, because you gave them a discount, and then you never see them again, yeah, you might get a couple, but the return rate is very, very, very small, because they're used to getting the discount that deal or whatever. I think the trap would be to do something similar. We have a product or offer or a service that is $500. Yeah. And so now we've bundled this, given it a cool name and everything, and given a $99 price tag. And now it's just a discount. It's not, there's no plan behind that. There's no larger offer whatever, we're just, we're just giving a discount, and you might make the sales. But again, what you're doing is you're you're you're pushing everything to be profitable on the cold traffic right up front, when that really just needs to be your lead gen. So what I would definitely not do is take an existing product or offer and discount that and try this strategy with it, I would come up with a new product or offer that is less effort for you to deliver and execute on. So you don't have to dump a bunch of time into it. And fits in between your offer that you really want to sell them and someone that's never purchased and make it this inbetween thing. Which is exactly what this particular company did, right. It was a brand new kind of thing to execute on it. They literally just have to do the consultation call and then maybe make some notes and then send them the PDF, because I'm sure it's all templatized and everything. So the execution and delivery of that is super easy. Yep. And it leads directly into the next product. So don't fall in the trap of just taking something you have existing discounting and giving it a cool name and thinking the strategy's gonna work. It probably won't
Greg Marshall 24:42 Yeah, and I just for me, personally, I found I have resisted I know the value ladder works really well for a lot of people. Especially in E commerce, I think Congress where it works big time, but I found that I'd much rather Do something how they describe like, the free consultations almost package different. And you have to prequalify by paying, then even just trying to consistently discount things. And I just feel like you train the audience to behave in a certain way. That's not really what you want to know. Right? And especially, like the complaint that I consistently will hear from people when they're generating leads. These people don't have any money. Right? They'll say, I'm talking to nothing but broke people. Right, right. And I hear this, like, a lot. Were there like, and I think the offer could fix it. Right? Because it's about what you're saying. Right? And I, what I've noticed is there there's a correlation between where that business owner is sending that person, what they're saying. Yeah. versus, like, if they're making it sounds like they're not repelling people. Right, right. So for an example, if you just say free anything, well, you're going to attract the person that's just into free. But if you repurpose or make it like, it's almost in sales, you call it the takeaway clothes, right? This is only for people that can do X, Y, and Z and are really serious about their health. And if you're not very serious, we don't really want to work with you. Because we only want community, right? Like, what that kind of does is it causes the person you could call it a takeaway, close, or ego close, it causes the person to say, oh, no, I'm serious. Yeah, and frames them into now I need to take serious acts because I need to save face,
Blake Beus 26:40 right? I think it does. It does two things, right. Because everybody's on the spectrum of I'm committed, and I'm not committed and everybody's here. And a closed like that basically forces people to either say, I am actually committed as this mental kind of I'm committing to this. So it shoves them further to the commitment, or people that are a shoves them further away to the non commitment. And really, that's what you want to do with leads, is have people self select and self filter, so that when you do get on a call with someone, they are much, much, much more likely to be committed, number one, because they're a better fit. And number two, they've already kind of pre committed because you told them this is only for people that are ready to commit. Yeah. And they're like, I'm ready to commit. And it's, it's, it's a psychological thing that helps with motivation. And and it's great, yeah, I'll
Greg Marshall 27:27 take an action. And I think it takes me back to setting appointments for personal training, where the I would always so when I started closing more, was when I would talk to the the prospect who was going to do a free fitness assessment. That's right, Jim called it. And I would say, All right, so they will say so is this totally free. And I say, it's totally free, what we do is we go over all of your goals, and then come up with a step by step gameplan, on how you're going to achieve those goals, with the strategies that we're going to share with you now. At the end, I am going to show you our personal training programs and pricing to see if you'd like to move forward with that. And I would throw that in there a purpose to let them know, this is not going to be a surprise attack. Right? This is literally I'm telling you right now, I'm going to offer you my goal. And sometimes people will say, Well, are you going to sell me something? I would say, Yeah, my goal is to sell you on personal training. That is my goal. Yeah. And because I think it works, right, those people that would show up, we're already framed, like,
Blake Beus 28:32 I know, this is going to cost money. They've already kind of committed to that versus in my beginning stage of the career, I would say Oh no, it's totally free. And I kept getting people that would just come in, get the free workout and say let me just go home and think about this. And just that small like it's not a lot like it's not like I changed my entire brands in I just literally would tell them at the end I'm going to show you programs and prices. Yeah. And my goal is to get you enrolled in one right and that would make people that aren't that already know they're not going to commit or already know they're probably not going to buy they're probably going to not they're much more likely to not schedule that free consultation which is fine. Yes. Because great because you're not a good fit for one another anyway Yeah, nothing against those people at all. It's just much more straightforward and clear communication and all of that stuff. So that people know what they're getting the whole surprise sales thing I still am floored when companies and salespeople try the surprise tax sales thing
Unknown Speaker 29:37 is or mislead you Oh no, I'm
Blake Beus 29:39 not trying to sell you Oh yeah, I'm not trying to sell you and then and then you you sit through their presentation and and you're just like oh my gosh, I gotta well and you know it's
Greg Marshall 29:51 funny you know how I discovered to use this was it was actually by accident. Well not I guess not by accident but through pure frustration, okay, me and my friend at the time. And an ex business partner when we were running the personal training companies, we had a blast, by the way. But we this is how we discovered it. I should give him a call after this podcast at times you remember.
Unknown Speaker 30:17 So we, the way we discovered it was we were constantly getting pounded by the like upper management. You need to have more appointments on your schedule, like this is a numbers game, right? So, of course, being good soldiers, we want it to follow suit and do what they're saying. So he said, Alright, great. So he and I went out, and we set so the just the, you know, the average daily amount of appointments, you would get in this location was like maybe three or four historically, right? And we set and one day, I want to say it was 15 or 16 appointments split between two people. These are our long presentations, by the way. So we got in like six o'clock in the morning and work all the way to like eight or nine. And we were like, couple people that show up. And the people that did they showed up lay and in all we did is we just tried to get as many appointments as possible. We went through all of those and close zero. Okay, I want you to think of the this is on a Friday on top of that. So we're young, it's Friday, we spent our entire wasted our entire day with a bunch of unqualified prospects, people with no bank accounts or no intent. By right. At the end, we went on looked each other in the eye, we were exhausted. We were like, completely, like, what did we just do? And we followed the advice, right? That night, we sat there, we watched the movie. And then we started like game planning. We said, You know what, let's not take any appointments that aren't pre qualified, like this is tell him straight up. Like, if you don't have a bank account, if you're not interested in really getting in shape, we're not setting an appointment, right? There you go, we did that. Okay, we started only scheduling two or three appointments a day. So we had more free time than ever. So you're
Blake Beus 32:12 a little bit below average number of appointments per day,
Unknown Speaker 32:16 we beat the sales record in that location, using this strategy. And then what happened was, we both got promoted to new locations together. And they kept saying we just ran the same play, we would so everyone else that was in our market was setting 10 appointments, just wasting their time all day, meaning it would show up, we'd have one appointment in the morning, one in the afternoon, go to the pole right after an A and B top and sales.
Blake Beus 32:44 So your your sales, you have more free time not only to have more free time, you have more time to prequalify appointments, I'm not sure how you but you guys getting your own appointments. Yeah, so you have more time to get your own appointments. Because the other problem with packing yourself with appointments all day long is I can't get new leads with that kind of model. So if I do eight appointments a day, they're eight hours long, where am I going to get tomorrow's appointments from or the day after? That's appointments. So you guys actually have more free time, more time to qualify leads and get good appointments scheduled. We're trying to follow up with people that legitimately couldn't come for legitimate reasons. And you're beating all the sales records.
Greg Marshall 33:20 And we had a whole lot more fun because what we started doing, we made a game out of which is like, how little of appointments can we get while smashing the goal?
Unknown Speaker 33:30 So we would try to precisely look for someone and we sat down I still remember we sat down in the office. And we wrote out okay, what does the person that pays the most always look like what how did they approach the gym? How can you tell why their body language, and we literally figured it out. We were like, they were these types of clothes. These types of sneakers, they're about this old, they usually come in around these times. They have a body language of like they're unsure but scared and intimidated. And so you had to talk to them in a certain way. We always waited till they were walking on the treadmill to approach them. Like we literally came down with like, precise formula.
Blake Beus 34:15 So you're not necessarily interrupting their workout because they're walking they're still but but they they aren't moving between machines. So they came to you like you're like oh man.
Greg Marshall 34:28 And we just we just figured this out like we just dialed in and like Okay, and so we're cold approaching people just so you know, these are people that are not in on the point we're straight up cold approaching and we figured it out and it became so easy that we will be like alright, so we would call them by numbers of the size of the contract. Because we because we just knew like not that they weren't valuable as a person. We were labeling like that right there is the perfect like if we're trying to sell someone to come use our training. We need them. If they if they're gonna get result, they need to train now one time a week, ready to train with a trainer three, four or five times a week, right? So and the size of those contracts were like, they'd be like $4,000, where we'd be like, that's a 40 100 right there, just
Unknown Speaker 35:15 wait till she gets on a treadmill, talk to her, set an appointment, she comes in what she did for you. And we just would repeat this. And that's the lesson that I learned in sales, where it's like, you can have 5000 leads a day. But they're not the people, you can serve the best,
Blake Beus 35:33 right? So and they're not gonna stick around, even if they do sign up, they're gonna stick around less whatever your model is, because they're not a good fit. Well, it's worth putting all that time and effort to dial in, who's a good fit, it's you just have way more energy to because if what's more fun, it's more fun to run your business when you're making money.
Unknown Speaker 35:54 Exactly. Then spending your entire Friday as an early 20 year old for 16 hours and literally making $0. And then even worse, I don't you have to call your boss and say, Jesse, you know, we had 16 appointments today and we sold zero,
Blake Beus 36:12 as opposed to calling your boss and saying just so you know, I have three appointments today. Close, close, all three of them. I'm already on
Unknown Speaker 36:19 Friday night later. Hope you have a great day. So that would make the boss happy too, because he made money off of what we show. So I think it was it was a strong learning lesson as far as always prequalify people know who you're actually going after and be okay with having less leads. But more sales. It's almost like there is a correlation.
Blake Beus 36:44 Yeah, definitely. All right, let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall 36:48 right marshall.com And you can book a free strategy session and Blake just like you start calm and you can reach out to me there. All right till next time.
Blake Beus 0:00 What was our lead off on this one?
Greg Marshall 0:01 What was the true value?
Blake Beus 0:03 Oh, yeah, the true value of social media. I was like, What did you wrap it up really nice. Yeah. Think of what that was?
Greg Marshall 0:10 Well, we were talking about what the true value of social media is and what that means for businesses, because you were talking about how some businesses feel jaded with social media, like God doesn't work, or it's overly hyped or the use of Word, or even
Blake Beus 0:27 just people. I mean, you hear all of these crazy stories about social media, Elon Musk kicking over Twitter, that's been this roller coaster ride out of news, meta, Facebook, their stock prices are down right now. And so you, you have this kind of attitude with, especially with advertisers that were or businesses that were maybe a little lukewarm about, about being on social media Anyway, you've seen this attitude from them saying things like, you know, it's not worth it. Yeah. Why even play this this game or whatever. But whatever your stance is, on social media being a net negative or net positive for society, and all that stuff. It's still worthwhile showing up on social media and marketing on social media, for many reasons. Yeah. And yeah, so dive into dive into that, because you were talking about some of the reach out to you. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 1:26 someone had reached out to me. And they were discussing, and then there's someone who, they do a lot of advertising and other channels outside of social media. And they had mentioned their struggle with trying to kind of wrap their heads around the true value of is it worth investing in social media? Because he sees other people in his industry, not succeeding? But I told them, I think it's because they're doing it the wrong way.
Blake Beus 1:54 And you said, this is a service based business? Yes. What industry was the real estate? Real estate? Yep.
Greg Marshall 2:00 So with, like, I know exactly talking about because in real estate, the number one challenge, right is always it's highly competitive. And then, really, what you're selling is the same. So it's everyone is selling the exact same product,
Blake Beus 2:17 and the exact same houses even right, like, it doesn't matter which Realtor you are, I mean, that might be your listing. But if I'm representing somebody, any 1000 actors could sell
Greg Marshall 2:26 that house. And that's kind of the the challenge that they all run to. So they all kind of are trying to figure out ways to market themselves. And I know what he was referring to. So he's referring to, we were kind of speaking about video. And he's jaded because he's like, Yeah, I've worked with some people who do a lot of video. And it's like, they're spending all day doing video, but they're not making very much money. And this guy makes a lot of money. Yeah. Okay, so he, so he's viewing that light, from an ROI standpoint, what he's doing is working better. What I tried to tell him, which I think he kind of intuitively knows is, it's just another media channel. So you almost have to remove like, the way someone uses something, is the difference on the success of it. Right? Right. So socially, when I say like, they're most likely using it wrong, in my opinion, if you want to reach a lot of people, you have two different ways to do it. If you do organic, you have to fully commit to organic and do it every day, you need to have strategy, you need to invest money, and time and energy into that it's not free, you still need to invest in it. Or the second one is you need to commit to paid ads. But you need to commit to one of the one of those options and preferably both, right if you want the maximal results. And so that's what I told them is what most people do is they are tiptoeing on, both of these are putting their toe in the water for organic, or putting their toe in the water on pain. Yeah, but they're never putting their whole body in for either or, and that's why they don't see an end result,
Blake Beus 4:07 you're better off going all in on one or the other. Correct. If you don't have the energy or the resources to go all in on, on both, or just have enough time to like dip your toes in on both. You're you're you're going to struggle. And in my opinion, do you need here is this? In my opinion? Yeah, you could either just do none of them and focus on other things. But I do think it's worth still showing up on social media, I would say if you don't have energy to do both, it's probably less energy and less effort to actually do the advertising side of the paid ads than it is to do the organic route. And I say that because the paid ads, you can see relatively quickly what's working, what's not. Whereas with organic, you have to put six months a year into that until you start actually seeing something measurable. But even then it's very, very, very difficult to state, this, these things that I did organically led to the sales Correct. Whereas with paid, it's very easy to say, these ads that I ran led to these sales. And so it's just a much clearer thing. And it's less, in my opinion, less mental energy. But the trade off is you put money into direct, but it doesn't have to be a ton of money. You don't have to like for realtors, if we're talking about that you don't have to put 10 grand a month into showing up in people's ads. Right,
Greg Marshall 5:30 exactly. And I think the point you're making with the paid advertising is if you remove kind of the personal, I guess insecurities from it as well, right? Because, yeah, you know, a lot of a lot of people don't feel comfortable putting themselves out there. It's like public speaking, right? You don't, people, most people are not excited to do public speech. And it's not because public speaking doesn't work and can't grow your business or spread your message. That's not the problem. The problem is you feel insecure about the judgment of what you might get, because I know that's what I felt. But at the same token, if you're going to use social media to like grow your business, you just have to like, you really just have to go, Alright, I'm gonna start taking it serious, I want to invest in it, regardless of the insecurities of what I'm feeling, and I'm gonna measure what I'm doing. But you have to, if you want the true benefit, you have to look at it as no different than any other marketing channel. Like TV advertising, more billboards or direct mail, right? Everyone in those aspects has essentially removed their emotional feeling and attachment to those channels. The social media hasn't been around enough for people that have done that yet. Yeah. So they, they're overly emotional about it, because it's kind of in that gray area of like, you are putting yourself personally out there. And it is a lot more personal because people can comment, or say this is stupid, or they can share it quickly. So there is a little bit more of a fear factor there. But I do think if you just view it as another marketing channel, and you're not emotional about just like your if you buy a TV ad, or a direct mail piece, I think social media is extremely valuable, because you can target better yes, even after iOS changes, you still can target much better than you can on TV, or direct mail my opinion, you can get faster feedback. And you can do a lot more reach a lot more people for a lot less money, right? And they're on their phones anyway. So accomplishing the same goal that you're doing investing in anything else, right?
Blake Beus 7:37 Yeah. And it's, I mean, look, there's lots, like I said, lots of opinions about social media, there's a lot of times Oh, my God, social media, kind of, yeah, but showing up business wise, it adds a lot of authority and everything. So if you are currently doing traditional advertising in any sort of other way, social media is, is literally just another channel. And before we turn the camera on, you were talking about this particular person, and they were saying, Oh, I've seen people put a bunch of time and effort into social media, and they don't make any money. Yeah, they're not they're not very good at it. Yeah. And I would, I would love to look kind of look at what they're doing. But I have a couple of guesses on what those people are doing, where they're putting their time and money into social media, and not selling any houses. My My first guess is they're only putting their time and money into social media. Yep, they're there, they're doing videos 345 times a day, they're trying to grow big on tick tock or some other platform that maybe isn't aligned with the people that are buying houses. And, and they're not very good at maybe the follow up side of things, I'm gonna guess, especially if they're a realtor, which is a sales position. And they're not making a whole lot of money, they probably never really were very good at the whole following up and selling game to begin with, and are trying to compensate with showing up on social media. So they've got maybe it may be going okay, or decent social media presence. But then once they get that contact offline, they have they suffer from the same problem that they had to begin with. Yeah, whereas this particular person, you were saying does really, really well with the current advertising that they're doing, which means they also are really, really good at the follow up side of things, because you literally can't sell houses if you're not following up. And so adding social media as a channel, even if it's not a huge challenge, adding social media as a channel will probably show significant benefits to them and what they have because they have their offline processes already dialed
Greg Marshall 9:43 in. Yeah, and I think this individual, I think would do exceptionally well with the paid ads on social media. And that's actually what I advised him. Yeah, we're at the gym talking. I was saying, you know, I really think that paid advertising is the way to go. Especially if you're someone who does not, doesn't have a desire to commit to creating an organic following. Yeah, right. Like,
Unknown Speaker 10:12 you just, if you don't want to do that, just do the paid ads route. It's faster and easier. It's easier. And with something like real estate, right? The organic stuff,
Blake Beus 10:24 it's gonna be really hard to show up organically on any platform, as as a as a realtor, and you just need to understand that because the fact of the matter is, is when do I follow a realtor? Yeah, only when I'm looking for a house. And when I bought my house, I unfollow the realtor, right? Like I don't, I don't need to see your content for the next 510 years. And so what you what you really need to do is capture the attention of people at that point in time when they're looking for a house or looking to sell their house. And paid is literally the best way to do that. Because you're guaranteed to show up in front of people. And you know how many people you're showing up in front of all of the like mysteriousness goes away. Now, I'll almost always recommend if someone's doing paid, that they post something organically, like once a week. Yeah, you know, just to show up and so your account doesn't look dead. Yeah. But it doesn't have to be amazing content or anything, just show up somehow, organically. So it shows doing stuff.
Greg Marshall 11:29 And you don't have to do it every day. No, not every day. And it's not. I just feel like the paid route is just perfect for that industry and individuals that are looking to get in front of people because you make a great point. Real Estate, I mean, what content does a real estate agent put out? Hey, I got these houses, I got these houses by looking to buy yourself. And it's it's repetitive. But the problem is, every real estate agent is doing the exact same organic strategy. Right? So you're literally competing, is everyone else doing the exact same? Or maybe if someone's doing it slightly different? It's not that much different to the consumer. Yeah, right. Like to the kid like me, for example. So who would be in a market to go buy a house or somebody that I look at all the content as the same, it's all the same like, because I don't, I'm not a professional. I'm not a real estate professional. So I don't know how different this content is. It's just this person is telling me about a house says this one, one person's tell me about interest rates. So this one, one person says the market is going up or down? So this one versus if you just run paid, you could just say, Are you looking to, you know, buy, sell, do whatever, this is what I can do for you. And if you can outbid your competitors, you can get those eyeballs to you, right?
Blake Beus 12:45 And the thing is, is like, if you just get in the mindset of Why does someone pick a specific realtor or plumber or whatever, since we're kind of talking about service based businesses, a lot of it has to do with trust. Yep. And if you're showing up in their in their ads, and they're getting to know your personality, they are automatically building some of that trust, especially in a highly regulated industry, like real estate or Friday Services and Financial Services, right? Because basically, everybody's offering the same thing, because you have to offer what's within regulations, right? Like, yeah, you can maybe tweak some of the numbers here there, you might be able to find a slightly better interest rate, because you got a mortgage place that has favorable rates right now, but you're looking at a quarter of a percent difference, maybe, yeah, but so so the product itself is almost identical. It's the service, the trust, the offline offline support. Yep. But it has to be you have to, they have to know who you are first and have to build that trust, before they're going to reach out to you. And you can close those those deals,
Greg Marshall 13:53 you make a statement that is often like, discounted when it comes to advertising, which is you have to be known. Yeah. What is the VAT? Like the value is? People first need to know you before they could do anything, right. And if you're gonna ask me to pay 500 $600 million for a home, I would like to know you. Yeah. Right. I want to know that you're going to take care of mount a big decision. And that's the part where, because we're all in such a rush. And we're not thinking long term. I need a return right now today. And so you ended up doing a lot of these activities where you're like, oh, it's not working after 30 days. Well, who knows anyone after 30 days, you're talking to a cold market, who's also being tough. Imagine if, if you're trying to date someone, and they have literally 1000s of people all trying to date them. Every day every single day and every single person says they're better. They're richer their services gonna be the best of all, it's literally everyone's telling them that all day just picture that when you're thinking of trying to sell your customer in a service based business that's highly competitive. A 1000s of people are trying to date that exact same person. And so you have to figure out a way to stand out.
Blake Beus 15:16 Yeah, well, I'm thinking here locally in Utah. There are there is one realtor, and one lawyer who has had different people, different businesses, everything that has billboards up, up and down the main freeway here. I haven't seen any of their ads on social media, they probably run ads, I'm just probably not in their target market, which is fine. I'm not looking for either of their services. But the thing is, is they've had those billboards up switching places slightly different for easily 15 years. Yeah. Why Why spend that much money if it's not working? And why is it working for them? Like if I put up a billboard right now, I was a realtor. And I put up a billboard right now, I'd spend, I don't know, 5k a month, 10k a month, depending on the location, and I probably wouldn't get a whole lot out of it. Yep. But these guys have multiple. And it's not because they're selling different houses. It's because over time they've consistently shown up. And literally, you can't think of choosing a realtor without thinking of this particular person's name. In this part of Utah, you might not go with them. There might be but but you're gonna think of them, are you and you are no, you know, and same thing with the lawyer if you have, if you have a need for a defense attorney, there's the one lawyer you're gonna know, because they've been showing up for two decades, on on billboards or just in different places. Yep. You have, you have to do that you just have to the cool thing with social media is is that you can do you can show up, especially in a local geographic area, you can show up cheap, yep. And let everybody know who you are, without spending five grand a month for a billboard in a single location for five for five grand a month for a realtor to show up in front of a lot of people like that. That goes,
Greg Marshall 17:10 it goes away very long. Yeah. And it's social media just doing just, if you look at it, and you remove the emotion, he just said, another marketing channel is faster and cheaper than all the other marketing channels.
Blake Beus 17:24 Yeah. So even in 2023, because we're in 2023. Now, even with all of the craziness with social media, and all of the people predicting that, you know, everything's gonna collapse, Twitter's gonna burn and crash and ground, whatever. And that might happen. But even with all of those things happening, it's still worthwhile showing up on social media. And if you don't have the energy to do organic Throw, throw some money into the paid ads. It's, it's maybe a little bit more intimidating to get started, but I swear, it's easier than trying to come up with really creative viral is all. So yeah, let's wrap it up. How can people get
Greg Marshall 18:03 in touch with you, Greg? marshall.co. You can book a free strategy call.
Blake Beus 18:07 What about Blake beus.com?
Greg Marshall 18:09 All right, so next time see you later. Okay. Bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 You were talking about hustlers mentality marketing plan. Yeah. All of that, like, yeah. Well tell me what you're thinking. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall 0:08 I think having a marketing strategy is important and kind of knowing how to get your messaging out there. And one of the things I was saying is, even if you don't have a large budget, I think the overall idea is you have to have a huge budget, in order to make marketing work. And that's not based that's not the case, that's not the full story, you either have more time, or more money, if you can do both. That's the optimal. But if you have less money, put more of your time. And if you have more time, he's more money, right? So you try to do a good trade off, and what you're doing but hustlers mentality, I was saying, a strong strategy that works really well from a tactical side is manual outreach, if you're trying to promote an event, or a service, right, and this manual outreach, I actually use this in the beginning of my couple of businesses, and it works like a charm, what you want to do is you want to find people who have the audience you already want, and you just start reaching out every day, you create a spreadsheet, put their name, phone, numbers, emails, and you essentially start working that list. And you want to have an offer that makes sure that the person you're talking to gets a huge benefit. In exchange for sharing the product serves that you have to their particular audience, one of the best ways to do that is to demonstrate how by them maybe donating a product, or a service, or sharing this their audience, they're also going to get in front of the audience you have right or will be going after it right. And it could be kind of have a joint promotion, and everyone wins there. Because every business is lead generating, trying to get more people to write their business. So it allows it allows you to add more resources to a marketing plan on both ends,
Blake Beus 2:00 right? Yeah, that's, uh, yeah, that's, I mean, I've participated in some of these, you know, business, lead groups and some, some things like that. And I think that's, that's one of the ways a lot of businesses are trying to do that. But the reality is, is you doing something like that for yourself, or like, owning that whole process, instead of just showing up to a lead generation group is going to be much more beneficial to you and everyone else? But I do, I do want to jump back to what you said, you know, you got either money or time if you have both. It's great. My observation, though, is that there are quite a few times when an organization or a person has money, yep. And then they go out and market because they're like, Well, I've got some money, well, let's do this. But they're not being smart with that. And they burn through a ton of cash, because that's the asset that they have a lot of Yep. And they end up getting kind of poor and miserable results. And honestly, if it's if someone had a stack of cash, and they're just starting out with a business or something, or a new venture, or a new pivot, say they made money in this business over here, starting out with the hustle mentality is still probably a better way to go. Yes. Then it is to drain your reserves upfront.
Greg Marshall 3:19 Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I think about is a story Daymond John shared where he said, like, he made all his money and FUBU. He was a multimillionaire, he financed that new project through only through money into it thought of no marketing strategy. And he said, he blew it off. And he said, he thought, because he had the money, that that would solve the problem. We all deal with speed up the failure, right? So I like to take that lesson that he shared and think like, even if you have millions of dollars in reserves, you still should have the hustle mentality of test quickly, and in small steps, where you're not risking it. All right, so you're saying, well, let's first figure out if we do some outreach, and maybe some lower budget test, to even see if we can gain traction and figure out messaging. And you still use the same fundamentals. And I think it's the same in like, let's, let's use basketball, for example. Basketball is a very easy game, you just put the ball in the hoop, right? But there's a lot more that goes into that. But when people start to get overly fancy and focus more on half court trick shots and dunks, I mean, that's not the best way to go about it. Because if you focus more on that, those are a lot harder than just doing the fundamentals of putting the ball in the basket. It always goes back to the fundamentals instead of trying to get fancy, and do all of these fancy things. Do the things that are not as attractive, which is know how to do your bounce passes. Know how to make a layup, a regular layup, not a reverse layup, not a dunk for the free throw line. Just get very good at that and then slowly expand and that's how I kind of equate He's using a lot of money is the focusing on the slam dunk before you actually focus on learning how to do the layup
Blake Beus 5:07 Yes, yeah. Small little tangent. Yep. To, you know, hi, everybody shoots their free throws. Yes. Did you know that statistically, if everybody shot underhand free throws, you would get about 20 to 30% more free throws made in the basket, which is crazy, but no one will do it because they don't want to look, Grant shots. But but because of the motion, you're actually closer to the basket because of the rope, you're able to get a better rotation to roll it in. And it's been proven over and over again, but no one has asked because they want to look, they don't want to look like that.
Greg Marshall 5:38 You know what you actually bring up another great point, which is the perception how you want to be perceived by everyone else. Right. So don't make the mistake of trying to be perceived more like different and almost value that more than the results that you would get, yeah, that's more effective, yet, you don't look as prestigious.
Blake Beus 6:02 And the thing to remember in your business is you don't have 100 cameras on you, you're not being watched by millions of people. Most people in their everyday lives aren't really paying attention to your your business and what you're doing. So really, if you're concerned about your perception with I don't know, your peers or your neighbors or, or even maybe potential customers, I wouldn't worry about that so much as I would worry about what's working. And what's working is oftentimes not flashy, not sexy, not high budget, whatever video marketing, whatever, not not so bringing in celebrities, as a sponsor, usually what works especially at first is the basics, right? You're you're talking to bounce passes, or, or creating a list of people you can reach out to and form like a good relationship with where you can trade each other services or something like that, that is boring, all marketing. But that's marketing that is highly profitable for the amount of effort and cost.
Greg Marshall 7:02 Well, and the other thing, I want to really harp on that because I liked the point that you brought about perception. Most people don't want to do the outreach, because of the perception, they perceive it as below them, right. I'm a business owner, I shouldn't have to do that. Or my product is so good, I shouldn't have to do that. And that's really a limiting belief. Because most of the time, I know for me personally, most almost all of my biggest deals have been from outreach. Yeah. And it's, it's simply just networking and developing a relationship and not having the ego to think I don't need to be doing that, or I'm so important that I'm not going to send out reach someone else has to do it. Right. That's, that's where I think you can get a lot of trouble as you try to remove yourself just from the day to day, you know, things that businesses need, just don't worry about what the perception is get the results real
Blake Beus 7:57 well. And that is so interesting to me. Because every single business that grows from nothing to whatever, there's huge, there's almost always a strong leader, whether it's the founder or the CEO or something. But that person is oftentimes the one that's closing the big deals and building those relationships. And the nature of the deals change, right. So when you're first starting out your deals, our sales or a partnership where we can help sell a related product or service or something like that. But as the business grows, the deals now turned into well, we need to deal for our warehousing or whatever or our, our supply chain. So now you're making deals with those things. And the reality is, is as a founder, as a leader, as a CEO, whatever of your business, whether it's small or large, you're going to be making deals through outreach. And so you might as well just get comfortable right now. And it doesn't have to be a super intimidating thing. But you shouldn't ever think that doing outreach is below you. It's your business. That's because that's kind of what your job
Greg Marshall 9:11 was. And in a lot of ways too, coming from a sales background. It's similar to how a lot of people view sales, right? Like, I shouldn't have to sell my product because it's so good. Or they just don't they they almost disrespect the sales position in a way, right. I mean, I've had business owners actually telling me like, the most valuable people in organization are not sales, but that that message almost implies that salespeople are worthless or less than and I think that whole belief is just incorrect sales are just as important as every other part of the business. And, you know, in order to set selling should be your selling to help right yeah, at the end of the day, your product or service should really benefit the customer in some capacity. So why should? Why should there be a negative belief or perception of sales? When it comes to all you're really doing is helping people understand that there is help available?
Blake Beus 10:12 Right? Yeah. And the whole, like, the most important part of the business is this or this or this, I find that so crazy. It's all there. It's one, when I get in my truck in the morning, and I drive, there's a bunch of things that have to be in place, in order for my truck to get me to where I need to build. I can't go there anywhere. If I don't have tires. I also can't go anywhere if I don't have gas. Yep. So am I supposed to say, well, gas is the most important thing that you need for a
Greg Marshall 10:50 truck to work to see how far you go if you have gas, but I take the right wheel. Yeah,
Blake Beus 10:53 if I don't have one of my tires, right? It's, it's so weird. And as, as you know, a business owner, you need to be thinking about the system. Yes, right. And all of these systems, and you need to think about how these pieces need to work together and where those bottlenecks are. And I think that's a good segue to kind of go back to what we first started talking about is marketing plans. And I wanted to talk to you about that, because marketing plans is essentially creating a framework or a system for the marketing and sales of your product. So going back to that, what, assume I know nothing about marketing, what would you recommend? I do? Because I know it can be an overwhelming thing where you dump all this time and effort into it. And you get locked into this mindset and idea, and it doesn't work. Yep. Right. So there's clearly ways you can dump too much timing too locked into a way of thinking, or you can just willy nilly leave free, you know, just figure it out. And if it that also doesn't work. So yeah. So what do you need to know?
Greg Marshall 11:58 Well, number one, I think the biggest mistake that you can make, is to start at distribution. So you're so how you're going to distribute your message. The reason why I think that's a big mistake is because you don't, you haven't thought through enough of the who, who you want to get in front of. So I see business owners oftentimes go right into, I'm going to do Facebook, or Instagram or LinkedIn, or Tik Tok, or whatever, and he thinks or events. And you think, Well, where did you come up with that idea? And why that versus something else? And it's usually Well, I heard somewhere that this is great, or whatever. And all channels are great. It just they need to make sure you they have your customer. Yeah. So the first part and a marketing plan, I believe, that you should start off is creating the emotional message and trying to match that with the person you're going after. So an example would be your messaging, let's say you're going after moms. And you historically, after looking at your past customers, you notice most of it is moms, or dads or whoever.
Blake Beus 13:08 So there's some data behind Yeah, you're targeting? Yeah, so there's just guessing. Well, some data races for the person
Greg Marshall 13:14 who at least has a business already developed. They would use that data of who's already buying, why are they buying? What are their greatest pain points, their fears and desires, then you would do negative visualization. And think of all the reasons why they wouldn't buy so that you can do the polar opposite with your messaging, and develop a whole messaging plan first, what are we going to say? Why? How will we trigger them emotionally? How will we help them justify logically? And then once you have that, then you move into the distribution plan. Where do they spend these people? Where do they spend most of their time? And is that platform, a platform that I am able to distribute this message in the way that it needs to be distributed? To get a response? That's the first place I think you start is data messaging distribution. That's how I believe you should start a marketing start
Blake Beus 14:20 with your marketing plan. Okay, interesting. What if I'm brand spankin? New, I haven't sold a single one of my widgets yet. So I don't have past customer of data. Yep. How How would you recommend someone like that get started on developing their messaging. So
Greg Marshall 14:39 I recommend you come up with two to three broad audiences that you would test. Then you would start doing outreach and figuring out who responds, right. Once you figure out who responds. Then you go back to the data, the messaging distribution, yeah. And that's essentially what you want to do is you want Keep testing to figure out who responds to your message and why. And then do your own research so that people that are responding to your messages, ask them, what about this product or widget attracted you? Why didn't like it? What do you do for a living and you start figuring these things out, because if you dig deep enough, you will fit most businesses, I think, don't believe that the same type of person is buying their product. But when you start to dig in, you start to realize there's a lot of similarities to the people who keep responding to your message. And then you can really like hone in on that one segment, and make it better and better and better and speak more like clearly to that audience, and you'll get better response rates.
Blake Beus 15:45 Yeah. And I think it's good to note here is the similarities don't have to be split down with standard demographics, that's the easiest way for us, yes, to split up a population is, you know, men, women, age, location, ethnicity, things like that. And, yes, sometimes that's important. But sometimes what brings people together is none of those standard demographics. It's an idea or an interest in something or a passion about this, or that or whatever. And so it's easy to get locked into the simple demographics. But you got to dig a little deeper and do that. The other thing I would say is, if you're just starting out, you have not sold a single product whatsoever, you can take a few guesses. But then I would recommend reaching out and trying to get on the phone with a couple of people that you don't directly know. Yep, that are in that and just ask them. And the easiest way to do that is to say, on Facebook, or something like that, hey, I've got this product, it's I think it's best geared towards this demographic. Yep. Does anybody know someone who fits in that that would be willing to hop on a quick phone call with me for 1520 minutes. And I can ask them some questions. And specifically, look for someone you're not friends with or family with. Because there's an inherent bias there. Yeah, they can be as honest as they can think they're being as honest as possible. But the reality is, like, we want our friends to succeed, so go for it. But in order to actually succeed, you need to get some honest feedback about about those things. And that's a good way to, I mean, you could get some data, some meaningful actionable data, without spending a dime that way, and only putting two to three hours worth of work into that you can get some meaningful data that can then shift your efforts to say, Okay, here's who I'm targeting. Now, here's what their interests are, here's what their fears are, because I ask them those questions.
Greg Marshall 17:51 Well, I think it's a very, so a marketing plan should be extremely customer centric, right? Meaning it's not what you think they want to buy, or what you want to sell. But providing them what they give you, right, the feedback that they're actually giving you. So if they, they liked this product, because of XY and Z, and you want to sell your product because of not that you need to give in to the XY and Z because that's what they want. Right? Right. So for example, if you're selling a product, and everyone says, I like this product, because it's easy to use, it's lower cost. And it's very efficient. But you want to position the product as high end and different from everyone else. Well, I've seen businesses get so kind of like stubborn with I want to sell it this way. Even though the language that my customer who is paying me is saying this. They don't they keep pushing this marketing message. And what did they end up like, pounding their head against the wall? Because they're like, No, but I want it to, I want it to be this and it's like, but the customer, not just one customer. Many customers are saying this phrase. Yeah. Imagine if you use this phrase in your marketing, the response rate you get, yeah, and how much easier life was become. So this is a part to not be stubborn. When it comes to your messaging and branding, let the customer almost do that for you, not you.
Blake Beus 19:23 And if you do that life's a lot easier when you don't have to you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about messaging, you're more going with the flow and the more you kind of let go and go with the flow of what your customers are saying and keep kind of gearing towards that they the actual people that are actually giving you actual dollars that you act actual bank account are the ones that are dictating your marketing message because it's actually working, as opposed to me trying to like paddle my canoe up river, because I want it to be positioned like this. Yep. And I think just just last week, I was speaking with someone who wanted to launch a podcast So as part of their marketing plan, and so they know that I do a podcast and so they're asking me some questions and, and I said, Well, okay, so what's, you know, what's your audience and things like that. And they, their audience are business owners, and they're typically busy, whatever. And so he said, I really want my podcast to be maybe maybe two, maybe three minutes long each episode, because I don't ever have enough time myself to listen to anything longer than that. And he said, Well, is that what your customers want? He's like, Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Have you asked any of them? And they have existing customers? And he's like, Well, no. And I said, Look, I typically podcasts that are most popular are between are between, you know, 20 minutes and 90 minutes or the three hours long, right. And I said, and that's that highly specific to industry. But there are almost no podcasts that are popular that people listen to that are only two to three minutes long each episode. So what you're doing is basically projecting the way you feel about podcasts onto your customers. And this person doesn't even listen to podcasts. Yeah. So I was like, and that's fine. You don't have to listen to podcasts to produce a podcast. But you don't know how people are consuming podcasts because you don't even like listening to podcasts yourself. Yeah. Right. And so I just had to be frank with him said, You need to just ask some people, what, what types of things would you be interested in? And how long are is when you listen to a podcast or something like that? How long is the podcast? And? And, you know, we'll we'll see, we'll see when he gets back to me on on what he's found out. But yeah,
Greg Marshall 21:41 and I think that's very valuable, because that also goes into the the mistake of assuming everyone consumes buys or behaves exactly like the business owner, right? Are you? And that's just simply not not true, right? I mean, you have to test and see what do customers look like? What do they respond to? You need to reach out to them? How can I make this better? What don't you like about this, so I can get rid of that. And it's a never ending, like, you really have to cater to your customer base, to give them the best experience if you want any chance of referrals, organic growth, and higher profit margins, because if you don't do that, it's gonna be churn and burn. Right? You might be able to get people to do stuff, but then they leave. They don't stick around. They don't tell anyone positive about you. It's all negative. So you're really like making this harder on yourself versus if you become the company or the brand that's known as we're going to take care of our customers by any means necessary. And their feedback means something. Right, right. That starts to travel on quicker than, No, we just do our way. And that's the only way, you know, and try to kind of pigeonhole that.
Blake Beus 22:54 Yeah, I remember very, very early on Netflix used to do this. This very simple survey strategy that I'm sure sure worked really, really well. And I was I was on Netflix, way back when they they didn't even really have a streaming offering. So I was a very early adopter on that. And they said, Ed, I had a two disc plan that anyway, but about every other month or so they would send me an email with three links in it. And a simple question it was, and the questions were sometimes like, how, how was the the quality of the DVDs? And the answers would be like, it was great. It was scratched or, but still played, or it was unplayable. And if I had one question in there, and three links, I would click and I could click on one of those links. And it would say, thanks for taking our survey. That was it. And they would log that data in the background. Very, very simple. But they could have also been things like, what new feature would you like to see next? This, this or this? And I would click on one of those links. Yep. survey done? No extended survey, no, nothing, but because they I was a customer of theirs. They already knew my contact info, they could track which link? I clicked. Yep. They could say, Okay, this demographic wants these features, this demographic wants these features. And it was a very simple survey tactic. But the thing is, is you don't need this massive infrastructure to do the exact same thing. You can do that exact same thing by just calling up a handful of people. 510 people don't have to be a huge, statistically significant audience. And just ask them, hey, what new features I do you use XYZ products that's maybe a competitor or something, what features do you wish they had? Okay? Then you go and make a product or a service that fits that gap. And you just let your customers dictate your next line of products or whatever.
Greg Marshall 24:49 Yeah, and I think you know, if you just want to make your life a whole lot easier, just listen to your customers and then adjust things as you go. And I think one of the challenges that sometimes It's hard, right? Is you personalize your business, you know, you put your blood sweat and tears into it. So when you're almost afraid to hear something negative, but if you can remove yourself from whatever they say, is not a reflection on me personally, it's just a reflection on the experience the service they're getting. And I can change that, then you'll be able to get much greater growth because I think there is a level of you don't want to hear anything bad, right? Or that's, why would I ask if there's problems, but that's every problem that I've ever run into with a customer. I've always been able to use that data to go, Okay, we need to get better at this, right? Or we need to prove it that and that's just quality feedback. And that if you care about providing a good service, or a product or whatever this is, you want that, right. You don't want to put stuff out there and, and secretly, everyone's like, I really wish we had this or that. Versus you knowing that they want it you can like delightfully give it right. Yeah. It's so much easier to sell something a product or service
Blake Beus 26:10 to someone when they've told you exactly what they want. And then you give them that exact thing. Yep. It's it's like it's it's like Christmas shopping. Yeah. Right. Like when someone says, Hey, I want a red Ryder BB gun to compass in the stock, and you get them that literal exact thing. They're happy. Yep. But if you're like, Well, you know, what if it's not a read writer, but it's this, this brand, and it doesn't have a compass in the stock, but it's got a scope on top, and you give it to them? And they're like, it's okay. Yeah, that's not what I want. But that's not what I really wanted. It's so much easier to have happy customers, when you just literally give them exactly what they want.
Greg Marshall 26:51 That's a great analogy, because it'd be the equivalent. I really want that, but you should, but you think I would really, if I was a kid, I would really love this right? And then you give them the place that they're like, I don't even like video games. Yeah. Now you've alienated? Yeah, exactly. Even
Blake Beus 27:08 if you've spent more money on it, and it's like a way cooler gift. If it's not what they want. They're not going to be happy.
Greg Marshall 27:15 Well, I think that's the perfect analogy. They're asking for stuff for Christmas all the time. Let's let's let's be a good Santa. Yeah. And give them what they want. They
Blake Beus 27:24 want. So yeah, well, I think now's a good place to kind of wrap that up. We kind of put that a nice little neat bow on that. Yeah, everybody. So Greg, how can how can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall 27:36 Greg Marshall Dotco. And you can book a free strategy session. And just Blake Beus TOCOM All right, so next time, we'll see you later. Okay, bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 q4 advertising like Black Friday just happened. Everybody's gearing up for q4. And you you were saying? You're getting asked a lot of questions about how to plan and prepare for the holiday season?
Greg Marshall 0:15 Well, you know, in a lot of ways we all of us adults never quite fully grow up. Now, let me explain to you how I remember in school when you had a paper and you knew that paper was going to be due months in advance, but then you wait to the last minute to do it. Similar to the advertising strategies, and q4. If you're trying to do it in q4, it's too late and too expensive. No. And I actually recommend if you're going to do you should be planning your q4 advertising. Now for next year, yeah, right. So I usually advise my clients, they should be investing the most money possible in the month of January to about June to July. And the reason why I advise that is because that's when ad costs are the lowest. And ad costs are the most expensive, and q4. So what you want to do is you want to invest heavy early on, build up a big email list text messages, customer base, retargeting audiences. And then when q4 comes, you can keep your ad spent either the same, or even drop it and invest more into sending out the texts and emails. That's how you'll get fantastic returns.
Blake Beus 1:28 Right? So and a lot of people don't don't think about this and don't think about what you're how our ad costs calculated. And so I always tell people, it's kind of like the stock market if you're bidding on on sets of eyeballs. Yep. Right. And so the more people that want those sets of eyeballs, the higher the cost is because you have to bid more. Yep. To get that attention. And so if you understand that concept, then you can plan based on seasonal thing. Yeah. But so yeah, you're you're saying spend more, put your dial in your strategy. Do all of that from July, with January, sorry, January to July ish. So you have everything down? Exactly. build your email list, because email, email marketing is cheap. Yeah, this is why it has such a high ROI. Yep.
Greg Marshall 2:17 And email, text message, all that stuff, drives the most repeat purchases the most sales and and you pay the lowest amount. And you have to look at as you're investing for q4 early on. Yeah. And if you wait too long, your list will be too small. Your retargeting audiences will be too small, and you won't be able to capitalize on q4. And this is when most people want to really make things happen. So I feel like investing heavy, January especially, is a good idea. So yeah, I personally think January investing in January is the most important simply because that's almost a hangover, all the spin of q4, everyone leaves the market. And so then this your CPMs your ad costs will go down. You're just not competing with as many people as you are, right now the month of November and this specially November, right? Because of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Blake Beus 3:23 So what do you like? Like, because the other thing I talked with people about? And I want to get your thoughts on this? Because I don't think we've talked about this specifically. But should should part of your planning process include what offers you're going to offer in q4, and then also in q1 next year or whatever. And yeah, what do you recommend people? How do you recommend people think about those offers? Everybody's looking for a deal on Friday? What like How should people structure
Greg Marshall 3:49 those? Well, I still think you should come up with your offers, and then that will actually drive who you want to advertise to anyways, right? Because you want to make sure you have the list of people that would be attracted to those offers. And then when you think about offers, you have to think like, you know, let's say you're in retail, right? Or you're you're you're selling clothing or products, physical products, you have to think like Okay, can I get shipments in on time? Yeah, to make sure I have enough volume and stuff to sell. What is seasonal? Like, what is popular during that time? What are people like, willing to spend more on or less on? What are your biggest profit margins and really think that through? Because if you do instead of a last minute trying to think of a deal, you never make your best decisions. Last minute, like thinking about, I need to hurry up, put some out there. Instead, think about the offers away in advance and just think, what is it that I if I had like I have a client right now. I did a great job over the summer of planning on getting the inventory that she needs now to sell to basically not prevent her from scaling it up. And she's out At this most you did $100,000 in sales with this product. And before we've kind of done that multiple months, multiple times in the past, but we couldn't because we didn't have the inventory. But we use this strategy of planning out our offer is going to be this product when Black Friday heads on Christmas heads. And we did all that over the summer. Right.
Blake Beus 5:23 And I think that's even more important now. Because ever since COVID, kind of hit we've had domino effects in lots of different areas in supply chain. Yep. Like getting products in and orders in and it hasn't been just COVID. It was. It's, it's been a bunch of things. But I mean, even even now I walk into Target. They're fully stocked here, Utah, except for there's some things they just don't have. Yep. And so yeah, that's that's a really good point to think about. What do you think about the people that do will do anybody? Does anybody ever come to you and say, hey, I want to want to run these ads, it's going to be a loss leader item, I don't even care if we lose money on this offer in q4. Is that a good strategy?
Greg Marshall 6:07 Well, I mean, it'd be a great strategy. Not too many people approached me with that idea, because most people are thinking more short term, which is usually the problem. But I think it'd be a great strategy, if you have a product that's very popular, that you could use as a loss leader to prepare you for the following year, where you have a huge customer base of people that you know, buy these types of products, and then you're able to market to them next year, make your profit. But like I said, I think it's a good strategy. But you do have to have a strategy during these times. The companies that crush it, are the ones that have a strategy way in advance of thinking of all the clients that are doing very, very well, this month, and most likely next month. We have talked about their offers, like like I'm recommending over the summer, right? Like, what are we going to do during these months to absolutely like, yeah, crush it. So if you're not doing that, start now. Like it's not too late to start for next year, even though that feels like a lot of years go by like that.
Blake Beus 7:08 Yeah. And I think like, I I struggle preparing and planning long term. Sure. Right. And so one of the tricks that I do is, is, when I whenever I think of I wish I would have done that for this year, I write that down. And then I scheduled an appointment for myself, a few months down the road when I need to, like address that. But But then I remember the things that that I should be doing. Yeah, I
Greg Marshall 7:36 think it's also important to think long term, you know, I'm constantly preaching that because long term will be more cost effective for you as well, because then you're not wasting money, which is a lot of advertisers fear, you're not misusing it in a way that you're getting the lowest amount of returns, or you're just not positioning your company in the way that is best. Right? So if you plan and think about long term, you'll save a whole bunch of money, and a whole bunch of stress because then you're not stressing. Yeah. And the fourth quarter with oh, man, I have to do this. But I don't know if I have the funds or I don't know if I have the list or I don't know if I have this right.
Blake Beus 8:13 Well, in total, the one thing I wanted to say in regards to the loss leader is if you don't have a plan to make the money back a loss leader is a bad idea. Yeah, like a really bad idea. And traditionally, Black Friday sales, I went Black Friday shopping, literally one time in my life, and I'm never doing it again. It was awful. But the companies that do the loss leader in it works is they know, I have this product that will get people in the store and then they'll buy other stuff where my profit margins are way higher, and it will work out. Yep. Whereas a lot of smaller advertisers, they think well, hey, Target and Walmart Costco are doing that. Yep, I should do that, too. Again, we talked about this all the time, there's different strategies for for different stages of business. Yep. And if you're a small business, and you're still working up your your, you know, strategy your offers and things like that, I think, I think something like a loss loss leader is a bad idea. Unless you have enough profit runway to make something like that work. You can do flash sale for a couple of days or something like that. But you you have to have that plan. And if you want to do a loss leader on Black Friday, or Cyber Monday or whatever, I would plan on then following up via email or something else with another great offer. That you could also have deeply discounted but since you're you're emailing it to people, instead of paying for ads, your margins are going to be significantly better. Oh, yeah.
Greg Marshall 9:44 And I think it would do you it will do good to just start today, obsessing about repeat purchases. How do I get people to buy more often and more stuff? Because that's where other money is made, it's not on that first sale. Anyone who's trying to make profits just on like one sale one offer only, you're gonna have a very difficult time. Because at cost just, you know, you just do the math, it's just not going to work out. You have to have a game plan on how can I sell these people over and over and over again, think about like, Starbucks people go there every day, right? And so what's the lifetime value of that customer? Who knows they're spending $10 per day $70 to 80 a month, that's 3360 a year 10 years? That's $33,000. That person just spent just on coffee, right? And maybe you acquire it for 250 bucks. It's a fantastic investment. Yeah. If you think that way, how do I just keep getting people to, to do repeat purchases, that's how you're going to make your money, it's not going to be off of one offs, like, Hey, I have a cool deal. Sell this. And let me just try to sell this, you got to have a plan. And you have to be thinking of structuring your business to like, I know a lot of I've heard podcasts is and I agree. If you only have one product or offer, you don't have a business, you just have an offer of businesses, can they buy more and more stuff from you? Over and over again? Yeah, that's, that's, in my opinion, what you should be focused on. So become obsessed with repeat purchase,
Blake Beus 11:20 right? And keep in mind, like if this is your business, you get to make your own rules, you can create new products all the time. Yep. If you're, if you're an E commerce company, that doesn't mean you always have to only sell physical items, you could maybe make an offer for some sort of a digital item, or it doesn't mean that all of your items need to be custom, maybe you make, maybe you find a way to bundle your items with something that's high value, but low effort for you, like I don't know, um, stickers, right, or maybe a digital add on for free that that they get with their purchase or something like that. There's lots of different ways to think about it. I was talking with a guy here locally that he has a CNC machine, right, so we can load up things and haven't carved stuff out. And he's done some really cool stuff, some some relief, 3d Relief maps and stuff like that. But he found this way, he can make these kind of ski signs and he can customize them. And he developed a system to do it very quickly, without a lot of effort on his part, the CNC machine does most of the work and the the materials are pretty low, low cost. And even though he does these really big expensive things he can sell these for for relatively cheap, making for people make them really quick and they're low, low effort, but high value for people because people love love having them in their in their home and everything. Get creative is what I'm getting, because this guy has traditionally done metal prints of his own photography on creative works, which is a lot of effort, but he does well at it. But he found a way to use us to use a similar, you know, creative outlet to make this thing that is low cost, low effort. high margin. Yeah, for him. Yep. And always keep looking for those kinds of things.
Greg Marshall 13:18 Right, I think. And higher margins, obviously always help when you're doing advertising. And I was just thinking of a client and we should definitely do an episode on the benefits of high ticket when you're doing paid traffic. But this gentleman, I won't say the exact product. But he had a very high price product that he intentionally price it that way to knock it down during this time of the year. Okay. And it's a nice product see? It? It did awesome. Bunch of people bought a very expensive product directly from ads, just because it was knocked off at 50%, which was part of the strategy from the get go.
Blake Beus 14:02 Right? So he's showing these ads for people at the regular price. Yep. And then come this time of year 50% off so all the people that didn't buy Yep. are like oh man that I've been seeing it for this price. And I know this is actually a good deal.
Greg Marshall 14:17 Yep. Yeah, so basically prep them right all year, prep them to see this price point. Then Black Friday came and we cut it in half. Yeah. And the conversion rate was like, yeah, like everyone, like as soon as they saw they're just buying it because they just do it's like anything else. It's like someone said I have a 2023 Ferrari on sale for $22,000. You better believe that definitely is gonna sell out like this, right? Because it's perceived value is really high. So you knocked the price down really low for a limited time. You're gonna get a lot of action,
Blake Beus 14:50 but you got to know your numbers. You've got to know your margins. You've got to have a plan
Greg Marshall 14:54 and he also did it to where the profit margin even at 50% off was massive. Yeah. So it was still a huge problem
Blake Beus 15:03 and you in you can definitely do that if you have a plan and you think it through. So anyway, let's wrap this one up. Yeah, right here. Greg, how can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall 15:12 Greg marshall.co. You can go ahead and book a free strategy session call everybody,
Blake Beus 15:16 just Blake beus.com.
Greg Marshall 15:18 All right, so next time see you later. Bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 book a call funnels. You said you want to talk about that. But you didn't want to tell me before the phone before we turned the podcast? Yes. What? What? What about book or call funnels? We want to talk about Yeah, I
Greg Marshall 0:10 didn't want to forget, because Because fresh off my mind, I was just talking with a client. And I was like we I feel like we always talk about, there's always like value before we hit the record button. We probably share that too. Yeah, so with the book a call funnel, essentially, if you're in the service industry, and you're trying to get more sales, right? You're gonna have people book a call. Now, the question I always get asked, and what I recommend, is, Well, should I just put a phone number on my ad? And I typically say no. Because if you have, because you're making yourself subject to having the customer call you, which is the last place you want to be in the sales process. Instead, I recommend, of course, you can have the phone number available, but I wouldn't make that your number one objective, I actually would make the objective, have them fill out a form name, phone number email, so that you can control the sales process so that you actually have their lead information. And you can reach out to them versus hoping that they call you or let's say they click your call button, and no one answers. Well, there you go. You lost them, right? Like there's no other I mean, you can't follow a retargeting. But to me, the best for retargeting is having their actual phone number and email to reach out to them. And so with the book a call funnel, there's several things that are important when it comes to this. So I was speaking with a client and I was explaining how the assumption is, you run an ad and the ad kind of does all the work for you. Yeah. And then they buy, but it's actually not, there's actually several steps to measure. And this is how you know, the journey of your success to your book, a call funnel is working. So number one, you have to obviously, and these might seem like not important, but they're extremely important. Okay. All right. Number one is, first, you have to get people to actually click your ad. Right? Yeah. So so if you're getting people to click your ad, that's step one of success, right? And I recommend you break it down in stages. Step two, is, once they click your ad, can you get them to fill out a form? Okay, so until then, if you're getting people to click your app and not filling out your form, work on getting the form better, right? Step three would be once they fill out the form, can I get them to respond in any way back to me via email or text? Right? Okay, that's step three, then you go step four, which is, and to me, this is the most important part of the process is step four. Getting them from responding back to actually on the phone. Yeah, that is the most important part of the process. Because everything else you can fine tune. But if you cannot get them on the phone, nothing's gonna happen. Right. And so that's, that's the next success. And then obviously, the next stage would be get them on the phone, have your sales process. And then after your sales process, what are you trying to move them to next? So a true book a call funnel? Although it seems like it's just add to book a call is a lot more steps than just that. What are your thoughts? I
Blake Beus 3:31 think you covered it we're good.
With with any sort of a sales process, so many people, and I'm guilty of this, too, we take too big of logical leaps, right? We think our customer is going to do this, and then they're going to enter, they're going to book the call. Yep. There's it the smaller the incremental steps you can make it, the easier it is. And see, I would me personally, I would recommend, most people, if you're paying for ad traffic, don't put the phone number there anywhere until after you've already collected their information. And which is pretty similar to what what you said, I think we're very much aligned on that. But and the reasoning is, is because, well, we were talking about this in a different way right before this is and then I'm gonna get nerdy but asynchronous communication. The whole point of running something like an ad is you want to basically multiply your effectiveness and your capabilities. I'm a human and I only have 24 hours in a day and I have to sleep for some of those hours and I have to eat for some of those hours and and I want to spend time with my family for some of those hours and do something outside of work for some of those hours. And if I am pushing people to a book a book of you know, call and my phone number is on there, I have to be available or else the ad fails. Yep.
Greg Marshall 5:00 And that's a great point, I didn't even I forgot to bring that. And so
Blake Beus 5:04 and so you what you really need to do is find a way to work in parallel, you're building some systems to basically increase your effectiveness and multiply your ability to do stuff without you having to actually do the stuff there. Yep. And so if you have that phone number there, you have to always be available. And not only that your mental energy is always going to be there is I got, I got a family dinner, well, I got I need to make a phone call comes out, it might be that $10,000 Deal. Yep. And that's just simply not worth the mental drain, your life should be getting easier not by running good systems, not harder by running systems. And so really, you want to collect their information, and then give them an option to pick a time during work hours for a phone call or something, you can use Calendly, there's lots of other options out there, you could have a custom built system, you could even just have them on the second step of the form, after they filled out their name, phone number and email address on the second step of the form. Just it could be as simple as selecting what day and what time works best to give you a call. And you limit that to hours of that, you know, you're already available. It doesn't have to be a sophisticated system. But you just say what times are good for you maybe even just write a little message, if you don't want to hook in complicated systems where they could just say, Hey, I'm available Tuesdays from this time to this time, and then you just call them on that time. And you know, in advance, you can kind of schedule around that. But yeah, the other problem with having a phone number in there is now your ads are basically ineffective during certain times of the day when you know you're asleep at night, or yeah, whatever. So now you're thinking, Okay, do I shut my ads off during those hours? Or should I leave them on? If I shut them off, we start to lose, you know, algorithm effectiveness if you really need those ads to work all the time. Yep. And so the phone number is just is not great. I've even tested this with some of my clients that had some high ticket kind of monthly offers. It was it was a subscription service that started at $1,000 a month for E commerce businesses. And it went up to five $6,000 A month or whatever. And they would have phone numbers, they had phone numbers on their site, phone numbers in their sales process, everything we tested ads to phone numbers. The reality is most people just don't want to call if they're looking for a solution. They don't want to call right now they're usually have five minutes before their next meeting or something if their business owner or whatever. And, and it asking them to fill out a form with name, phone number and email is is a big enough ask already in the app takes 20 seconds, asking them to call right now and dedicate who knows how much time to this phone call is is a hard pitch.
Greg Marshall 7:52 And I think you know you speak about time. I think the biggest thing when it comes to time is when you're asking them to do a phone call. Because this is a common misstep I think people make or salespeople make excuses is they do not they? They say hey, when do you have time to book a call or to get on a quick phone call? Versus giving them a specific, very short amount of time as a small tycoon. So like, Hey, do you have two minutes or three minutes or five minutes to just hop on a quick call? So that they can see like, oh, yeah, five minutes? Yeah. If you say do you have time for a call? In my opinion? The assumption is, oh, this might be a long call. Yeah. Right. Like when people say can we do a call typically calls at least 1520 30 minutes?
Blake Beus 8:39 Yeah. Yeah. And that that's a really good point, you could remove the mystery of what the call is like, even when they're selecting a time or whatever want to one of my favorite things. I heard years and years and years ago, I I mean, I don't think this works all the time. But when it was the this person was giving advice on how to connect with other people that were busy or whatever, and how to stand out. I think it was on a podcast about productivity or some something like that. But they basically said, if you're reaching out to someone, and you want to connect with them, and you don't know them very well, or maybe you don't know them at all. But you know, they're a busy person. Ask them if they have some kind of a non typical timeframe to make a call. So for example, do you have 11 minutes for a quick phone call? Yep. Right? Or do you have seven minutes for a phone call? Not 10, not 15? Not 20 or 23 or whatever, whatever you think is appropriate? The reason is, is it stands out. It gives a time timeframe for them to think, Well yeah, I could do two minutes, three minutes, seven minutes, whatever. And I think that's helpful. I think the other thing you could do is you could detail out in the seven minutes, or 10 minutes or whatever it is. We're going to do this, this and this. And then I can go back with the information you've given me and work up A quote or whatever is appropriate in your sales pipeline. But you can say I need these things, these pieces of data, and then we'll work up a quote, and I'll get back
Greg Marshall 10:09 to you on it. But I think that's super important. And I do think that works is because it kind of breaks the rhythm as far as you say, three minutes, 11 minutes 13 pattern interrupt, we're gonna kind of like, wonder, has someone asked me if I have 13 minute? I think I got 30 minutes. You know,
Blake Beus 10:25 I don't have 15, though. Yep.
Greg Marshall 10:29 So I do think but a lot of it's just like, you know, I would use this in sales strange where I say, you know, one of the worst questions, I think you could ask when you're, if you work, like, let's say, in a sneaker place in the mall, right? Do you need help with anything? No, I'm just looking. That's like an automatic response that says, I say that all the time. If you if you ask twice. Or even more specific, you'll get a different answer. Hey, looking for something. Now I've just taken a look. Is there anything specific that you're looking for? You most likely will get an answer because you broke the pattern of not just looking? Well, actually, that works
Blake Beus 11:05 on me all the time. Yeah. Meeting all the time. That's my, my automatic response without even thinking about it, even if I am looking for something specific is no, I'm just looking. And if they follow up with a second question, is there something specific you're looking for? I almost always answer with what I'm looking for. Like,
Greg Marshall 11:22 yeah, I'm looking for the new Apple Computer. I just came out yesterday. And it's like amazing how specific you can get right like, for me, like if I want to see this? Yeah, I'm looking for the size 10. New Ken Griffey sneakers. Like yeah,
Blake Beus 11:35 that's such I did that exact same thing. When I went to an office supply stores looking for some colored stickers, circular, nothing fancy. I walk in there. And then I say, Can I help you with anything? We looking for anything? And I'm like, No, I'm fine. I'll just look around. And then I spent 10 minutes looking for the stupid.
Greg Marshall 11:49 If he just followed up, he or she, you could have literally gotten the hell that you want it. So I had to
Blake Beus 11:55 walk up in shame and say, I can't find this. Yes. Can you tell me what
Greg Marshall 11:59 you should ask? First, you should ask me a follow up question. So I think the importance of a timeframe, specific questions, breaking pattern, you know, pattern, interrupt, those are all keys to making a book a call funnel work. Because if you don't do that, you're not going to get people on the phone, people are going to avoid the phone call, because they're going to feel like it's going to take too much time or the sales pitch, right? That pretty much everyone knows getting on the phone means I'm going to be sold to, but if people don't mind being sold to for five minutes versus an hour. So if you make the timeframe really small, then they're not, they're not going to feel like they're being hooked into what's the timeshare sales pitch where you have to take your whole day basically, for a salesperson that's like, does anyone really want to spend their whole day getting sold, you know, so that's what people are really trying to avoid is essentially wasting their their hour or time because it's the most valuable asset to most people with a sales pitch. So if you can shorten up the duration, they'll feel a lot better about moving forward and getting on the phone call. And almost every time someone says I only have a few minutes, they if you do a good enough job, they always have unlimited time to be on the phone and talk about solving a problem that they have. Because at the end of the day, that's why they're on the phone, they have a problem that needs to be solved.
Blake Beus 13:23 And if your sales pitch I mean look a hard sales pitch works. That's why people do them. I don't like I hate if I'm ever in if I'm ever in a hard sales pitch situation, I instantly am trying to get out of there as fast as I can. However, if your sales process is very much a conversation, and we're on the same team, we're trying to see if we're a good fit for one another to help you with your specific problems. And if you're honest about that and saying you know what we we are a great fit or I don't think we're the perfect fit but here's a couple of things I would look at which I know you do with with some of the people that reach out to you to be to be clients with you there have been times you've told me that that you've you've said look I could take your money but we're just not a great fit because you're not to this level just yet so you would be better off instead of paying me to do this and this put some money in ads so you understand the process better and dial in your sales process better and this and this instead of giving me money you'd be better off to do that yourself for a little bit and feel free to reach back out to me in a couple of months of doing that and we can have another you know book another free 30 minute call to just chat about whatever see how things are going you're very much helpful to them as opposed to trying to get them to make a solid commitment and by now is
Greg Marshall 14:40 by now I forget everything right forget
Blake Beus 14:43 so but yeah use I mean your main process. Your main sales process for your getting your clients is basically a book a call funnel in lots of different ways through social media, organic stuff, or through ads or whatever. You use this all the time, and I've
Greg Marshall 14:56 been using Bucha call funnels for probably 10 years. Be honest, because like previous to my marketing business, I was in the gym and fitness space, and people wanted to book a call to come check out the workouts or the gym facilities. And so I'm very experienced in the kind of book a call funnel. And what you need to do, and these are just, I'm just sharing the things that have worked consistently, for 10 years, that will get you from someone on the internet, to getting them on the phone call and turning a stranger to a customer, which is the goal, right? And I've never gone as in depth with this actual way of doing it. Because I sometimes assume that everyone knows that's how it works. But when I talk to customers that are trying to book calls, I noticed that there's a big gap. And like, kind of like you said, the ask that they're doing is too far, like you want to get married today. That's too much of an ask when no one knows who you are, it's more, do something smaller, you kind of work your way up. And that's kind of the same thing that you really should be thinking about when you're going to book a call Funnels is how do I develop the relationship? And how do I remove the fear of being sold to for too long, for something that I don't want to be in and like you and I and probably most people, we don't love high pressure sales pitches, it doesn't it's not a fun environment to be in. So people that's the core objection is like, I really don't want to hop on a call and get told why I'm making the biggest mistake of my life by not buying your product right now. Yeah, right. I mean, because I hate having to tell someone. Yeah, I just right now, it's not the right. Well, I thought you were serious about doing this or doing a lie. Now here,
Blake Beus 16:42 I have been known to literally just stop talking and walk off. Like,
Greg Marshall 16:46 I've done that, too.
Blake Beus 16:48 I just can't. Yeah, but so yeah, so So quick question. I know, we wanted to wrap this up, kind of kind of, we're gonna make this one a little bit shorter today. Say someone has a book a call funnel? And it's not working? Yep. What are some things that you would recommend they look at and do to try to diagnose and fix it?
Greg Marshall 17:09 So a couple of things. So this is good question number one go into? Are you getting people to fill out the form if not fix the form. But typically, people are not getting them on the phone. That's why I said that's the most important stage. So I would actually look and go, What are you saying? Or how are you following up once you get the lead? Nine times out of 10? People follow up with Hey, do you have time to do a quick call, they're not building the relationship and having a conversation before getting them on the call. That's, I can almost, I don't want to guarantee but high probability. Anyone who says booking and call funnels don't work for me. It's that stage right there. It's yeah, I get these leads, but they never respond or whatever. It's because they're not. They haven't fine tuned what to say, between form fill out and getting on the phone. Right? And so that's the number one place I will look at. If they're not getting for Philips, then it's through traditional Well, what's your ad saying? targeting the right person. But most people have that part down. It's it's the book getting them on the phone.
Blake Beus 18:17 It's like that transition from the cloud. Yep. to the real world. Yep, is a bit of a disconnect. Because people I do this to I feel like I can understand the cloud, I understand the real world. But like Bridging the Gap sometimes is a little bit hard. I just had a thought based on kind of what we were talking about before this. I have seen people do this, I don't see very many people doing this. But I've seen people do this with the right kind of offer is once they get the lead and everything and then they reach back out to try to schedule the time. I've seen people actually record a little video using a service, the one I was telling you about is one called Jump share which favorite serve. It's a it's a time saver. You could record a little video and say, Hey, I just made you. I wanted to introduce myself, so you get to know me just a little bit better. So here's some things about me my background, I don't know much about you and your business yet because you just barely fill out the form. But here's a quick little video and then you can dump that link into the into that and it could be a 32nd video introducing yourself. The one thing I've realized, and this is one thing I love about this podcast is and why we do this podcast is the single best way to build trust with potential potential customers or just people out there is video or audio. They get to know your tone of voice. They get to understand you they get to feel like they really do know you. Yep, as opposed to just an email or whatever.
Greg Marshall 19:39 Yep. Well, I agree. And I think I utilize that as part of my strategy. Thanks to Blake. You know, bringing me on to different software's that really help and because it's it really at the end of the day, it's all about building the trust and building relationship with the customer so that they feel comfortable to even talk to you. Right. So that's the key. Yep.
Blake Beus 20:00 Alright let's wrap it up well how do they people how do people get a hold of you just go to Blake beus.com and you can reach out to me there
Greg Marshall 20:07 and if you want to get in touch with me Greg Marshall Dotco and you can book a free strategy session call all right
Blake Beus 20:13 we'll catch you guys later bye
Blake Beus 0:00 Google Analytics. So I've been getting a ton of emails about me to the changes on this. And I've actually converted a few sites already, from Universal Analytics to GA for Yep. is what they're calling it. But you had some questions about that.
Greg Marshall 0:14 Yeah. So actually, I had a client asked me about it last week. And I said, I'm not really the professional and this particular aspect. So I knew I wanted to ask you. So I'm going to literally ask you, because I don't even know what the differences are between, you know, the Google Analytics, and then g4. Yeah. So what is the main difference? Why, why is this shift happening?
Blake Beus 0:39 Because Google sets up
Greg Marshall 0:42 the Google gods. Google said,
Blake Beus 0:44 so I mean, every This is, I mean, it's called G a four. So this is the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. And Google Analytics first came out in probably the late 90s, early 2000s. And so in that time, we've we've had four iterations. And this is the fourth one. As far as why Google decided the way they were doing analytics needed to change. And so they
Greg Marshall 1:11 think this has anything to do with privacy.
Blake Beus 1:13 I mean, probably, it probably, I mean, you're seeing a lot more things. So the initial way back when Google Analytics use relied heavily on third party cookies, right, and as new privacy standards, get updated, and things third party cookies aren't a thing. So the last version of Google Analytics, which was I believe, they called it Universal Analytics, relied on first party cookies. And essentially, I mean, for most people, third party first party doesn't really matter, most users, but essentially, first party cookies mean that Google Analytics is installed on my site. And when I set a cookie, which stores some information about my session, that cookie is stored based on a domain name. So it would be that Google Analytics cookie would be stored based on my Blake beus.com domain. And as I browse to other sites, those sites don't have permission to read that cookie. Whereas third party cookies, Google would set those cookies based on the google.com domain, and then as a third party cookie, and then as you browse around, all the other websites would be able to see the data stored, or at least some of the data stored in that cookie. That's a very big generalization. But we're starting to see, we've talked about this too, we're starting to see cookieless the future right? Oh, cookies go away. And again, we're moving to a different type of technology that that offers more privacy and offers better isolation of data. Yep. You know, probably, you'll probably see more data being stored in an in an encrypted state, on your computer instead of just in a plain text state. Yep. And this is this is I haven't read their specific why. But if I were to guess these are all the things that you're starting to see.
Greg Marshall 3:05 Got it. So essentially, for a business owner, what is it I know, I've gotten those emails? What do they basically need to do in order to switch over? Does it automatically happen? Or do they need to go through a step by step process? Yeah,
Blake Beus 3:18 it does not automatically happen. If you have a very simple Google Analytics install, all you really need to do is swap out the tracking code. And it's not just a pixel ID, you actually because Google Analytics will give you some code to copy and pasted some JavaScript code, you need to swap out that code entirely. And you're, you're good to go. You can actually run them in parallel. So the site's I've converted, we just put both on there. Okay. So to start gathering data in one or the other, any cons to that to running both? Yes, you might have a slight decrease in site speed, but we're talking about that significant 10th of a second, maybe not Not, not a big deal. Okay. The other problem you're you're going to bump into is, if you have a complicated Google Analytics install, maybe you're tracking some values, you're passing some values from some event values from from Google Analytics into your Google ads, as conversions, or you have custom funnels built. And all of those things, then you're setting up Google Analytics for is going to take a lot more time. And some of those things you have set up don't have a direct translation from the old version to the new version got the concept of funnels, and these things are different conceptually from one to the other. So you're going to have to spend some time rethinking how you have that setup. That being said, most people don't rely on Google Analytics heavily like that, unless they have a tech team or marketing tech team or something like that, that knows what they're doing and is technical and can check and help with that implementation?
Greg Marshall 5:01 Got it? So are there any, I guess, new features that that are of benefit to a website owner or business owner? Or is it kind of pretty much the same? Just a different kind of layout or format?
Blake Beus 5:15 Yeah. So, um, I mean, if you go read their documentation on it, or their introduction on it, they're pitching all sorts of great new things. And honestly, I read through a lot of those, and it's just more of the same, okay. But you always got to put a positive spin on it, because because you're forcing hundreds of millions of people to change. Right? That's, it's a, it's a big change. of the people that I've worked with that are actively using GA for most of them don't like it. Really? Yeah, that and why is that? Well, first and foremost, the Well, first, you always have a learning curve. Okay. So the dashboard for GA four looks significantly different than the dashboard for the Universal Analytics. So it's a new dashboard. Okay. Second is an I agree with this. I mean, I like learning new things. But I agree with this part. They don't make it really very easy to say, what's the traffic look like on this page? Yep. You would think that that's in the old dashboard. And the old way of things that was, you would obviously, you looked at that all the time, you would just go say, hey, what's the look? What's the traffic, like on this page? And with this new version, they have it split up into different concepts that essentially talk about you know, we had this before, but But you have acquisition, you have different channels and things like that. But if I just want to look at what's a page doing, it's not easy. Yes,
Greg Marshall 6:52 you can still do it. But it kind of takes some work. It's really hard.
Blake Beus 6:55 It's like, they don't want you to do that. For some reason. I don't know. I don't know. It could just be that could be something that changes. Yeah. But again, most of the people that I've done conversions for they they needed the conversion, but they don't like what they're seeing. And, and and it's complicated to set up the reports and things got that that they used to, which has led to conversations with several people saying, what else is out there? Yeah, Google Analytics can't be the only analytics platform out there. What else is out there? So I've had some of those conversations,
Greg Marshall 7:29 which if you think about it, I don't know, I'm sure Google's done the you know, the benefits pros and cons. Because if you're gonna get a bunch of people feeling like it's too complex, or you're not getting the information that you want, it is gonna raise a question. Well, I've always used Google Analytics, but it's getting too complicated. So maybe I'll go use something else. And so they could lose, they could a lot of their data and our customers when it comes to that. So they
Blake Beus 7:56 really could and I mean, Google is a smart company, but also they're a big companies with lots of people making decisions. And when you have a big organization like that, it's completely feasible to make some decisions that impact a lot of people that are just not great decisions. That happens.
Greg Marshall 8:13 Well, what do you think about? What's a secondary option? Let's say someone doesn't feel like he's in GA for? Yeah, what could you use.
Blake Beus 8:23 So what I would recommend people do if you have a more complicated kind of setup, or whatever, I would look at some other options. But the first thing I would do is, because Google owns search engines backwards and forwards, Google is the biggest search engine out there. And if you find GA for too complicated, all I would do is I would put, I would create an account. And I would put the simple, simple tag on your site. And maybe don't even look at the dashboard at all, but putting it on your site, we'll help you rank better, because Google's going to know more about what's happening on your site, and, and all of those things. So I would put that on there. Even if even if you want to show up and be represented in Google Search, having that on there is going to help with them. Even if you don't look at that. So if you want to look at other solutions, other free solutions, you're limited gotta there's not as many free solutions out there. And oftentimes, the free solutions are going to require a little bit more technical setup. But I mean, let's take a step back and say why Google offers it for free. They offer it for free because it benefits them in their ad play or on their search engine. Yeah, out of the goodness, no, no, they're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it because it benefits their company. That's why it's free. It's it's actually kind of crazy that Google Analytics is free if it were a standalone product by some company. Yep. It's so complex and so many moving pieces and is updated so much and it would be absolutely insane for it to be free. You have to reason that they offer it for free is because of their ads platform and all these other things. So some free some free options out there. If you're looking at free options, if you have a high traffic website, I'm talking, you know, 500,000 page views a month, or viewer, or a high traffic would be that or more, you're going to probably end up paying because a free tier is not going to work for you. But if you have, say 500,000 or less, you can find some free options out there, right, because a lot of the other analytics companies will have a model where they want you to use it for free. But once you start using it to a point where you're making some money, they need to make some money because they gotta pay engineers, and all of these things to like, maintain it. And then there's some open source solutions out there. And open source solutions are oftentimes free with maybe a paid support tier or something like that. So one that I really like is one called post hog, that's an open source one they have, if you are a technical person, you can actually install it on your own server. So you can have your own analytics server, and your own code snippet that you can put on your sites, to look at how everything works there. And that would be free for you to do if you know how how to do. If you don't know how to do that, you can that you can use their hosted service, which is free up to I think it's like 500,000 pageviews, well, they call it 500,000 events is what they do. So a single page view is an event. But also if you're you can set it up to track button clicks nine. So every button clicked, every one of those would be an event. So a single person could have multiple events on a page view or a session or whatever. That's a really interesting one, it's a much simpler ad platform. But I I think most people would find that the the information in there is quite a bit more valuable. Got it. Because it's more consumable for a regular, regular regular user, I find it more consumable for me. Yep. And I find the data on that a much more actionable data because it's, it's simpler, and it's not superduper hard to set up, say like a simple funnel, and get a Funnel Report and things like that. But then you have some other platforms that are more geared towards enterprise users you have segment is one mix panel is another one, this is gonna cost you, you have Oh man, I'm I can see their logo, but I can't think in the name. Anyway, there's a bunch out there, you can just do a Google search for, you know, Google Analytics alternatives, and you'll find a list of them. And most of them are going to be paid. I think a lot of the paid ones start at 30 bucks a month. So it's not the end of the world. But they get more expensive. If you have more traffic, a large volume of traffic got it. But a lot of them will do extra things to they'll give you a heat map. So you can see where people are scrolling through on the page where their finger is pointing or things like that. So there's there's a lot of things a lot out there you can do above and beyond just what Google Analytics stuff got.
Greg Marshall 13:12 So I know we got to keep today's short. Yeah. Is there anything that were that were missing as far as the analytics? And what to look out for what not to do? Or any and maybe any pitfalls that people may run into? Anything like that?
Blake Beus 13:29 Yeah. So I mean, I think the biggest pitfall would be ignoring the fact that you need to convert the new, they're going to have a hard cut off. And you'll, if you rely on ads, Google ads specifically, or traffic from google.com, if you don't convert over, you're going to you're going to start seeing it to the quality of data, the quality of that traffic go down over time. So definitely convert over. Okay, if you do have a complicated install, and it's Phil's overwhelming to convert over, just literally copy and paste the code snippet on your site right now run them in parallel, and reevaluate if you actually needed that complicated of an install, got it, if you actually needed all of those custom events, and if you actually needed all of those custom reports, and actually needed those things, because most people over time, I mean, the old version of analytics has been out for over 10 years. So over time, you get all of these things. Yeah. And you're thinking, oh, man, we have all of this stuff. Now's the time for a little bit of housecleaning, yeah. Maybe starts from scratch and say, What do I actually need? And most likely, you only actually need one or two of those reports. One or two of those custom reports or custom events, covers probably 95% of the value you are getting out of the old thing. So I would use it as an opportunity to do some housecleaning and get that you know, getting that set up. And then remember over time, you can add more reports. It's not like you're not missing out right Now this minute, if you don't have all of the reports, and you have a gap in some of these reports, those things aren't going to impact your, your business dashboard much. Sure. So
Greg Marshall 15:11 So basically, in a nutshell, if you're not using it or haven't set it up yet, run them in parallel now, so that when the cut off period happens, you don't lose your building. You're building up some data. And I think that seems to me that's, that makes the most sense as far as what to do next. Because like you, I've been getting those email, Hey, this is going away. So I was like, Well, what exactly do they want us to do? So I wanted to pick your brain and see what should everyone do to keep their websites up to date? And so yeah, so that being said,
Blake Beus 15:42 I actually have one other smellies of advice real quick. The other thing I think you should do, you should take this as an opportunity to set up Google's tools. They're called tools for webmasters. Okay. And it's, it's an old school tool. Yep, I heard they still use it all the time. But basically, what it does is it monitors your site over time, and will email you alerts if it detects some sort of a problem, okay, for example, it will kind of get a baseline of your site, if your site normally takes two seconds to load. And then all of a sudden, next week is taken 10 seconds to load, they'll shoot you an email and say, Hey, we've noticed a couple of problems. And then you can go in there and fix and fix those problems. We have, oh, you know what, someone, someone changed our picture. And now and they didn't scale the picture down. So now they're trying to load a 10 megapixel picture on our homepage, and it slowed it down. Or it will alert you if you have a huge increase of like missing page errors or things like that. And then you can go in there and fix those, taking the time, once a month, or once every few months to kind of fix those things, helps. It's like a dental checkup for your your search engine results. It just kind of keeps everything good, fresh, make sure still in line with what Google search is expecting and with Google ads is expecting and all of those things. So I would take this as a chance to use this other tool, set it up set up a super easy, it's it's literally you just have to confirm ownership of the domain. And then it doesn't if you have Google Analytics already installed, you don't have to install any other code or anything. You just need to confirm I own this website. And you need to show me you know, monitor it for me and send me email alerts if there's Scott that's going on.
Greg Marshall 17:22 So tools for webmasters. Well, I think, and is there anything else? So we've got? I know in a mess, his name walltime, GA for GA for tools for webmasters. And then if you want to look at other alternatives, do a Google search. Yeah, there's lots of them out there, try them out for Google Analytics. And then is there anything else? Are we missing? Those three key points, I think are the main things that the email or the store owners or website owners need? Pretty much. Yeah. And then what if they need help installing this, can they reach out to you,
Blake Beus 18:00 you can reach out to me just go to Blake beus.com. And I have a way for you to contact me on that site. And we can have a quick conversation about that. And I mean, a lot of this stuff isn't super hard. If you really if you really need to, and I don't have availability or whatever. You can actually hop on, say Upwork or places like that. There are experts if you've never used up work have used Upwork before,
Greg Marshall 18:26 I think once like five or six years ago, so I mean,
Blake Beus 18:29 I have a profile on there. I don't I don't do any do much with it. But from time to time. If I want to pick up an extra job or answer client or something I'll hop in there and, and whatever. But you can find an expert in there that has good reviews that has experienced with GA for interview them make sure they actually know what they're talking about. Get a Quote for most of them will will quote you an hourly rate to do a conversion. But for someone who's an expert, it shouldn't take too terribly long to get you converted over it would probably be three to five billable hours tops. Got it? I would say unless it's a really complicated install. But yeah, so that's another way to get it done, even if you're not a technical person.
Greg Marshall 19:11 Got it. So yeah, so if you need to contact Blake, go ahead and visit his website. And it's Blake beus.com. And then if you want a free marketing strategy session, you can go to Greg marshall.co. And fill out the form and we'll reach out so until next time, we'll we'll see you later okay, bye
Blake Beus 0:00 So I don't even know what we're talking about today. You wouldn't even talk with me about it before we started. Yeah, that's
Greg Marshall 0:05 because that's because I wanted to make sure we didn't miss out on some of the Golden topics. So, today I had mentioned to you just last week, and in fact, it might already be active, because in a couple ad accounts yesterday, I saw, so Google has decided to remove on Youtube Keyword targeting, over asking me yeah, all really are content targeting. So you can't you can't do placements, keywords or topics for conversion campaigns. What's just weird? Yeah, they just removed that. So like everyone, and like, the Google ads, YouTube faces like, This is unbelievable. Like, how are you supposed to actually target if you can't target the content, you know, contextual targeting? And I thought, well, that's interesting. I wonder why they would do that. I have a couple of guesses. I mean, my guess would be probably that, if they're trying to increase revenue, and you take away like, high performing, you know, campaigns, then you have to spend more to get the same result. Right. And so that's my guess, I mean, and it's probably accurate. And so yeah, there's no incentive for, if you think about it, if you own that business, there's no incentive and having campaigns where you could get like, $2 conversions, because then you never spend more, right, you know, your budgets really low. But if you have to spend to get, you know, $100, get a conversion, then you have to keep spending over and over again. And I think that's kind of the same thing that they did with forcing Display Network ads, on the video campaigns, I think it's the same concept, like just, it's a way to get more advertising. And in addition to that, I had noticed Facebook has this new feature that says, Would you like your ads to be a multi multi advertiser channels or something like that, what that means is, if you don't uncheck that box, they'll put your ads like on Instagram next to other people's ads. So it's just like an ad feed. It's not actually a feed. So it's like you're competing against other ads, it's like a, I was thinking about it, it's like, like a swap meet. It's like, everyone's kind of selling the same thing. And you're all in the same area. So it can devalue your ad, but it can make it seem like it's being seen by a lot. And I thought this is interesting that they're making a lot of these changes. And then another change that I saw on Facebook was they changed, at least on my on all the My Accounts, which is a lot. They changed the default setting, to instead of like, especially on conversion campaigns, instead of showing costs or conversion, or leads or whatever. The default setting is reach impressions and engagements. And you actually have to like, search out how to put the conversion as the default setting to see your performance. That tells me multiple things. Either clients are starting to like fall off, because they're not seeing the conversions that they want. So it's almost like they're trying to convince you of something else. Yeah. But having that as the default. Yeah. And so yeah, so quite a few changes happening. And I know a lot of advertisers are like, What is going on? Like you're essentially taking away all targeting, but in my opinion, I think the entire time targeting is going to go away anyways. Yeah, like, if you think about it, the trend is maybe six years ago, five, six years ago, you can get ultra targeted, right. And then each year, they've removed more and more, you know, due to privacy. And really, it's just, I think it's a money grab. Yeah, but at the end of the day, you're gonna have to play by these rules anyway, so you have to get good at it. No matter what, it's not like advertising is gonna go away. You just gonna have to play by those rules and adjust. And I think I have seen quite a few comments with people online. Right, saying like, this is, you know, terrible and, and, in my opinion, it's just as far as part of the game. It's like anything else? Business changes. Yeah. And you just need to always know it's not it's not going to stay like this forever.
Blake Beus 4:22 Yeah. Oh, man. That's That's it. I mean, I have I have so many thoughts kind of surreal surrounding this, because, because I haven't, I mean, I haven't paid attention to that. And so this is kind of news to me. But it brings up a lot of a lot of things. The very, the very, very first thing is and this is where I take a step back and I look at the just kind of the industry, just the tech industry or even just like the economy as a whole because I'm, I'm a nerd in so many ways and economics isn't another way in which I nerd. I study that stuff way too much. Um, But one of the problems we have societally or economically and I'm talking kind of specifically the United States, this probably exists in other places too. But is is the way things like venture capitalists investing stock market. And these operate. So whenever I say I'm running a business, and I, I take some VC funds, how I used to work, helping businesses qualify for investor funds. So I know a bit about the it's not a ton, I did it while I was in college, but I used to work doing that. And basically how it works is we say, okay, we believe your company is worth $50 million. Yeah, even though your revenue is not there yet, and you're tight on cash. That's why you're looking for investors. And that's fine. That's like normal. But we think your business right now is worth $50 million. But we do think in the future will be worth more if you have the right money. So what we're going to do is we will give you $10 million, right now, for 1/5 of your business and you run the math, that's like it's worth 50 million we're giving, so we're giving you a $50 million valuation for $10 million. We as the as the VCs own 1/5 of the business. Yep. But because of the venture capitalists, I want to protect that investment. So the other part of the deal is, you have to have one of our board of directors or a person on our team, they need to, they need to sit on your board of directors, and help guide the company so that our investment is protected. And on the surface, that doesn't sound like too too bad of an idea. But the problem is, is that once you do that, as business, you kind of your customer is no longer the people you're trying to serve. It's the VC because you want to round two and around three and around forecasts. And so you're always trying to make those numbers look good. Same thing with the stock market. If I go public, once I go public, and my shares are being traded on the stock market, my customer is no longer the people I'm selling my product to it's the shareholders. And so I have to continuously show certain metrics. Yeah, which make my business look good on paper, but maybe alienating Yeah, your, your customer base. So we have this problem with both Facebook and Google. And basically every big company out there. I mean, you see this all the time, you have a great product, a great service that takes some VC money, and then all of a sudden, they're jacking up prices. Or they're saying, hey, buy an annual plan right now. And you can be grandfathered in this happened with a service I use recently. So they can pump their numbers, their revenue numbers really quick and show good on paper and do another round of investment. And so we have this all the time. And so companies are constantly not just sitting there saying, You know what, we're comfortably profitable. We don't need to change things, things are working. But instead they're saying, we need to show an increase in profit. And there's only two ways to do that. increase revenue, and decrease costs. And so you have these decisions that don't seem super logical. So this is one of those ways. Google and Facebook are so huge that they have so much market share. How do you increase that?
Unknown Speaker 8:12 I mean, last I looked, you gotta make more money. Yeah, last,
Blake Beus 8:17 I mean, you can't get more customers. They're so big. They have all the customers. So how do you make more revenue? If you can't get more customers? Well, I can't wait for more people to be born. I got to do it this this year. Yeah, I gotta do it this quarter investors
Greg Marshall 8:30 are waiting for their return. Yeah, the investors,
Blake Beus 8:33 they're not going to wait very long. And and so you start thinking of different ways you can do that. One great way, this is a behavioral economics thing is changing the defaults. Yeah, if I change the defaults, then more people will opt in to the thing that I want them to do. So we change the defaults. Yep. Right. And then after you do that, every everybody that's going to do that, that hasn't noticed or whatever they'll opt in. The next thing you do is maybe you make your services a bit more generic, people have to still they have to keep using them. And so you make them a little bit more generic. So you can kind of spread the revenue out on some of these channels that aren't as profitable for some people, but give more metrics. And then you start looking at different metrics. What metrics look way more impressive. CPMs cost per impression or just number of impressions. Yep. Which that one with the grouping with other advertisers? They basically every impression gets to yeah, go to to 10 different advertisers. So one set of eyeballs gives them 10 impressions to make their numbers look good. And I'm like, What the hell
Greg Marshall 9:45 yeah, that's that. So basically, and it makes sense. I mean, when you're the customer, it's easy to kind of like get upset, right? Oh, yeah. Because you're like, Well, I'm the customer. But if you were to flip the roles or Round, right? And you own Facebook and Google and you've got investors breathing down your neck, saying we need to have a profit that's bigger than last quarter, every quarter, forever. And you only have so many resources. I mean, you have to find a way to go, Well, how do I make more money? Because that's the only way to do this. And and in advertising, it's the amount of space that they force people to use. Right? And so it doesn't make any sense to have people figure out campaigns that will get them huge returns where then then they don't have to spend more, rake and just say, well, I'll just spend, you know, 10 grand this month, because I'm getting a 4x. I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, that's good enough. Yeah, it makes more sense for for you to say they have to spend 10 to get 20. Yeah, then they have to spend, because double
Blake Beus 10:53 is on their side of things. It's it's not necessarily on Facebook, in Google's best interest for you to get a 5x or a 10x return on any campaign campaign that Miles doing amazing, so good. And they shut it down. Because they're like you, it's too good. You guys are cheating. Somehow we weren't, we're not we literally weren't just perfect messaging and fit and everything, it's in their best interest for you to get a 2x campaign because that means more more revenue to spend more in Yeah, you got to spend more, but it's enough for you to keep spending Yep. And it can be wildly frustrating when this kind of stuff happens. But the reality is, is that whole system is not going to change. VCs aren't going to change the way that's happening, the stock market is not going away, right? Like none of that stuff is changing. So you just got to understand the incentives of these companies. And that makes sense why they're doing the things they're doing. And then you as an advertiser or a business, you have two choices, throw your hands up in the air and quit, go back to a nine to five, stop running your business, or adapt. And there will be people that will throw their hands up in the air and say, You know what I'm done with this. There's going to be media buyers and advertisers that will stick with it, but not adapt. And so they'll struggle and limp along. And then you'll have those that will put in the extra work, learn to adapt. And for those people, it's an opportunity.
Greg Marshall 12:24 Well, I think there'll be some big opportunities moving forward, because you can already see what this is going to do is take out people that really have no desire to do any work at all. Yeah, right and overly rely just on the machine. And I think like anytime things change, you'll see like a huge drop off. I heard a stat the other day, where they said, like, you know, we're in a recession. And they said, there was like a very huge number of real estate agents that have dropped out of the market. Because prices, you know, interest rates gone up, you know, blah, blah, blah, the same stuff that always happens every eight to 10 years, or whatever that number is. And what that basically shows you is there's probably an oversaturation, which means it was very easy. And then as soon as it gets hard, all the kind of that extra dead weight leaves, and only the people that are truly committed to kind of stick around. And it ain't easy for people to really commit to it. But they just, you just got to work your way through kind of that storm. And I think that's kind of what you know, I think there's multiple things going on with especially the ad changes, right? Recessions here, it's also fourth quarter. So they have to make their numbers, they know that average, a lot of advertisers are cutting their spend. So they have to figure out a way to get this revenue to go up. So they'll lean on pretty much the winners to keep spending more, because that's what they're gonna have to do. Right. Yeah. And I even saw some interesting, because you don't, I never thought of it this way. But I saw like, I follow a lot of YouTube creators on Twitter, just because I enjoy their content. Like I like to see what they have to say. And one of them who's kind of an industry leader, a guy that I respect, mentioned, he said, Yeah, I'm getting, he sent out a tweet, like a lot of YouTube creators have been kind of talking about how their CPMs have dropped by 30%. And that they're making less money because they're getting paid off of CPM. And I thought, that's interesting. It probably has something to do with the removal of content targeting because if you think about it, if these creators are making like, let's say one channel has a huge channel, and they have a specific audience and you're removing their nonsense people's ability to target that, then you're gonna get way less views, you're gonna get paid a lot less if it makes your channel less valuable. And so that's kind of where I think this is all going is one thing impacts the other. Yeah, so you're gonna see creators and it's always interesting to see how the businesses kind of adjust because I wonder when you're these app platforms. At some point, something's probably gotta give though, right? Like, if if you start to see that you're losing people in droves? Yeah, at some point, you've got to like, make an adjustment, because I would think the short term gain you would get from doing this long term, though, will hurt you. Right? Because eventually people will be like, well, if I can't target these channels is key. What if I can't target at all? And I have a very niche product? How will I sell that? Yeah. Using your platform? Yeah. Well,
Blake Beus 15:38 I mean, what you see is several different forms of consolidation. Right? If we, if we look back 10 years ago, this exact same kind of stuff happened with blogging, yep. Right. 10 years ago, someone could have a very comfortable business, blogging and just running Google ad, you know, AdSense, AdSense
Greg Marshall 16:02 fact, I had a client yet lived off this. Yeah, I had warned them about what you're really about to say.
Blake Beus 16:09 But the money paid per eyeball on your site will continuously go down. And that's the that's the exact same thing that will happen with YouTube creators, the money that they're making will go down. And the reason that happens is, is two different reasons. First, more advertisers are constantly hopping on board and you think, Oh, that would be great. But there's more advertiser competition there. Yep. Second, more creators are constantly hopping online. And third, people sometimes are just eventually kind of get sick of things. I, I've actually had quite a few people recently say, I am so sick of YouTube ads. Yeah, like yep, in YouTube has definitely been putting more out they have
Greg Marshall 16:55 on it. And it's significant. Now they have the two ads. And you notice I have like one hat.
Blake Beus 17:01 And then if you keep skipping, you'll get some Unskipable ones next. And that's frustrating to people. And so they'll say, You know what? Screw this. I'll go watch Netflix instead. Yep. Right. And, and so you're gonna see people doing that. So the reality is, though, is these companies are so big, that what you'll see is some consolidation, because those people are going somewhere. Yep. So they'll buy up something else. That's why that's exactly why Facebook bought Instagram. Yeah, people were more putting more time and effort into viewing Instagram than they were Facebook, or they saw that trend. Yep. So Facebook just bought. YouTube was a purchase that Google made. Yeah, Google saw a lot of people using YouTube and not reading blogs so much and stuff like that. And they could they, they were like, You know what, we're going to do this. So they bought YouTube and consolidated that, you'll, you'll see more and more of that, I think a lot of the top. So I think five years ago, the top creators on YouTube, were almost all independent creators. Now the top 20 creators on YouTube, almost every single one of them is a corporate entity, not not a not a person on the independent person or you know, a person who, whose business started on YouTube or whatever. So you'll see more and more of that kind of consolidation. But again, this is the this is the world we're living in this stuff isn't going to change.
Greg Marshall 18:29 Because you want it because you want it to.
Blake Beus 18:31 The only way this stuff would change is if we have some sort of government entity involved in saying, Alright, you guys need to do this and this and this, because of these reasons, which might happen, but we don't know. And if it does, it's going to be a very long process. And you can't, you can't wait and hope and hope that that that will change. Because it probably won't.
Greg Marshall 18:56 And I also think too, like, this is the nature of you know, because this is where I'm starting to feel old. You start seeing these cycles, and they're like, well, this happens to be you know, this has happened. I've seen this happen now like twice Yeah. Or it's like you there's a major powerhouse, the powerhouse goes away, then it's a new powerhouse. And then it always feels like that powerhouse will be there forever. But they're not. They get overtaken or something changes or they get bought out or it's just a cycle, right. And they I remember like when MySpace was came out, I thought that day was never going to end. And then Facebook came and I thought there's no way Facebook can take over and the Facebook did and now you thought there's no way anything could ever be faced with an Instagram shows up. And so this is a cycle and it's essentially like, you'll do yourself a huge favor. If you just assume that right now i will be doing this. And in the future I will be doing something else. Yeah, right because that will change and it's kind of the St. Like when you're talking about and you know, this is a marketing podcast, right? So we're talking about marketing, marketing principles stay the same always. It's just what platforms you use. Right, right. And you just got to know like platforms are always going to change, but the fundamentals don't. So it doesn't matter what the next thing is, you're still going to have to use same fundamentals that we've used for. I will,
Blake Beus 20:25 I would say the fundamentals become more important. Yep. And when we talk about fundamentals, and when we talk about it a lot on this, we talk about message to market fit. We talk about offer fit fit to the audience. Yeah, because here's the thing, people change much slower. Yeah, then these tech platforms change, right. And so as long as your messaging and your offer is, is good, and in line with what people actually want, you just got to get it in front of those people. And maybe that's getting it in front of those people is different now than it was a year ago, maybe you have fewer targeting options than you had a year ago. But you still just need to get it in front of the right people. And if you get in front of the right people, you've you've got a winner. I mean, 50 years ago, it was sending direct mail. I mean, that's still as a family, and still get mail, I still get junk mail in my mailbox all the time. And they literally wouldn't send it if it wasn't making them money. So it's still working, even though that was a way of doing it 50 years ago. Yeah, it still works. today. I'm not saying you should to hop over into that space, necessarily. But
Greg Marshall 21:41 I think what you're saying too, is skill set, right, like so, the people who are really good at direct mail, continue to use it, because they're very good. But the people who maybe if you hop on an opportunity early, right, you can kind of get away with like, not being very good. Because the opportunity is so new, it's fresh costs are down. As soon as those costs go up, though, you cannot afford not to be good. Yeah, like you have to think things through and actually say, like, instead of just throwing anything out there, I have to make a good app, you have to think like who is this? How do I make sure I repel the wrong audience attract the right one? How do I get a good ad? Copy out hook? How do I have the right offer some that? Sometimes I feel like is almost overlooked? Yeah, is having a good product. Right makes a big difference. If you're marketing, like a product that's bad, then you're gonna have best ad copy in the world, but you're just not gonna see growth. I mean, you have to have a good product. And so I think with all these changes, it's inevitable. And it's interesting to like, because I'm, you know, I follow all these people on Twitter and LinkedIn and stuff, just to like, keep a good pulse of the markets. I feel like that's my job. And just kind of looking at all that it's, it's interesting to see the reactions, the almost not victim mentality, but like, yeah, in a way, like, this is unfair. And it's like, it, there's nothing's gonna, you can't, you could call them 1000 times a day and say, This is unfair, it's not gonna change. So you might as well just adjust, you've just got to adjust to what it is and what the new way is. And anytime there's tough changes. I always see. It never feels good. I can't remember who I was talking to the last week. But I always feel like this is relevant, and never feels good. While you're going through the change. That's actually good for you. Right? It never feels good while you're going through. But usually, if you hang in there, and you kind of adjust things, nine times out of 10 It's actually a good thing. Whatever is happening. Yeah, it feels very inconvenient the moment. And so that's because I still remember during COVID times, yeah, I honestly, I was scared when that first hit because my first thought was, oh, no, everyone's gonna cut budgets. Business is not even open, how am I going to advertise? And I remember being really, really concerned about that. Because I was like, Man, this is such a change. And what ended up happening was the opposite. Yeah, things grew because everyone cut their spending and as became cheaper. And so I was able to take advantage of that. So that's kind of my rant is anytime something quote unquote, bad happens, it doesn't feel great while it's happening. But usually, if you focus on the opportunity, you can find a way to make it work better than the current way. Yeah, we're working on that. Yeah.
Blake Beus 24:43 Yeah. It's interesting, interesting to think about. I'm going to shift gears just a little bit because I just have this weird thought I, I think about I think about this kind of stuff all the time. From an algorithm perspective. This would never happen, but Oh, you were you were talking, we were talking earlier about how it's doesn't make a whole lot of sense for them to, to see that you're making 10x row as or whatever like that. I oftentimes wonder what would happen to their algorithm, if all advertisers agreed to report zero revenue back to Facebook and Google, he would throw their algorithm way off, and it would be very interesting to see, to see what would happen, it wouldn't that would never happen. But part of me thinks that that would be interesting. Maybe they don't deserve to see my revenue numbers. Yeah. Because when, if I can't target for conversions anymore, then you don't get to see my revenue numbers. And
Greg Marshall 25:37 I think, yeah, that you know, now that you say that, too. I wonder sometimes I wonder, because, you know, they're taking, aren't they taking cookies away to 23?
Blake Beus 25:48 Is it Yeah, but that's a that's a, that's a privacy thing. That's kind of more of like a regulation? Well, kind of a thing. But yes, that will impact advertisers. And these third party cookies are going away, even first party cookies are probably going to be going away so
Greg Marshall 26:01 well, which makes me think like, should you just prepare to like, conversion campaigns? We've talked about this before, but like, do you think eventually conversion campaigns, like selecting it as an objective could actually go away? Because how else would you track conversions? If you can't? It would have to all happen within platform, right? Because if it's going to happen on a website, if first party and third party data is going to go away, yeah. Then how would you track that?
Blake Beus 26:34 You would use something like their conversion API? Which sir, which is server to server communication, which doesn't rely on things like cookies or tracking pixels or anything like that. And so there will, there will still be ways to do it, you might just need to make sure you're on a tech platform that has an integration with Facebook's conversion API, or Google. I don't know, they don't have a fancy name for it. But Google has an API for the same thing. My
Greg Marshall 27:01 question, though, would be this. So for the lazy person who doesn't do that, not only does it impact that person, but wouldn't impact the platform because they're getting receiving less data. It would be advantageous if they want their conversions to basically make sense and use algorithm based to have everyone using this API then, right? Yeah. So if people aren't connecting their API's, what did they be losing a significant amount of data?
Blake Beus 27:31 They they would, my guess is, is that they probably don't care. And well, let me put it this way, they probably don't care about those advertisers. Because they're probably not the advertisers that are spending the money to make the real money. Right? The people spending the real money will take the effort and have resources to hook up to the API, which isn't that hard if you're a tech person, or you can hire a tech person. But if you're not a tech person, and you're doing this solo business thing, you're not spending enough money for them to progress even care.
Greg Marshall 28:09 Well. And I was just thinking not even necessarily, from that aspect. Meaning how, how accurate? Like, wouldn't even if you had a bunch of low spending people, and let's say that's like 70% of your advertisers, then you could potentially lose 70% data, does that make the machine less smart?
Blake Beus 28:31 I guess it depends on what kind of data you're looking at. And considering. So right now, the data you get from the pixel is pretty unreliable, anyway, yeah. Because it's not guaranteed data. And it's just because of how that works. So for example, the pixel is say, I'm on my computer, and I'm browsing on my computer, and I go to 10 different sites that have the Facebook pixel installed, I don't purchase anything or whatever, but I'm just browsing sites, that data gets sent back from my web browser, specifically, to Facebook. Yeah. And there's a lot of problems that can happen. My my ISP could be glitchy, or my Wi Fi could could be whatever, and those packets could get dropped. And that data could get dropped, or I might have an ad blocker installed, or something along those lines. So then that data doesn't get reported back reliably. And so unreliable data is hard to make the data meaningful at predicting, this person is going to be the next person to purchase your xyz, whatever. So having more perfect data, even if it's less data is probably advantageous to them. So it was it's less muddy, it's more accurate, even though it's less so they can rely on it better.
Greg Marshall 29:56 So I always think to Is it possible we've all become overly reliant on conversion campaigns? Like sometimes when you use conversion campaigns, you really are like leaning heavy on an algorithm? Yeah, right.
Blake Beus 30:14 Yeah. I mean, probably, but if it's working, it's working. Yeah. No, no, no saying you shouldn't do it. Yeah, just probably. But I would hazard to guess, conversion campaigns are going to become less and less in fact, effective. As as we kind of go on, you're probably not going to have a conversion campaign, that's going to be a 5x or 10x. Row as anymore, you can still get that. But it's probably going to be part of a larger marketing funnel with text messages or email marketing kind of mixed in there. And the campaign all by itself probably won't be getting the 5x row as the 10x. I was just thinking like that.
Greg Marshall 30:52 When do you remember what year like because I remember running ads, where there wasn't even a conversion objective. Do you remember what year?
Blake Beus 31:01 That was? Actually, before I started running ads, okay. Because yeah, yeah, I started. I mean, I had I had done so he
Greg Marshall 31:08 tried to make me feel.
Blake Beus 31:12 I mean, I had done some, some Tech Data integrations, from like, a software engineer side of things. But I wasn't actually running ads. I didn't start running ads until 2018. So wow,
Greg Marshall 31:27 that's Yeah, it's crazy to think because I think I've been running ads. And I never really think about how long I've been doing it. But it's, I was running ads, when you could really only get like, you could buy the right hand space. That like the desktop. And the only campaign objectives. At the time, if I remember, there was only like, have like two or three. And the highest level one was like engagement. Yeah, like you can pick the engagement objective. And that was like, and that was like next level, you pick that as like, wow, you can get people to engage on that. And then conversion campaigns came by, and I just, it's funny, because I don't remember what year, but all of a sudden, it became like, this huge game changer, like, people started using it, and it will get you these huge returns. And it was just just interesting how the evolution of all of it. And I wonder if there's like, there'll be this window and time, just like I'm talking about only doing desktop newsfeed or desktop, right hand corner ads, as like, remember that time conversion campaign. And I wonder if we're like living through that, like little window where like, it's a shift to something else, because it does change and it changes quickly. And I, you know, I just now that we're talking about these conversion campaigns. For the good old days, it's like, wow, that's, that's cool. So I think, you know, marketing, like, like we said, fundamentals don't change. For the most part, human behavior doesn't change that much. Or if it does, it's very, very slow. And the core motions, humans, I feel like will always have the same core emotions. And if you tug on those emotions, people react. And so I think if you just get good at the fundamentals, you know, selling for emotional, have people just find a logic, have a good offer, and then just adjust these platforms. Everything's gonna be just fine as long as you're willing to do the work.
Blake Beus 33:31 Yeah, I think so. All right, let's wrap it up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you,
Greg Marshall 33:35 Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session with
Blake Beus 33:38 Blake beus.com/sm3 is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall 33:41 All right. Well, until next time, I'll talk to guys later today. Bye bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 Okay, so we were just barely talking about. I mean, everybody talks about data driven and all of these things. But we, we were talking about some unique situations where a lot of business owners, they've been through the the brand voice message, the customer avatar thing that they they put in that work, which I don't think is a bad thing. But then it's almost like they get a bit locked in, in that area. Stubborn. And and convinced that that that because they did that work, which is great, that that's what we need to stick with when the customers are voting with their dollars in a different direction. Maybe you can clarify what I'm what I'm getting at? Yeah,
Greg Marshall 0:45 well, I think one thing, and you know, I've think we've all fallen prey to this before, but being too overly focused on like, what you want the message and the image to be versus what the customer reacts and pays for. Yeah, and some examples that I would use is, oftentimes I see. And it's normally the individual that's very brand centric, right? Especially if they want to present a high end brand, right, they become so obsessed with how everything looks and feels to them, that they're actually focusing on the wrong person. Yeah, you need to focus on the customer who's going to buy it. And where this is coming from is actually I've run a bunch of campaigns where I've seen where the business owners is like dead set on the vision and the brand, and everything has to look a certain way, yet those campaigns perform very poorly. And then when we switch it up and do it more in the way that the customer responds to, the business owner is unhappy with how the image brand and voice looks. But the customers are responding and
Blake Beus 1:56 buying and buying. And so they're, they're happy with the money coming in. Yep. But they're not happy with the images or the video because they're not pro quality. Yeah, or, or any of those
Greg Marshall 2:09 are, they don't look as a very specific way, maybe the way they envisioned and I go back to, when I when I first started doing my fitness business, we initially wanted to go after like this high end. And I think a lot of changes is high end highly motivated, willing to spend a lot of money type of client. And we kind of just kept pushing that over and over and over again. And we noticed we had no customers, no one would pay us even though we were like we deserve the high paying customer we deserved this is the best product out there. No customers where we had people like beating our door down, saying can you help us lose weight? Can you help us get fit, and this is the exact thing we were trying to get away from. And we finally caved in because we're like, well, these people are literally like throwing their money at us asking us can we help them? Maybe it's time to make a pivot and make a change. And when we did that, we started seeing great success. And so I say that because it is very common, in my experience, especially if it's a newer business owner. Or maybe someone that has the habit of comparing themselves to other bigger brands, where they get so locked in on how everything needs to look that they don't do enough testing, to see what gets the customer to buy. And then how do I do more of that? Right? And that's kind of the point of this topic is to almost tell you make sure you're not making this mistake where you're doing it a certain way, because you want it. But the customer or the market is not actually even paying for it.
Blake Beus 3:49 Yeah, I mean, this is when I went to college, I have a degree in Business Information Systems. And I had a bunch of business classes with that. And it was it was one on one, it's like, marketing one on one, you are not your customer. Yep, you are not the one going in there and buying this thing to fix this problem. You've already solved the problem. Yep. So you are a completely different person than your customer is. And so the best way to figure out what your customers want is to ask them and let them vote with their money. And this is where, you know, free market forces and we want to start using some economic terms free free market forces. This is this is how that stuff works. And you see this all the time in, in restaurants, right? If you have ever been to a brand new restaurant that just opened up in a dance, they have a menu and that menu is the chef's best guess what people might like right and and I've I've helped open restaurants before when, you know when I was working at the ski resort. And it is we have there's lots of meetings about you know what kind of food we want to have your meeting with the general manager of the resort and everything and, and I was in a lot of those meetings mostly because I'm I'm a tech guy, and I've got to be able to make sure their systems are selling and all this. But all of it is this big guess. Yeah. And then when people start showing up, you see what they're buying? Yep. And then you drop the things on the menu that they're not buying. Yep. And then you add more things to the menu to see if you can find a few winners. Yep. Right. But the ones that are selling, you know, get rid of those. Yeah, you never get rid of those. And in I don't know why in business in like, a more a non food business. This concept is, is is harder for people to grasp or something. And I think one of the things you said really drove the point home in that they're comparing themselves oftentimes to much bigger brands. Yes, right. Um, my, my wife, and I watched the house of Gucci, okay. And I have never owned any Gucci Mane, we've never. But you know, there's this this high end fashion brand with a specific look, and whatever. The thing is, if I were to launch a clothing brand today, it would be absolutely crazy for me to try to dump so much money into the photography and the videography and everything to match that brand. Because I'm not Gucci not yet. Like, if I wanted to be as big as Gucci, whatever, I think that's possible. But you, you aren't at that stage yet, where that even makes sense, you need to come down to this lower stage. And I think the waters get one last thing a little even a little bit muddier in that was social media ads, people want to see the types of ads that they expect to see in their newsfeed. Yep. So when you have a very organic looking photo of, you know, someone modeling something, and it's clearly not a pro photo shoot, that oftentimes can resonate better with your customers than a high fashion, very professional, highly edited, perfect photo.
Greg Marshall 6:48 Yep, I would agree. And in fact, not only will I agree, I can just tell you just from looking at data, that seems to be the case, the ones that are like very organic, and almost look like they're not an ad, are the ones that perform the best and what the way you can take that information is to essentially let yourself test different ways of communicating to your audience. And then focus on doing more of what works and remove your emotion from how you wish or want it to be. Right. Like, an example would say, like, I sure wish I was 610 and was in the NBA, but I'm not right, right. So I can't behave like I'm a six foot 10. And expect things that a six foot 10 NBA basketball player would expect, when I'm not any of that, right? And that's kind of how you have to view your businesses, you have to go where am I at right now? What is the customer really looking for, and then grow your way into a lot of the big brands that you see, or you know, aspire to be or emulate? Do the things that they did when they first began, for example, selling sneakers out of a trunk, selling CDs on a street one to one, actually knocking on people's doors to sell their shampoo. These are examples of billionaires that have a lot of money, that they have very extravagant marketing campaigns now, but that is the wrong stage for you to be following. You need to do what they did when they're at your
Blake Beus 8:21 stage. And you're always going to be frustrated if you try to follow the stage of a large brand. Yes. Or follow the strategy of a large brand, because it's frankly, impossible for a small business to do that. Yeah, why money? Like these, these, these large brands have marketing departments that are hundreds of people large Yeah. And then they have entire departments that are just for media production. Yep, where they have entire studios and everything to take all of these photos. And I know you can get a $2,000 camera and a nice lens and some decent lights and get kind of close. But this waste of your time to put all that effort into a couple of photos. It's just not worth it, you're much better off, snapping some photos, focusing on your brand message. And figuring out which of those work and in scaling up the things that work
Greg Marshall 9:12 exactly. I think messaging is more of because you can always fine tune photos and videos and things like that. But it's the messaging that actually matters the most because if you can resonate with the customer, then you can start making much more because you figured out what message works, then you can start making much more prolific type of campaigns with better pictures and better video and you can kind of upgrade that way. And that's exactly how the brands that maybe you aspire to be did it. They figured out what their market is what the message is, who's their actual customer and buyer figured out how to give them more that stuff and then build campaigns around that the messaging instead of guessing and doing these elaborate photoshoots or video shoots I have another big brand without even knowing what message works.
Blake Beus 10:03 Yeah, yeah, it's um one of my, one of my favorite brands on Instagram is a good example of this. It's, it's a brand that's targeted towards middle aged men, like myself. And the brand is called Sharpies, and they started off selling just swim shorts. Okay, yeah. And when they first started off, and their swim shorts are kind of like bright and loud and everything because traditionally, swim shorts for dudes have always been I don't know, camo. Yeah, we're blue with some stripes. Yeah, nothing crazy. And, and so these, these guys did this. But their brand messaging has shifted over time to apart a point where now it's pretty professional, but their messaging is dialed in, and people know who they are, and everything. But their messages are funny. They'll oftentimes take photos of actors in the 80s, like men, with their hairy chests, and whatever, and wearing really short shorts. So they're like, it's time to bring back the short shorts, you know, stuff like that. But it's, it's just a funny brand. But they didn't start off that way. If I were to launch a short brand a day and try to emulate what they're doing, it would fall flat, because there's already someone kind of feeling that knee. Yep. And but they had to, they had to go into that they didn't know exactly what they needed to do. They had an angle. Yep. But but they didn't know exactly. And then it took them several years of consistent marketing effort to do that. And now Now they do really well. The same thing can work with products too. But go ahead.
Greg Marshall 11:34 No, I'm sorry to cut you off. But I want to I don't want to forget this point you just made. The point Blake just mentioned is this company was testing and giving what the customer wanted. Yeah. Like they didn't say we sell shorts, this way. And that's the only way we're gonna sell. No matter what the customer says there, they adjust to what the market is telling them they want. And so that's, that's something that I wanted to interrupt and make sure you hit on that, because that's a great point.
Blake Beus 12:03 And that's, that's kind of like the whole point of a business in general. The great thing about owning your own business, is you can make your own products and services. Yep. And so because of that flexibility, I think a lot of people kind of forget this point, because of that flexibility. You can literally adjust your products and services to match whatever the customers want. And theoretically, this is super simple. Like, it's like, people like this t shirt. Let's maybe ask a few of them why they liked that T shirt. And then let's make some more that have those qualities in there. Yeah. Is it? Is it the quality of the fabric? Is it the funny message? What about the message? Is it the design is that the colors, whatever those are, and then launch some similar to that and see, see what people resonate with and then drop the duds and or bundle the duds. Yeah, bundle the duds to get rid of is a special flash sale
Greg Marshall 12:54 offers. Yeah, you buy this, you get these for free,
Blake Beus 12:57 for free, or whatever, you know. But you, you need to going back to what you said about removing your emotion. I heard this phrase this week, and I loved it. Some points in time, you just need to be a stone cold, professional, right. And I like I like being loosey goosey and running a kind of a casual business and things. But when it comes to ads and emotion, you got to be a stone yelled professional. And you have to look at which ones are working and which ones aren't. Because if you keep turning off the ads that are working, yeah. Because you don't like the picture isn't super professional, you just have a feel or you have a feeling. You're constantly you're literally shutting off your revenue sources. It's like I'm thirsty, and you keep turning off the water, the water spouts that are given me the most water. Why would we do that? Is it it's because of oftentimes your own post personal insecurities or visions or whatever?
Greg Marshall 13:59 Well, it's funny that you mentioned that. So just just yesterday, I had a call with one of my clients. And there's, they have a unique setup where it's kind of three owners and they're they're all very open minded and willing to try things, which is great. So we spoke yesterday. And it's funny how it was a good lesson in emotional decision making versus the data, right? Because two of the people of the three were felt that the ads were performing exceptionally well. And then one of them felt that the ads weren't performing at all. Which is interesting, right? So they were both trying to figure out why do you believe that the ads are not performing well at all and they're like, Well, I I just been here that people sales. And so think about this, she said I just been hearing about other people's sales and the sales or or this and that and you know, maybe it's a tough time And the other two are just looking at the data from the ad account and saying we're getting what we want. And they got 500 subscribers to see, you know, for 300. Something bucks targeted US Canada leads not, that's cheap. Yeah. And sheep it and it's to the exact targeted audiences that they want. Yeah. And so after we went through the numbers, she actually felt like, wow, this campaign is doing really well. We literally almost turned it off, because she was like, I just don't know if it's resonating, or this, this and that. Yeah. And so that's, to me a perfect example of how you can have, you can feel an emotion. And if you sometimes follow that emotion, you can make the wrong decision for your business.
Blake Beus 15:47 It, I think it's a bit of a catch 22 situation, because when you start, if you're a business owner or whatever, and you suddenly start diving into ads, you want to start learning about ads. Yep. And so you start learning about it. But then you start, there's no shortage of people out there willing to tell you how to run ads, many of them disagree with with one another. And guess what, we're here on a podcast telling you about how to run ads, right? Like everybody in their dog is going to tell you that. And you're going to have people that are going to say this is the only way I would run out right now. Because you hear that messaging all the time. And then you so you, you start knowing and learning more, and then you start second guessing what, what you know, is work is working? Yep. And so at some point in time, I'm a big believer, at some point in time, you need to kind of shut off the gurus, and trust yourself, you know, trust, like trust yourself, and the things that you've learned that are working with you with your, your business and everything. It's okay to learn a few things here there. And I think, I think in our podcasts, we're not super, super opinionated about, absolutely do it this way, do this one structure, if you do this one structure will work because it's not really sustainable. Things change too much. We talk a lot more about principles and things. So that's my hint that you should keep listening to this. But trust yourself, and what's working for your business and maybe shut off some of these other channels with these loud voices to trying to teach you how to run ads. And
Greg Marshall 17:18 well. And the other thing about you got to be careful with how much you can get information overload where one person will say, I mean, look at anything in life, how to make the most money, right, that's a subject everyone's probably looked up before. You got some people will say you should focus on one business. And he got some people say you should have 20 streams of income. Right? Which one is the correct way? Well, it depends. If you're already a millionaire 20 streams might make sense because you've already have a million. And you can diversify. If you have $10, it makes no no sense to have tried to attempt to do 20 different businesses. And so it really depends on each person. And so if you take information and you almost like just think, Okay, this is the way no matter what versus saying, How can I apply some of these principles into what I'm doing, you can get very confused. And what you're going to do is just be in a cycle of starting and stopping over and over and over again and gain zero momentum, right. And then because you don't gain any momentum, you're keeping yourself in the hardest stage of anything, which is the very beginning. You're literally keeping yourself
Blake Beus 18:29 going in the hardest, hardest part and you're getting burnout, because you you you're you're stuck in this loop where you don't get out of the hard part, you
Greg Marshall 18:39 still in the hard part. And the worst part is you're the one doing it yourself. You're actually resetting and restarting your progress over and over and over and over again, instead of looking at how can we build some momentum. Let the momentum work for me. And let me make adjustments as I go along. Instead of start, stop, start stop. And that's, that's something that I also see a lot is the starting and stopping you hear people say, Well, I've tried this, or I've tried that, and then you go, but for how long? Well, you know, I ran for three days I spent, you know, 50 bucks. And it's like, there's no I mean, you never gave anything a chance to build the momentum. The people who see the best results in any aspect, making money running ads, exercise and fitness, marriage. It's all the same long term, build momentum fundamentals. There's no tricks Yeah, to start and stop over and over again. Because if you get overly fixated on that, you literally will keep yourself and the hardest part of the journey over and over
Blake Beus 19:46 again. This is this is Greg's marriage counseling. We've We've turned it into this is no relationship.
Greg Marshall 19:56 This is marriage counseling.
Blake Beus 20:00 But it's true. Like, these are the reasons we talked about principles a lot is because a lot of these principles carry over into many different aspects and can be applied to to many, many different things. And, and it's so easy hung up on a lot of these details and everything. But when it really boils down to it, running a business, at least principles of running a business is pretty straightforward. You just need to give people more of what they want. Stop doing what's not working, and follow those numbers. That's the end the podcast. Well, there's that's it, you know, we're shutting shutting everything down. We buy, we buy our course. Yeah, that one sentence. Like unless of what they don't. Such a simple statement, but it's so hard to do. I don't want to minimize it. Like, I've definitely struggled with that. Right? Same here. We're emotional beings, like, yeah, we do that I've been so hung up on my emotions before, with various different aspects of my business and everything, I get it. So it's easy to say, and I know it's hard to implement. But it's one of those things that you should constantly strive to maybe gut check those emotions. Well,
Greg Marshall 21:06 you know what, speaking of emotions, this is why you have you should before you make any decision, take a step back with with, what am I feeling right now? And does this have? Is it real? And I'll give you an example. Let's say, you know, not that this has ever happened to me. But let's say you didn't sleep for a few days, because you're babies. And you're extremely exhausted, right? Well, sometimes when you're very tired, you start, like the little things that maybe don't bother, you will start to bother you. Right? Yeah. And but you could really make some really dumb decisions. If you let that portion impact your decision making instead you have to go, Well, this is probably fake. None of this is really that bad. It's that I just haven't slept for three days. Yeah. And so let me I actually exercise this a couple of days ago. And it was, I was like, I wish I knew this like 15 years ago. But it was. So I didn't have a great night's sleep. And then I found out some information, like some changes that we needed to make a certain campaign. And I felt like, you know what, I'm just really tired. And I don't want to say yes or no, or make any adjustments based on how tired I am. So I'm just gonna, and I would have never done this 1015 years, I'm just gonna not do anything. I'm just gonna go to sleep tonight. And then tomorrow, when I wake up, I'm gonna think what's the best decision, I waited one day and made the correct decision. And it was the decision that I would have made the day before. So even that taught me the importance of taking a step back, right, let's, let's say you're very tired from exercise or family, or maybe you had someone pass away in your family, or you've just got outside life factors. Sometimes those can transfer into, like, the one thing you can control your business, you're looking for a sense of control. So you control that, versus taking a step back and going. Is this real?
Blake Beus 23:13 Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I get that all the time. Right. And I feel that way, a lot. It's and not to get too much into you know, mental health or whatever. But when you're in like a mental health cycle, which everybody, everyone, I think more people need to talk about mental health. It's not it's certainly not a bad thing. We all go through stressful moments, or were moments where things aren't going right. But it's very easy to kind of get stuck in a cycle. And and when I do me personally, I get an inner dialogue that is negative. Yeah. And, and I have to gut check that, and my wife helps me gut check that which is great. But I have to gut check that and say wait, or is this inner dialogue actually reflective of reality? Yeah. Most of the time is not a couple of times. It is but it's too harsh. Yeah. Because obviously we have things to work on right? Yeah, every everybody does. But my kind of point in sharing that is we have that but a good way to kind of check those things is to have someone else you can talk to Yep. And I'm telling you right now most the time with Greg and his clients he's he's honestly more of a therapist but but no, you need to gut check yourself. And that's why it's that's why having I don't know a media buyer on your team or or a business partner or an associate or if you're just starting out. I don't know just someone that's maybe not just anyone that doesn't know anything about ads, because that would be frustrated. Maybe someone that knows a little bit about marketing advertising just to bounce some ideas off of them, and to gut check yourself, or whatever, but it's totally okay to think am I am I thinking About this correctly or do or whatever. And when in doubt, just follow the numbers. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 25:04 and I think to the importance of having an outside eye on things, or someone to bounce ideas off of is important because the likelihood that both of you are feeling the exact same emotion at the exact same time is highly unlikely. Right? Right. So if you're, let's say having, you know, problems at home, or you're having problems at work, or you're at work, you're having problems with your health, whatever that is, most likely, the other person you're talking to, is not going through the exact same thing at the exact same time. And so they don't feel as emotionally kind of boxed in as maybe you are. So they're able to give a little bit more constructive feedback on like, You should do this or try this or take a step back. And so that's where I see the value of having other people to bounce ideas off of, and really talk things through. And I know for me, anytime, you know, we're going into the emotional side of things, because that's probably the most important thing you can do for making the best decisions for your business long term is controlling your emotions and understanding them better. Because if you know your tendencies, right, like for example, I know if I don't sleep that great. Sometimes I get a little more anxious, more antsy with things. My maybe my, my fuse is shorter, right? Why know that? So if that happens, I know to go, Well, I'm going to back out of some appointments. I'm gonna go do something completely unrelated and relaxing, so that I can prevent myself from even putting myself in the environment of making a bad decision. Yeah. Right. Because because I know that's how I behaved Yeah. If I don't get any sleep, or or I'm just physically exhausted. And so do you have any kind of tactics that you'd like to use? When you kind of know you're at your threshold? And you're like, Well, before I do anything that I'm not going to be happy with? Let me go ahead and start with.
Blake Beus 27:04 Yeah, I have lots of first and foremost, one of the most consistent triggers for me to be grumpy is I'm hungry. Because I focus on I focus on work. Like when I sit down, I usually work really hard. And I've got, you know, juggling between a couple of different things. And it's very easy for me to forget that I need to eat and have water. Yep, drink water. And so first and foremost, I kind of prep for that. Yeah, I don't, I intentionally don't eat like snacks and things at my desk, because it's too easy, just cram and food. But I have them like away from my desk, and I'll go up and grab a handful and check the time. I try to be pretty consistent with meals. Like I'm like a little baby fat on time getting whiny. But the other thing I've been doing recently is I, I work in a remote office. And I have set up this cozy corner. Yeah, with a chair and an ottoman and some plants and a blanket. And I sit down. And I call it meditation. Yep. Sometimes it turns into a nap. Yeah, I set a timer because I don't want to sleep for like a month meditate. But it's it's I basically my the point of it is I sit there and I try to just kind of clear my head of thoughts. Because I, I have a lot of thoughts going on a lot of the time and, and there's a bunch of different techniques, people can like in their head, chant different things or whatever. What I do is I just count backwards from 100. Yeah, I need something more than just saying the same thing. Because my brain can think about things. Yep, saying something happened going autopilot. But if I have to count backwards, I have to think about the focus just a little bit. But I don't want something too complicated. But something that makes me have to focus enough so that I'm not thinking about this software engineering problem, or this customer problem that I'm dealing with, or whatever, I don't want those things to spin. And I do it for 2030 minutes. And it it sounds I don't know, it helps a lot. I think it helps a lot. I
Greg Marshall 29:00 think it's important to prioritize time like that in your day, particularly if you're running ads, or you've got anxiety about running ads, or you've got anxiety about just anything else that's you know, going on in your business. Because if you don't take that time out, you're setting yourself up for massive failure, because you're going to start to feel these emotions and they'll start to compound. So the anxiety starts to go into the depression, and the depression starts going into anger. And then it becomes well I don't even know if I should do this. And then before you know, it's like, but nothing in your business has actually changed. It's all your motions that have changed, right? And it's it's funny because there's so many times where you can you know, from running my own stuff for for quite a while now. I've learned a thing or two about self management for me and how I behave and I just try to really go alright, I have felt This emotion before, and the decisions I made in the past weren't always the most productive, right? And so, knowing that, what can I do differently? When this comes up again, and you just kind of like step back and try to learn from previous mistakes or errors, and at the time, you don't know better, but now you do, right? Like, now you understand how to improve these. I feel like, if you spend more time, here's, here's something that I don't know if I've ever actually revealed, but I try to spend more time, quote, unquote, like having fun than working. And I consistently try to keep that unbalanced. And the reason why I do that, because I have a tendency to want like, if I don't stop myself, I want to work the whole day. Oh, that's and and all day, and that's unhealthy. So because of that, I switched my thinking, I just said, I need to actually focus more on having fun, because I've run into the opposite problem of almost working yourself to death, right?
Blake Beus 31:06 Well, that's my default, my default answer to every problem is to work hard. And I don't love that. I mean, I'm glad I'm a hard worker, but I don't love the the older I get, the more I realized that's not a healthy trait. Now, you got to have you got to have a good, a good balance. And, frankly, I'm trying to teach my kids that as well. It's, it's hard, right? Cuz a lot of aspects of life. Yeah, in a lot of aspects of life like school and things. When when my kids are in school school is pitching it as this is the most important thing, you got a bunch of homework, these grades matter, especially my son is in high school, these grades are starting to really matter. Yep. And, and they're not wrong about any of those things. And I absolutely am a huge fan of being as educated as you can. Sure. But sometimes I feel like there's so much emphasis put on working hard and putting in all of this extra effort when our quality of life isn't there. So we get into these habits, college was very much stepped out for me, I was working full time doing school full time and had a family and, and that was you know, a few years ago, basically just kind of, I did it. I just didn't sleep a whole lot. But it kind of set this stage where my default solution of a problem is to work hard. And it's not fun. Yeah, when you do that, like it's not enjoyable.
Greg Marshall 32:26 Well, I think too, you can get a lot of the wrong messages from you know, making things quote unquote, matter. One of my things that I've learned over time with making things matter is when you attach too much of a meaning to something, I find in my own experience that it creates a negative thought pattern, a negative cycle, you're no longer doing things for enjoyment, or to improve yourself, you're now acting out of fear, right, and you're acting out of fear that something bad is gonna happen. And then you're basically robbing all the enjoyment out of your life. And because you make something matter more, doesn't mean you will actually perform better. That's kind of the irony of it is as a good point. A lot of times you perform worse, yes. So you're making you're increasing the meaning of something with the kind of thought thinking that if I make it matter more, I'll perform better. But the irony is you don't you perform worse when you make it matter
Blake Beus 33:35 more. Yeah, there's a lot more stress, anxiety, you know, mental energy needed to to this thing that's like super, super, super important. I think that's, we're getting philosophical. I think. I think that's, uh, yeah, I do. I think that's one of the reasons why I struggle with a lot of when, like, someone who's wildly successful, writes a book. And they're like, here's how you do a startup business, or whatever. It's like, you don't have a lot of the anxiety and stress because you have this massive cushion, shirt and blanket and everything. And so I don't think your information is actually that relevant shirt to your average everyday person, because they have a different set of circumstances. And of course, you can run 2030 businesses because you have a team helping you with this and, and all of these things and payroll of $20 million. Right, right. And that's all fine. Like, I'm not saying that that person is bad. I'm just saying, I really struggle when someone who's up here is telling people down here, how to get up here because most of the time, I don't think they actually know how to do it. Yeah. I think they know how they did it. Yep. But I don't think they know how to teach others to do it because the circumstances are so different. Yep. So I my very first example of like, really this thought thinking sinking in is when I read Elon, Elon Musk's autobiography and it was written back in 2015 and He's much more famous, famous character now than back then. But the book was talking about how he, you know, he was one of the founders of PayPal sold that had a lot of money. But he dumped it right back into starting three different businesses, if SpaceX Tesla and solar, solar city or whatever the solar one is, and slept on people's couches, because he did. He dumped all the money in there. And he was working 130 hours a week and all of this stuff. And I was thinking, Well, that just sounds terrible. Yeah, that sounds absolutely absolutely terrible. And and I, I just didn't think that that was realistic for literally, your any average person. And that doesn't mean that someone like Elon Musk that was able to do that is has more mental strength and more grit or whatever. It probably means that that aspect of his life was quite unhealthy. Yeah. And people that have a more healthy, well rounded aspect of life, probably would choose to not do that. I know, it doesn't mean you're weak or whatever. You'd be like, I don't I don't see that. Well,
Greg Marshall 36:12 and I think the you have to want you have to make agreements with yourself. Right? One thing that over time I've come to, I guess peace with is not necessarily okay, what are you willing to sacrifice for your life? Not for someone else's? Or to impress someone else's right? Meaning? Yeah, we can also you're not weak. If you say you know what? I am, Greg. And that's Elon. Okay. Ilan is wired to want to do that. Greg is not I have no desire to run $3 billion companies, because you know what that means? No free time, a microscope only 24 hours a day. No privacy. That just sounds horrific to me. I would much rather do a whole lot less, and have massive free time, financial freedom, not so much in the public eye, and just be able to live my normal life. We only live once, right? So it's like, I don't want to create a jail for myself. Because a lot of things that people may not realize is like, imagine being someone like Elon, or Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, where your every move is calculated, you can't go to the movies, and watch a regular you can't go to the grocery store. You can't do a lot of things, right. So there's a price for this. It's not all you know, all good with nothing, you know, being taken away. A lot of your freedoms are taken away. You think Mark Zuckerberg can just walk down the street with no security, go play bass, all people just start shaking hands with people just go to random church and hang out. There's no chance in the world. He could do that. No, he has. He'd have to call his security people and set up all of these schedules and time to do so. So there's a price to be paid. And I think growing up I always thought I have to be willing to pay the biggest price no matter what or that means. I'm weak. Right. And I don't think that's true. Like now that I'm getting older. I'm looking at it like, well, that's actually not true at all. Yeah, it's, you decide what you want to do. Yeah, sacrifice.
Blake Beus 38:32 Yeah, it's, um, you know, I had a ton of thoughts while while you're going on that rant, and I, you know, we'll we're kind of getting long winded. So we'll definitely wrap this up here. Just a second. But I think I have a question for you. Do you know the name of the person who started my MySpace?
Greg Marshall 38:50 Oh, yeah. Tom. Tom, right.
Blake Beus 38:54 Do you want to know why most people don't know Tom's name? Because he sold his business and retired I Yeah. I've never seen like, once. Yeah, he's just like, he he sold his business for I don't know, it was a lot of money at the time over I want to say over $100 million, where he sold MySpace to YouTube. I think they drove it into the ground. But but whatever. But here's the thing is like Tom got to this point. He's like, I think I've made it. Yeah. And I think he does personal projects and things. He's a tinkerer. I wouldn't be surprised if he's out there under some pseudonyms on I don't know, Reddit, or on GitHub writing code, because he likes to do that kind of stuff. But he's not in the public eye. That guy is the genius, right? Like, he did the thing. And the thing is, is, you know, gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, all of those guys, they all could have done that. Yeah, they all could have done that, but they chose not to. And so I really struggled, like Holding, holding a lot of those people up into high esteem. And even really even listening to their tweets or what they say like ever because I just They are so much different than me my core values are so different that let's say we wave a magic wand and and Blake Beus started Amazon in the 90s. Yeah, I guarantee you, I would have sold that business way sooner and then you would have never heard of me again. And I would have had a peaceful life. They just like dads, I probably would have, yeah, would have done philanthropy or whatever. And there's so many things in my life that I would find much more fulfilling than trying to take a business from being, you know, a $200 million business to being a $200 billion business. I like that doesn't even sound fun to me. So I don't want to like listen to what they have to say all the time, because I just don't think they are even close to sharing my values. Yeah. And
Greg Marshall 40:46 I think, you know, it's funny you brought up Tom because I just remember him because he was my friend for so long my space. And but that's, that's a great example. And I think, you know, overall, pretty much this podcast episode, we wanted to go over something that I think a lot of business and or marketers don't really ever talk about, because it's like kind of that taboo subject, which is looking at your emotions, and kind of really making quality deals and agreements with yourself. Not because you feel like you have to do something because it matters. What matters
Blake Beus 41:24 or you're emulating this person. Yeah, it business that's up here. Like literally put in the work. Trust yourself. Don't over exaggerate the worth of something. Follow the data. Be a stone cold professional. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 41:39 Do it, do it your way, do your way. Find what works for you and do that versus trying to do what you're supposed to do. Right. So I think outside of that, right, we got long, hopefully was wrapping up. This is valuable. So Blake How to Get a hold.
Blake Beus 41:55 I just got to Blake beus.com/sm3 and
Greg Marshall 41:59 get a hold of me at Greg marshall.co and you can book a free strategy session with me. And until next time, we'll
Blake Beus 42:04 catch you guys later.
Unknown Speaker 42:04 Bye bye
Blake Beus 0:00 It's been a couple it's been a couple of weeks. Yeah. You've been traveling. I got COVID. Yeah. And then we're back. But yeah. So you you read something on Facebook's documentation. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 0:14 And I surprised you and I never redacted.
Blake Beus 0:17 Yeah. Because usually their their advice is bad. Yeah. Every time I've talked with a Facebook rep, the advice has been at the grid has not worked and when I've tried it, but so I wanted to pick your brain on what this was, well go over it, it
Greg Marshall 0:32 almost. So basically, what it was, is, in the documentation, I was just making a training video for our clients to help educate them. So when they onboard, they understand what to expect when they're running ads, because a lot of our clients either have run ads a little bit in the past, or none at all. They've just started running businesses, and then know that they need to advertise on social now. So what I looked up was interesting. So the in the documentation, I read it said, you should only have one ad per ad set. What? And I so I had to check a couple times, because I was like, this is facebook.com documentation. And I had never seen this before. And so when I was reading it, I thought, well, this is interesting, because a lot of the accounts that I've had the most success with, I've always used this tactic, but did horizontal scaling, while using the existing post IDs, we even did this with you. Yeah, yeah. And the interesting part was, in the documentation, I should find the video that I created. It said like, the problem, especially when you're running the ad is, the more ad you have, the longer it takes the algorithm to learn, because it has to it just has that many more testing points. Sure. And so what I thought was interesting about that, though, was when I first started that, I was like, okay, that's the opposite of what I've heard, in many ways, cases, where they say when you're testing ads have multiple ads running to see which one works. Give it enough information. So the algorithm has something to work with. Right. And I thought, That's interesting, because that's essentially mostly what I thought and mostly what you hear. Yeah, right. And so this is like a contrarian thought. And the funny thing is, as I started analyzing a lot of the accounts that have scaled really big, we actually used the single post id and did heavy horizontal scaling, with no multiple ads in the ad sets, only one. And so at one point, I remember getting yelled at actually by a client, because they didn't like how I set it up. But it was working, which is I had a campaign. And I had like, 20 ad sets in there. Yeah. But all the same ad. Yeah. And it was running, and it was absolutely crushing it. And I was, but they're like, well, people are gonna get tired of seeing this ad or whatever. And they were overly concerned about this. And so I stopped doing it, right. And then the account starts and not, you know, goes well. And the sad part is this has happened multiple times where clients have this same objection. And then we try it, where you got a bunch of ads in there. And it just, I've just never seen it work when it's like a ton of different ads.
Blake Beus 3:31 First of all, it it always kind of blows my mind when something's working. And the clients like, Oh, I'm afraid it might stop. Yeah, maybe work. So instead, let's turn it off in advance some
Greg Marshall 3:41 all. Let's make sure it doesn't work.
Blake Beus 3:45 Make sure because the most surefire way to make sure your ads don't work is to turn them all off. Yeah. Right. Like, and I just don't get it. Taking a step back with with messaging. I know a lot of people are concerned Well, what if What if people get sick of it, and they get annoyed? And I think that's a very common thing that business owners think they constantly think I don't want to be that annoying advertising person. And we take a step back. I don't know if you've you've probably seen these, but in Utah here, there's this one legal firm that has this phrase, one call that and they've done it on radio, they have have it on billboards. And they've done that since the earliest time. I mean, I moved it to Utah in the 90s. Yeah, they were doing it in the 90s. Yes, same phrase. Yep. And we're recording this in 2022. So we're thinking, you know, this is 25 years of the exact same catchphrase. Yep. And is it annoying? Absolutely.
Greg Marshall 4:48 But do we remember it?
Blake Beus 4:50 Is it working? Absolutely. It's working. You've
Greg Marshall 4:53 moved here. You said at the 90. Yeah. I'm not even from Utah. And I knew that Fraser
Blake Beus 5:00 Uh, it's, it's it works. And and so I think I would probably say first and foremost, just just from a business owner perspective, you're listening this, you're thinking about running your own ads or whatever. If the ad is working, don't worry about being annoying, especially with online ads. If people find it annoying, they can actually go in and say, Don't show me this ad anymore. Yeah, because and they're not going to be your ideal client. Anyway, people have control over seeing those ads online now. And so I wouldn't even worry about that I would worry about is this working. And if you're running an ad, and it stops working, maybe at that point, test a few new creatives, and then scale those new creatives. But if it's working, yep,
Greg Marshall 5:46 let it let it work. Well. And here's here's the other thing. So that was one. And then I'll go into the theory, kind of what we started talking about the theory of why people always do the opposite. But the second thing that I saw on the documentation that I had never read before, like I said, I will be a front. I never really read documentation, I just test to figure things out. But I was just doing this to help the clients was it said, whatever your target CPA is, make sure the budget is 10x, for your daily budget of that CPA. Oh, really? I've never seen a specific number. And I remember in the past, I used to look for that. Yeah, and I've never seen it before, but in the documentation says, multiply your target CPA by 10. And so that your deal so let's
Blake Beus 6:34 let's break this down using like, just kind of regular folks language, CPA, cost per acquisition, what does that actually mean to someone that's just new getting into ads.
Greg Marshall 6:43 So So means every business is trying to do two things, one of two things, when they're running advertising, get a lead. So someone's name, phone number email, or something like that contact info, or get a purchase someone to buy. Now, most people really want that purchase, right? Because that's why we're running ads. So if your target cost per purchase was, let's say, $20, then your daily budget should be $200. Right?
Blake Beus 7:09 So cost per purchase, purchase cost per acquisition, they basically mean the same thing, except for acquisition could include a lead, if that's the your ad objective, what you're trying to get out of the app.
Greg Marshall 7:20 Yep. And so they basically said, that's the recommended recommended daily budget for when you're setting up your advertising, which makes sense. That's what made me kind of go deeper into like, the whole single ad thing, because then I started thinking, well, when we're duplicating ad sets, we're still running more money towards that ad. Yeah. And there must be some level of learning on just an ad level. That it the more you invest in it, the more it knows exactly who put that ad in front of. And so I noticed when we were really scaling at one point, we were spending $1,000 a day with one ad. And it was like, previous, or at least not even at the time. I just knew it was working. So I just kept doing more and more of it. Yeah. But I didn't actually have the answer. Like, why is it that there's a single ad, and it almost didn't matter who I targeted? He just was generating buyers? Yeah. And now I look back at it. And it's like, okay, well, that makes sense. Because that ad is getting funneled so much money into it that it has it just figures out who put that in front
Blake Beus 8:31 of well, not only that, if you think about it, you're also generating some social proof. So we were doing this strategy back with one of my products. We had the one ad you remember this app, it had 135,000 likes on this one app. And so you're seeing this ad and it pops up in your in your feed. And it instantly grabs your attention because it had 135,000 likes. Yeah. And that ad was just absolutely crushed it and that was our number one moneymaker. It was it was and it was a super simple ad. There wasn't anything unique or particularly inventive or creative about that ad. It just it just was solid, straightforward language clear offer. The coloring stood out in Facebook's coloring that was maybe the only really super creative, social proof and had tons of social proof.
Greg Marshall 9:22 And I think I've heard Molly Pittman talk about this before where she says social proof is a very big it's very important for the ads when you're running on Facebook. But you can never like see, like, well, there's no real explanation like why or how or whatever. You just kind of have to come up with your own theories. But when I saw this in the documentation, that's where I thought like, Okay, so there's there's something to that. Yeah, right. And even right now, a couple of clients that are really scaling Well, there's one in my mind right now that she's up 16 100% Since the iOS changes happen, year over year, and she's not doing small numbers, and everyone that's like part of her group that she's, they've all dropped big and sales. And there's one thing that I know about what those people in that group are doing versus what she's doing. And what she's doing is, without giving away the whole formula, what she's doing is getting good at letting them run, and then showing them to more and more people. Yeah, right. And it's gaining stability. And there's obviously other strategies, we're incorporating with that. But to me, that just shows iOS or not. Here's our theory that me and my immediate buyer were talking about yesterday, we started saying what so then why, why is it recommended? Because I'm thinking there's a specific I'm not gonna say their name. But there's a specific credible, so I'm not saying they don't know what to do credible, like Facebook ads expert, right, that would say, Yeah, we test hundreds and 1000s of different angles, and hooks and images and stuff like that. And I just thought like, Well, how do you do that? Because it seems like, I remember trying to do this technique before, for like a week. Yeah. And I saw some of the worst results ever got,
Blake Beus 11:23 I think, if I were to pinpoint it, if someone's a really well known, advertiser with courses and things out there, and they're well known, they have a big following all of these things, I think they're playing in a different sandbox than the rest of us, then people, they're, they're spending less. So for example, if if it's a particularly unique challenge to say, I need to spend $100,000, this month on ad campaigns, yeah. And I need that to be profitable. That's a very different sort of problem with a different set of solutions than someone that's saying, I need to get up to spending $1,000 A day profitably, those are very different problems. And I feel like a lot of times these bigger advertisers that have courses and things, they maybe forget a little bit that there are stages to this, and the solutions are significantly different. But if I'm spending $100,000 a month, and I only have one ad, yeah, depending on the size of your audience, you might not be able to spend $100,000, with one ad, unless you you set your settings in your campaign to show that to people, three, four or five times a day. Yep. Were the default setting, if I remember correctly, cuz it's been a while since I played with these things. The default setting in Facebook specifically is to only show that one ad to someone twice a week or three times a week. I think that's the default.
Greg Marshall 13:01 So the default and there's mold, and it changes. It changes. Yeah, yeah. But But yeah, that so? And that's, that's my point. My point is, what's communicated out there is based off stages. Yeah. Right. And what they're saying, is the message to the market they're talking to, is not incorrect. But a mismatch. Yeah. So they're teaching this, but the people that are doing it are not spending 100,000 hours a month, right, therefore, the vise is going out. It's not applicable, right to the audience that they're actually targeting. Right. Right. And so that's where I'm saying like, because in my mind, I'm talking about the regular business owner, that is going to spend, yeah, maybe $30,000 a month,
Blake Beus 13:54 right. I mean, we kind of gear this towards people. You know, we when we talk about who we're making this podcast for whatever, we're kind of gearing a lot of this towards people that want to get up to spending $1,000 a day, because that's a significant spend for a lot of businesses. And so that's what we get a lot of,
Greg Marshall 14:15 and that's what most businesses, most businesses are there. If you were to look at the whole market and slice it up, I bet it's 80% 85% of the people are not really ever going to exceed spending $30,000 a month, right on campaigns, because they're just not at that level. There's only a select few that are like, you know, they run into the problem. You know, Coca Cola. Yeah. And this, this, this guy that I'm talking about? He ran one of the bigger if not the biggest advertising budgets for tech, a very well known tech,
Blake Beus 14:50 right, so he's playing, he's playing in a different, a different realm, and he's probably really good at that and that's great. But that advice doesn't translate down to someone who's, who's spending three, four or $500 a day. On ads, the the advice is a mismatch. That's a really great way to put it.
Greg Marshall 15:12 And the interesting part about it is I'm looking at so all the people, this is funny, because I've never questioned this. And so I read this, all of the advice that I see out of the marketplace, and I'm sure there's things I'm missing, but the main ones I see is almost like they're only talking to their it's like rich people talking to poor people about rich problem. Does that make sense? So, so that's like, that's like the comparison. So like, for example, someone who just started off their business is not gonna understand, like, you know, my private plane just broke down last week, and I'm really trying to figure out how to, you know, like, not pay as much or lease it this way, or whatever it's like, well, that's not really applicable to most of the people. But I say that as kind of an extreme example, to be funny. But most of the people that are pushing out the content in the content creators that show you how to do that, yeah, they're really almost speaking to a whole different market than what the normal business owner is going to write their business
Blake Beus 16:18 like, especially if it's someone that has consistent content on multiple channels. So let's say, I'll pinpoint Neil Patel, he's been around for a long time. I like a lot of his content. But he has new blog articles every week, multiple times a week has consistent social media posts on basically every single platform out there. He's constantly a guest speaker at different things like that. You can't do that unless you have an entire team behind you. And I don't know how big his team is. But off the top of my head, if I were to guess, I would say his team includes probably 20 full time staff. Yep. And maybe up to 50, maybe maybe even more. And that's fine, great. Literally nothing wrong with that. That's fantastic. But you got to understand that some of the advice he's going to give may not apply to you, when you're setting up your very first Facebook ad campaign. And you're and you're, and you're going to spend $100 a day. Even if he says, hey, if I were to spend $100 a day, this is what I would do. The reality is, is he and his team probably haven't started $100 A Day campaign in years. And so he's been too rich for too long, right? And, and it's fine, like, Look, I'm not saying oh, it's bad, don't listen to anything he says I mean, either, but I'm saying is it's a mismatch for what you're trying to do. And he might be missing the point because he's lived in this realm for so long, that things are so easy to him. But he's also got this entire team behind him and a lot of momentum and name recognition. But if you're starting off, and you don't have name recognition, you don't have, you know, 100,000 million plus followers or whatever your your set of circumstances is, is going to be different, a lot different. And I feel like well, when I first launched my very first product, it was a product on how to post consistently on social media. And I launched it knowing I don't post consistently on social media, and I only had about 150 followers at that time. But I am really good at creating systems. And so I made this system and put it out there. And the first month I sold it, I did $37,000 In sales, which was fantastic to me. But those problems that I faced in that, you know, growing that and everything was significantly different than you know, Neil Neil Patel's problems, he's got great advice, listen to his stuff, read his books, but filter that through, okay, how does this translate to me? When I'm just starting out and take that advice and say, Okay, maybe this is great advice, but not for me right now. Maybe, maybe in a few months, when I've grown things up, or I have a little bit more recognition, or I'm a little bit more advanced or something like that. You have to constantly filter that stuff.
Greg Marshall 19:06 Yep. And I think I'm also thinking of like, for example, you know, the content can Gary Vaynerchuk. Yeah. Or there's another gentleman that does organic, basically, the, the interesting part about so when they talk about content, right? There's several people that have great advice, Gary Vaynerchuk is one Yeah. And a couple other guys that are very credible, and I respect big time, but the advice that they give to maybe the beginner beginner business, it's not going to work as well. For example, one was like, Yeah, I've grown my my business using pure organic content. And then you find out you hear like through an interview, well, how much is that worth? You know, organic content costs? Well, I have a team of editors and a team of this people and I spent $45,000 a month so they need it well done. How does the small business who doesn't even make $45,000 a month. Take that advice at that stage, right? Because they don't even have their their revenues aren't even what you're spending just on editing alone. Yep. Each month and so sometimes it gives not and I'm sure it's not intentional, yeah, it's but it gives the wrong maybe idea or expectation where someone's like, Well, I'm a one man show. And I'm gonna start doing some organic content.
Blake Beus 20:29 It kind of reminds me of, and I don't I want to say this was Warren Buffett that says I'm probably not, but some some person that had done really well for themselves, had basically said, and you see people make fun of this all the time, but basically saying, hey, the younger crowd needs to maybe stop getting avocado toast and buying that $5 latte every day. Yeah, and start hustling so that they can be successful. And it's like, okay, yeah, maybe we need to save some money, avocado toast and lattes, that's 10 bucks a day. 30 days, that's 300 bucks. Maybe I could save 300 bucks by by, you know, making my own avocado toast or whatever. But that's not gonna make me a wealthy Wall Street. $300 is not gonna do it's, it's not it's not right. So that that advice, while maybe that can help me save me a couple 100 bucks a month? That's not going to like set me up for life. Yeah, it's really kind of unhelpful. And yes,
Greg Marshall 21:25 it truly is. Because you do hear that, you know, like, one of my favorite phrases that one of my mentors. I used to say, as you can't shrink yourself to wealth. Ooh, I like that. It's it's very, like, it's powerful. Because really, what he's saying is, you know, saving money and avocado toast isn't gonna make you millions. No, because the because the message implies, if I just don't spend money, then I'll accumulate all of this wealth. But if you think about it, if you don't spend any money, and let's say, let's say you make $3,000. And you figure out a way to live off $100 a month. Are you really gonna get wealthy just saving $2,000 a month for the rest of your life? No, no, no. Because what is that? That's like, $24,000 a year, 10 years, that's 240 is still not a millionaire. And you're living off $100 a month? Yeah, you've
Blake Beus 22:18 got, yeah, you've got you got nothing. Now, if you're bootstrapping, you've got a product, you've got a business, you've got a landing page. And you need you're pretty strapped, and you need a couple 100 bucks to run your first ads, skip some avocado, toast and coffee for a few weeks, and put that, you know, said save up that 10 bucks, and actually put it towards something. Right. That's, that's helpful advice, because that that ad budget could change your life, literally, a good ad campaign, and learning how advertising works, is a skill that can have massive impact on your ability to earn money over time. Yep. And I think so that's what worthwhile
Greg Marshall 23:04 and I think, you know, so kind of this, this episode is going into knowing where you are, at what stage and then doing the activities that are necessary just for that next step. Yeah. Right. Just like, you know, I talked to one of my clients, we refer to Nike. And we said, well, if you ask Nike, now how to market and yes, Nike, well, how did you get started? marketing plans a lot different, right, waited for the marketing plan, in the beginning was selling sneakers out of a truck, and just driving the places and pushing it. That's the marketing strategy. Now that they've grown using marketing strategies, build a $10 million commercial, and put it out there in the whole world see it right. Now that both work. But both are different stages of your business. And so I just found that interesting. It because it stuck out to me, because I like, you know, consistent self education and learning from other people. And it dawned on me when I read that, I was like, Wait a minute. All the advice that you get, though, are from people that are saying to do the exact opposite of what that just says. But then you have to take into context like, but where are they saying At what point of their journey they saying that from? Yeah. Because when you usually hear the examples, when they start asking people like, here's another one, I heard, yeah, we, we ran some ads, you know, we didn't spend that much. And we figured out what ads work the best. And then we started, you know, teaching other people how to do it. And that's what we did every month. And we spent anywhere between 50 to $60,000 a month to figure that out. And you're like, and the communications like, so you just need to figure out what ads weren't really. But you kind of left out you spent $60,000 to figure that out to figure that out. Well, first you need $60,000 to do that. Right?
Blake Beus 24:52 And, and not a lot of businesses have a $60,000 per month ad budget to just figure that out, even if there are Successful business. That's, that's hard. And frankly, I wouldn't even recommend that. Just saying, okay, are we're stepping into ads or very first ad campaign, let's slot 60 grand this month in ads, I wouldn't recommend it, we got to figure a few things out. So let's, let's circle back to kind of the initial talking point, a one ad in an ad set, pair that with a CPA of whatever, 10x. And then you want a 10x that as your daily budget? Yes, that's what it says. So let's say I haven't run any ads. I don't know what creatives work. I don't know what audiences are work work. But let's assume that I know how to set up ads. How would I go from there to having one ad, in a campaign scaling horizontally? And like, what what would you be your process to go from? No ads to? I've got a winning ad. And I'm running one ad. And I'm scale.
Greg Marshall 26:00 So once again, I think there's context left out even in the documentation. Yeah, I think they, the assumption in the documentation is you have figured out what ad,
Blake Beus 26:10 you figured out a creative and you figured out an audience match for that creative,
Greg Marshall 26:14 right. So I think that's like, the small details left out. So you know, start there, right? I would say, and you're not actually done. In fact, just yesterday, my mind, I'm thinking, I've been using this process for this one client, and it's worked out beautifully. You can start off as low as five $10 A day still optimize for what you want. Understand, you're not going to get these huge results from it, you're just trying to prove proof of concept with that accurate. Let's say you create a campaign, you create an ad set targeting that you think would work the best based on the ad, and you run one ad, and you run it for a week, you see if it ends up getting either leads or sales. If it gets you a couple of leads, or sales, and you look at the click through rates and all that it kind of looks like it has promise, then take that post idea, that particular ad and then now moving into trying to scale it up.
Blake Beus 27:08 Okay, that's, that's basically, you got to run some tests. And if you have, if you have the budget, you can maybe run a few $10 a day with maybe some different audiences, or maybe a couple of ad creatives, and you're running 30 bucks a day on three, yep, three campaigns to just kind of see, which is the best audience to add to offer fit. Yep, focusing on alignment, and the metrics that can show you the alignment, like click through rates CPMs, which is your cost per 1000 impressions,
Greg Marshall 27:40 add to cart carts, whatever any type of high level metric that tells you you're on the right path. But just
Blake Beus 27:46 don't expect at that budgets that you're going to see a 3x 4x 5x return because, as we've talked about a lot on the show with algorithms, you've got to feed a lot of data into the algorithm in order to get some significantly significant results. But you can run these, run these ads and say, Okay, I'm gonna slot a few 100 bucks to testing this out whether it gets some sales or not, I'm going to come up the other side of this with some knowledge about which target which targeting and audiences seemed to work best and which ad worked best. Now I can combine that together, and run it and run another test and then see if that's good to scale.
Greg Marshall 28:19 And that's, you know, and it's funny, because as we talked about this, in my mind, I can see a lot of these campaigns where reviews the structure, unintentionally. So it's not like I knew from some level documentation, some that it worked, I just was figuring out that it was working, and was just doing more of it now. But now after reading that, it starts to make a little bit more sense to me. Now why it was written, I actually knew the why. So the theory that we actually talked about today. The other thing that I think is important is if you get the recommendation of running like a bunch of different ads, sometimes that can cause you to make bad ads. Yeah. And this is where I mean, it's almost lazier, because although you're doing you know, technically more, you're not putting the necessary thought of how do I get the audience hooked? Yeah, because you have the, like, luxury, I guess that's what we call the luxury of like, I'm not paying a magazine or TV or whatever, you know, 20 grand is gonna show one ad, you pay a lot more attention what you're gonna say, yeah, when you do that, versus on Facebook, I can just spend, you know, 100 bucks, throw out a bunch of stuff and just see what works, right. And I think it would be in our best interest to just pretend like you're buying ads, to where like you're doing direct mail piece, like once you submit it, there's no changes. And it just, it's gonna go out there, the money you spend is spent. And now you have to hope that you get the results that you want. You think a little bit differently. Yeah, as far as like Well, let me make sure my that hook is good. Put a bit more effort into that. Yeah. And I think that part can't hit, you know, I don't know, I feel like that part maybe has gone away. Because we have the luxuries of technology where you can do so many things and test where you can almost use testing as a way to not think through what you're doing. Yeah. Well,
Blake Beus 30:20 I think it and we've talked about this before, we've had multiple podcasts recently on messaging. Yep. And with iOS 14, and now 15. And Google has announced that they're going to have an advertiser sandbox, where they're going to start blocking third party tracking on Android phones. The messaging, the psychology of the messaging, your ad hooks, your creatives, that part is going to continually become more and more and more important. And you're going to need to spend more time learning how to write good ad, copy how to write a good video script. And it doesn't have to be sophisticated, but it has to speak to your target audience. And you're going to want to spend more time studying ad messaging, and maybe looking back at the old school ad copywriters, Dan Kennedy, greatest of all time, plugged into that guy. And studying that, that kind of stuff, and focusing on your messaging, and then looking at the advice that is aligned with what stage you are in your advertising journey.
Greg Marshall 31:28 Well, and the other thing, I think that you'll want to spend more time on this, this is like how it makes you feel like you're going back to old school. researching your market. Yeah, right. Like the other thing that you kind of, can get almost lazy with because of technology is and algorithms do everything for you almost. It's almost like your mom does everything for you. And then one day, you're left alone. They're like, well, you need to clean your house wash it is no insurance, know what to do. And this happens. And you're kind of like, what, yeah, that basically that's my scenario, and I'm 70 years old. What am I supposed to do? Right? Yep. It's almost the same with algorithms, right? They have like, spoon fed us this whole time. And now, as they start to take away these things, you have to now you figure out like, okay, so I can't overly rely just on all these targeting options. I have to like, now know what I'm doing. And I
Blake Beus 32:20 think it's a good thing. I think it's a really good thing. First of all, I've it's weird coming from someone who helps advertisers, but I'm a big privacy advocate online, I feel like we need definitely more of that. And these are moves towards more online privacy. Yep. And then the second thing is, I think it's weeding out. A lot of the people that are gaming the system that are that are flash, you know, flash by night stealing ad copy, doing doing whatever, knowingly shady things, it's filtering those people out and making it so that the people that are passionate about their product, their audience, advertising, this kind of stuff, are the people that are going to shine and the other people that were just lazy and they knew a couple of tips and tricks to game the algorithm are going to go well. So I think ultimately, this is a good move, but it's changed and we you know, you raised
Greg Marshall 33:09 you just reminded me so I don't know if maybe my algorithm hasn't hit or what but I haven't seen any luck of those like guru type ads that I used to see all the time. Oh, really? Like I there's one guy but he probably actually knows what he's doing. Right? We'll just say his name Dan Henry. Oh, yeah, but he's
Unknown Speaker 33:31 legit I don't see his stuff anymore.
Greg Marshall 33:33 I see a lyric lyric well yeah, lyric I see I see his stuff a lot so he's great. I just like he just seems to be very excited. But But what I mean is like the pool has shrank like more than people that act like you know that they've actually made money you still see them but you don't see the almost like the no name or random people you're like who's who these guys?
Blake Beus 34:00 It was like what two three years ago you would see also I would call them dude printers Yeah, these guys that are just like standing in front of a Lamborghini they probably rent it and yeah, I'm going to show you how to do all this it's super easy Amazon FBA business was was a big one. I don't see I don't see many. I don't see very many of those anymore. I see. I still see a few of the quote gurus out there, but they're probably a bit more knowledgeable understanding Dan Henry his ad copy while some people I think maybe find him a little irritating. Yeah, I feel like his ad copy and his video scripts always get me sucked in. Yeah, I think he's does a really good job with the content in his ads. And I think he's done a really good with that for a long time. And I think that's maybe why he's still rocking it.
Greg Marshall 34:50 Well, that's why I said you see the same like, I've seen a Laird for years now. You know, I feel like I know, you know, I've seen some I
Unknown Speaker 34:57 know I feel like if I saw him on the street, choleric who was Gonna
Greg Marshall 35:00 go to my end.
Blake Beus 35:01 I know we've talked about this before we'll we'll sign off after this but one of my favorites with a lyric, because he kind of follows you all over. But it's not super irritating either, but I remember on one he's like, Oh, but you didn't think you'd see me. That's my favorite. And it was like a new retargeting ad. And I thought it was hilarious.
Greg Marshall 35:19 But But I think he has a true passion for I think marketing and stuff. And so that's why I think, at least for me, I don't get annoyed because I'm like, Hey, he's trying new things. He's always trying to get better. And so how can you not like that? Yeah.
Blake Beus 35:33 All right, let's, let's, let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch
Greg Marshall 35:36 with you, Greg marshall.com. And you can book a free strategy session. And me,
Blake Beus 35:40 Blake. beus.com/sm, three, four. The best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall 35:46 Yeah. So until next time, we'll talk to you guys later. Bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 scaling like everybody, every client there, they always get nervous. Yeah, anxiety when they when it comes to scaling, right? So you found something that works. You're spending maybe 100 bucks a day or something. And now you're telling them alright, let's do 200. Let's do 300. Let's, yes, let's do this. And then they have a ton of questions as they do do that. So what happens? Yeah,
Greg Marshall 0:22 so, and it's normal to be nervous. I don't think that's abnormal at all right? Right. Because no one wants to like spend more money and risk losing. So typically, what happens? So number one, scaling, all that really means is do more, right, get more sales than you're currently getting, or more leads that you're currently getting. And typically, what happens? So here's usually the concern or the misconception of scaling. So let's say something is working really well, like $50 a day, right? Really, really low spent, and you're getting a good return. Let's say you're getting a four return on adspend. No, nice, right? So let's, let's just pretend that's happening now, if you haven't scaled before, or you're new to it, and I have made this mistake, okay. So I'm not like excluding myself, it is very easy to believe as well, if I spent 50, why don't I just spent $5,000, and I should get the exact same return of what I'm currently getting now of a Forex, right? Unfortunately, that is not how it works. And it pretty much I don't want to say it's impossible, but close to impossible to keeping maintaining that ratio that return as you spend more. And the reason for that, and Blake can probably attest to this is the audience, right? So the way these algorithms work, is when you're spending low spend, you're like forcing the algorithm to work harder to find that little pocket. That's a perfect match for your offer. But then what happens when you expand that audience?
Blake Beus 2:01 You will you start, you start having to boil over into the the people that aren't perfect for the fit, and that's fine. Yep. There's more of those. And that's a good thing. Yep. Because there's, that's a much, much, much bigger audience. But instead of finding the people that are ready, right now, you're finding maybe people that are going to be ready, tomorrow, next week, or even a few or even in a few weeks, or maybe the offer is not exactly what they need. And they're comparing a couple of alternatives. And it takes them some time to make a decision. But all of that drives your costs up. Yep. And so people, in my experience, people start seeing the cost per acquisition go up, yep. Which means their row as return on adspend starts coming down, and they start panicking because they think this is a trend, that's eventually going to mean, I'm losing money. So I'm spending all this money and I'm losing money. But in reality is a good thing.
Greg Marshall 3:04 Yep, in my eyes anyway. Well, and one of the things you have to keep in mind is, in my experience, okay, so I'm just speaking, in my experience, when you scale you actually, so people, I think incorrectly focus on the wrong part of the scale. And you should be thinking about the second sale, you're gonna give them the upsell, how many more orders they can make, and really focusing your energy on that. Not the the advertising part. Because it's inevitable that the cost per purchase, and the row ads is going to go down, the more you spend, but if you if you only focus on the advertising part, what's going to happen is you're going to get scared every single time it goes up, and you're going to retract or, you know, go back to what you were doing. And you're not ever going to be able to grow that and get more customers that you're looking for. And so that's the mistake that I see constantly is when they're trying to scale going, what worked out for x and 50. How do we make it work at $5,000 a day for x? Let's just keep looking at the ads over and over and over again, which is actually the wrong place to be work. You actually should be working on how do I increase the average order value or get them to buy sooner or get them to buy more often. That's how we
Blake Beus 4:23 come up with more offers, like follow up offers, they bought this one thing, what's the next thing they should do? It was thing after that was the thing after that, if you have two or three layers of different offers, oftentimes they're going up in price. Exactly. Then you you actually have legitimate business there.
Greg Marshall 4:41 Well, the advertising tends to work out right then you're not as concerned. But there is a transition where you have to almost practice going through this. Because every single time I've gotten I mean, I can't think of many phone calls and conversations of this sense of panic. Yeah, that scaling brings to the business owner, once again, not saying it's not warranted. It's just because you start seeing, Oh, man, I'm spending $1,000 A day 2000. And what makes it scary? Okay, this is a psychological game. What makes it scarier is when you keep seeing the receipts from Facebook or Google or any platform, hitting your account, reminding you how much is going out it almost couple times a day, yeah, when you're scaling, you're seeing your account being hit over and over and over and over again, one day, and that. So without looking at revenue, the client will just keep seeing these, because a lot of them have notifications set up when they get like a spend on their credit card or something like that. And so when you're, when you're spending $2,000 a day, which we've we've been,
Blake Beus 5:51 and I think Facebook the most you can have it set out and unless you have an account, like a big account with them or something is to charge you every $1,000. So you're gonna see $1,000 purchase twice a day. And most people were thinking, Ah, and I'll spend 1000s of dollars, you know, $1,000 Twice a day on anything. And you see that, but then you don't see the revenue numbers come in. Yep. And, and so it's easy to panic. Well, and I've been there, and
Greg Marshall 6:18 I think it's totally normal. Yeah, we're not, we're not like downplaying, like, you should just let it happen and not be concerned or worried. We just want to prep you on, this is what will happen and make sure you This is like a psychological thing, to where you make sure you're not turning things off. Because I've had this happen before they are getting hit, we've got up to $3,000 a day, at at their threshold was $900. So that's three or maybe sometimes four transactions on Facebook a day. And what ends up happening is their return was working, everything is working, the numbers are working out. Nothing's really changed. But they shut it down, turn it off, turn it off. We're spending way too much. We gotta like reassess, yeah. And they lose that momentum that they're building. And they're constantly starting and stopping, not because of logistics, or looking at their numbers to see if it's working. But just because of the fear of seeing anxiety, the money come out over and over and over. And
Blake Beus 7:17 that's, that's real. And it's normal. I think about it this way. So a few years ago, I got into my wife bought me smoker, and I got into smoking, you know, briskets. Yeah. And pork butts and things like that. And there's a saying for anybody that that that gets into this. If you're looking you're not cooking. Yeah. And I remember the first time I cooked something that was long, it was gonna take 16 hours. Yep. So I put it in the night before. I didn't sleep that night, I have thermometer in there I will. And I had the thresholds on the temperature set. so close that it was going off every half hour, and I'll go out and look at it and tweak things. But every time you lift the lid, the temperatures, drop, drop and change. And it turned out in there. But now, when I do that same cook, I get the get everything up to temperature, I throw the meat on I go to bed. Yep. And it is what it is in the morning. And it turns out great. But if you're looking, if I keep tweaking, you, you lose, you lose all the heat. Yep. Right. Yeah. And so you're constantly cooling things down and resetting the algorithm benefits and, and things along those lines. And so I'm not saying that doesn't mean, you can't turn things off. But as part of a proper scaling campaign, you shouldn't really have these surprises. Because you're not gonna go from 50 to 5000. Overnight. Yeah, you're gonna kind of you're gonna make some incremental changes. And then you'll pause, not necessarily campaigns, but you'll pause scaling for a minute, sometimes if something doesn't seem quite right, and you'll massage at that point, but you don't want to keep just flipping things on and off swapping out things all the time. Because you're you're gonna stop cooking at that point.
Greg Marshall 8:57 Well, that's a recipe. That's a great analogy, because that is true, right? When you're smoking things. What we're really saying is, it's more about trust. Yeah, trusting the process. More so than trying to control too many things that ultimately because you're trying to control them makes it worse. Right? Not because of the intent that you have the right intent, I want to make sure everything works. But sometimes you have to let things run. And you know, they gotta cook, you gotta you gotta let them cook and you don't let it cook. You're gonna end up having not so good. Finished product and I think scaling is one of those. So here's, here's the base what you want to do number one, if you want to scale you should months before start mentally prepping and preparing what you will, how you, you will behave when these situations happen. I think it'd be very helpful because if you plan out mentally like okay, if I'm spending this much What are my by my logical cutoff points? And only measure of that and nothing else? You have to remove the emotion when it comes to so I recommend saying, what's the maximum amount of money that I will spend? And what does that ratio have to look before and a timeframe, how, you know, seven days or 14 days before I make this judgment call, so that when you go in, you're only you're doing it in a non emotional way. And you're just saying, if I spent $1,000, and I don't get at least $2,000 back and it's like, 1500, then I'll cut it off, right? Or if I spend $5,000, and I don't get 10,000. Back, I'll cut it off having specific numbers that you can just look at, and just say, Okay, I hit my threshold. And what typically helps I will have clients do this drill is to go if you were to spend, what X amount of dollars, you're not losing all the spend, right? That's the part that people like our minds trickers. So if you spent $1,000, and you get 1800 in sales, you didn't lose $1,000. Right, you may have just lost a couple 100. Yeah, based on whatever business model, and that's, that's the thing, like think about it that way. It's it's hard to say, Oh, we
Blake Beus 11:22 lost money. If I spent $1,000. And I only sold $950 with the product. I lost 50 bucks, and it's not even a lost, you learned a lot and gained a bunch of customers. Yep. Right, you gained a bunch of people on your email list and everything. You can't keep doing that, because you're gonna run into some cash, cash crunch problems. But if you have a day like that, that's not the end of the world, because I've blown $50 In a day on stupid stuff before. And didn't get any customers out of it. Because it was 50 bucks on I don't know, I don't know, food or something. I mean, it's cool toy at best bought by or something and then didn't make me any money back. I didn't get any customers or anything. So think about it that way. You are going to have some fluctuations. You can't have consistent days where you're under Yeah, where you row as is under one. Yep. But if you have a single day like that, but all of your other days are good. That's not time to panic. That doesn't mean things are going south. That means I don't know, maybe there was a big news story that day. Or maybe something happened in the lives of a lot of your your audiences, like those things happen if you had I mean, if you had a massive news story, like a war started or something like that the day Russia invaded Ukraine, I guarantee you everybody's ad spent was way less effective that day. Oh, yeah. Then then or other days?
Greg Marshall 12:48 Recession? Yeah, right, the talk of a recession. People cannot even I mean, everyone gets impacted by that. But some people may not even really have to worry about that. But just the fear that comes now we're going into recession will make people shrink. Right, right. You know, maybe I shouldn't buy that even though I can't afford it. Yeah, it's a natural, like knee jerk reaction, which, you know, I saw quite a bit with buyer behavior for like two weeks when it's just being pumped on the news every day, gas prices to all time high. The cost of meat is this and the cost of food design, and everything's gone up, you could see a shift in consumer behavior for a couple of weeks. But now, it seems like people are realizing oh, it's, it's hard to live, it's okay.
Blake Beus 13:35 There's, there's all there's always fluctuations. And oftentimes, like with a little bit of creative thinking, without turning off your campaigns, you could use those new stories, or use those concepts in some new ad creative and see how that works, right? There's lots of ways you can kind of manage that, but you're not losing money, per se, if you spend $1,000, and you only made 950 back, you gained a bunch of people qualified people for your email list for your next product. And that's not really a bad thing. Obviously, we you want to be profitable all the time. But if you have one of those days,
Greg Marshall 14:07 I'm glad you brought that up too, because the other almost unrealistic expectation is that every single day will have the exact same ratio of returns, which that's why I typically recommend look at seven days minimum, but more like 14 or maybe even a month to let it all kind of average out and go, What was our return? Right? Because if you do it day by day, what's going to happen is maybe one day at 5x And you're like, This is unbelievable. Then the next day dew point eight, you're like the sky is falling and you just turn it off. But if you just let it run and then another day three and others two and a half and others for you average that all out. It's actually a pretty solid campaign. But if you're looking at it like the stock market like your day trader and your cost is saying, Oh, we just lost money in the last hour. It's you're not going to get anywhere, because you're going to constantly starting and stopping. And that's not how it works,
Blake Beus 15:08 right? And I would tell you if you're going to put effort into something like if you have this nervous energy, and this is like stressful for you, and you're going to, like put the effort into coming up with a next product. Yep, that once they've purchased this offer, yep. What's the next thing, and that next thing doesn't have to be a big step up in price it can be. But it could be just a little mini add on that you can follow up with a quick email campaign, that will make you more money than trying to watch your ad spend hour by hour, minute by minute, and keeping an eye on all of that stuff. So put your effort into that. I would also look at shifting gears just a little bit. I think a lot of people look at the wrong numbers, advertisers, media buyers, we talk a lot about cost per acquisition row as return on adspend CPMs. Those are important metrics. But as you scale the the way those metrics should be interpreted changes. And so what I think a lot of people should look at is instead of looking at those metrics, because those metrics will get worse as you scale. Because they have to get worse as you scale. But I would look at the total profit amount. Yeah, not margin, not percentage amount, but like total profit amount. So for example, let's just say I'm spending $10,000 a month, and I'm making $10,000 a month on that ad spend. And so that's my row, as is a 2x. And that's great. But next month, we spend $1,500. And I make, you know, 12,000 13,000, on profit, my row as is less Yep. But the actual profit in the bank is more, and your overhead didn't go up other than that ad spend, it's not like you had to hire new staff to deliver or whatever, you just have that ad spin. So your actual profit dollar amount is more. And I would like to make $12,000 in profit, more than I would like to make $10,000 in profit, that's a bigger number. And so you want to kind of look at that, as well. And if you're and then you also gotta realize that's just the first part of your marketing machine. And we've talked about this several times, but you have email follow ups you have next offers, you have all of these different things. Where as we focus on this one piece, because that's where everybody gets started. And that's fine. But when you want to start building out the full business, the marketing machine, you have these other products, these other offers, more bundles, more promotions, holiday promotions, all of those things. And putting effort into those things are what take your $12,000 a month on your 15k ad spend and turn that into $24,000 a month profit on the 15k ad spend is that extra stuff that you're you're adding on because the profit margins on those things is significantly higher, because you didn't have to acquire through paid ads, you've already acquired them, you've already spent the money to acquire the customer you have
Greg Marshall 18:13 now. So that's the secret that a lot of the people out there that are scaling and scale big. That's what they're actually focusing most of their effort on. Because I've heard this before from clients like yeah, I talked to this one guy. And he you know, he he spent X amount of dollars and got a gigantic return right sounds like some outsize return. Did you go to find out? Well, he sent emails, and he's hitting a huge list of people that he already acquired. So that's why he's able to get such a outsized return, because he tells me already bought those cars. Yes. And so the numbers are gonna be skewed on that. And so you have to think that's how they're doing it. They're not, there's no secret way that you can unlock, you know, like a video game, or like a cheat code where you can go, Alright, there's a secret audience out there that if I just tap into it, I'll be able to get 1500 row as some that I'm doing unlimited. And if I can just find the pot of gold, that at my life will be saved. just doesn't work that way, no
Blake Beus 19:22 matter how many no matter how many, just this one quick tip or this secret or how many, you know, whatever secrets books, you buy it, those are hooks to get you to buy. But But yeah, just there's no magic code to that. And the people that are saying they have this massive row as they're using that as a hook to kind of get you in. Fine. But oftentimes, I was watching one where the person said, Oh, the row as was, I don't know. 10,000 Yeah. And when I dug into the story a little bit, they will Were running some ads to a small geographic area to get people to come to a seminar to buy condos in a new condo complex. Yeah. And so they needed, you know, they had 100 people in the room, they, they they ran ads, maybe they only ran $1,500 in ADS. Yeah. And they sell to condos. And they're low as $1,500 to a million because they're $500,000 condos. My row as was crazy. Here's the secret, but they
Greg Marshall 20:28 don't like, yeah, most people aren't selling condos.
Blake Beus 20:31 And that's not a pure row as because there's all this overhead and selling condos. Like, there's all of these construction costs and real real trophies, it's just not accurate.
Greg Marshall 20:42 So we recommend, build a business. Don't listen, anyone who says you're gonna get some outsized returns, it's not going to happen. You can get very solid returns from the business fundamentals, which is, of course, what most people do not want to hear. Just like exercise and eating healthy. There's no secret, there's no nothing. It's just basic fundamentals, you just got to do the same thing when you're building your business. So we really apologize to laying down that there isn't some secret trick or hack to get everyone. But if you just stick with the process, you can have a very successful business, trust me. Amazon is not hacking the system with some secret ad campaign. They've got a very strong business model. That's a well thought out from the acquisition all the way to fulfillment to return customers. If they do it, you probably should do
Blake Beus 21:37 well, and they didn't do that overnight, exact, right? Like it's gonna take you some time to get there. They built out they're still building out big sections of their fulfillment arm of the business. Right? And so you build those parts and you optimize those parts as you go. That's why it's called building a business. But anyway, let's wrap this up. Greg, how can people get in touch with you,
Greg Marshall 21:56 Greg marshall.co, and you can book a free strategy session. What about
Blake Beus 22:00 Blake beus.com/sm? Three is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall 22:04 All right. Until next time, I'll talk to you later. Okay, bye.
Unknown Speaker 22:06 Bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 I've heard this term float floating around zero pixel tracking,
Greg Marshall 0:03 or as you call it, zero pickle,
Blake Beus 0:05 zero. I'm full of it today, everything zero pickup pixel tracking. And I like I like that term. And it's something we've actually talked about, we didn't have this catchy term, sure term for it. But let's, let's take a step back and talk about the problems with iOS 1415. And upcoming 16, I believe, and why that's relevant. So what what, what problems did iOS 14 put in place that everybody freaked out about? Yeah, as advertisers, so
Greg Marshall 0:41 basically, you know, you just couldn't track as accurately anymore. And there was just so many targeting options taken away. So much data collection taken away, the reporting is way off. And because of that, that does impact advertisers spending, the confidence of how well your ads are doing. A lot of it can be psychological, if you're not looking at your actual numbers, and just, you know, change, people hate change. And I think iOS really put, you know, really put advertisers, businesses marketers in a tough spot, at least for a little bit, because of how everything was done in the old days, right, when the wild wild west of targeting and tracking and just plugging, there's just so many more steps now you have to do to try to get cleaner data. Yeah. So that's basically what happened.
Blake Beus 1:34 Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I know, people tend to dislike change, or change throws people off. But especially in the advertising world, I feel like when change happens, it's, it's, it's a huge opportunity to level up, because, you know, some advertisers are not going to put the extra effort in to, to learn the new, learn the new way things are working, right, live live in the new world. And so they're gonna fall behind and new, you know, advertisers that are willing to be a little bit scrappy, and try new things, and whatever can contend to get ahead. Yep. So one of the things, you know, zero pixels. So I guess I'll talk really quick about the pixel just to give people a background and why zero pixel is even a thing. So how it used to work is you could install this tracking pixel on your website. And the tracking pixel was literally just a one by one pixel image, a lot of people don't realize that that's all it was. But when when the browser would load that image, you could also append some additional data, like which click ID they used when they clicked on the ad, or the browser ID of the person. Or if you've previously identified that person, you could even pass their email address and some other things back into Facebook system, or Google system, or whatever. And so you could connect the dots between data and events that happen outside of Facebook, we'll talk specifically about Facebook, outside of Facebook, you could connect the dots with what happened with a specific Facebook user and some things along those lines. And that was great for advertisers because we could track this person was actually the person that bought this thing, this person in Facebook world was the person that bought this thing over here, you could report that back, your ads reporting was nice, you could see how much you spent, how much you made, the dollar amount, amount, how many sales you had, or how many leads you had, and it was great. When iOS 14 came around, they said we are going to block third party tracking. And what that meant was any stuff that happened outside of Facebook, they're going to block reporting that back into Facebook, and it's a data privacy thing. In the grand scheme of things, most people probably wouldn't be okay with how much data collection Facebook was doing at the time. Maybe not even be that much data tracking they're doing now. But it was good for advertisers. Yeah. So when they did that mobile devices make up? I don't know why on it on most websites, I look at these days, I would say mobile iOS devices make up probably 50 to 60% of the trials gonna
Greg Marshall 4:22 say 70% 70% on many sites. Yeah, as high as
Blake Beus 4:27 and it's in it's higher when that traffic came from Facebook because I have something like 90% of users that use Facebook, use it on a mobile device, right. And so so the tracking just went through through it just hit right into the concrete. It was terrible. And everybody freaked out. Facebook kept promising. They're going to have a good way to handle it. Google was like, Oh, we've been we've been through this rodeo before. We've already got this figured out. Figured out but Facebook, freaked out and a lot of advertisers freaked out in the game. seem completely changed. But you've said before, it was it was so good back then that it kind of made advertisers lazy if they could just rely on, you know, campaign tricks and things and make money. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 5:15 just basically have just like a maybe have a good offer, you didn't have to do much to make it work. Because quite frankly, the pixel will do a lot of the work for you soon. So people can get away with just like throwing up an Amen, it's a couple of words, get some really, you know, dialed in targeting, and start making money. And that's it. And essentially, the iOS 14 changes have impacted that particular advertiser. One who didn't do the research, understand sales, understand that copy, understand the good offer, having all those in place. And those are usually those are the ones that panic the absolute most. And I think, with the challenges with the iOS 14, and me being a media buyer, I will constantly have to explain why the numbers weren't going back into the ad account and talking about essentially the good old days, right? Like, yeah, I used to run these ads. And I would get like, you know, fill in the blank 7x return on marketing. And now I'm only getting a three, right? And they would kind of measure the success on past old campaigns where it's kind of like measuring different things, right? So well, just because you got A's in first grade doesn't automatically mean you should be getting A's and 12th grade, you still have to do the word you still like it doesn't carry over, right? And so you have to adjust and get better each and every way of the of the journey. So that's basically what I'll have to always explain is, yes, it used to work that way. But it no longer does. And we need to adjust to that. Because if we, if you get stuck in that mindset, you can put yourself right out of business, because you're just like, stuck in the old days. Like imagine if you just kept thinking like, No, I want reality to be newspapers at my front door every day. Yeah. And I don't want to learn how to use a computer, or a cell phone or syntax, because I don't want to do that. Because I just, I liked how it used to be. Yeah, imagine where you would be today. Yeah. jobless,
Blake Beus 7:18 jobless. Yeah, yeah. So Sorry, I keep going back to the kindergarten grades versus 12 grade grades. And just thinking about coloring in lines and what you did in kindergarten to get your good grades, and 12th grade coloring in those circle bubbles just just fine. They might not be the right circle bubble, but at least you stayed within the lines. If it doesn't the skill doesn't transfer. You got it, you got to keep up with the times. And so, so yeah, it threw everybody through loop. Now let's talk about what zero pixel tracking means. Yeah, right.
Greg Marshall 7:52 Well, I mean, the way I would, so really what this is, is 00, I can send a zero pixel track pixel zero. Really what this is, is a matter of, you're not using the pixel or over, I guess, like, over relying on the pixel to do most of your work, or the tracking any of that, you're actually using things that are going to happen inside the app, where the data is a little bit more accurate. So for example, before we hit record, Blake was talking about video views, right, you can optimize for video views within the platform. And then retarget that people who've watched a are 90 or 100% of that video, and that data lives within Facebook. And that can't get lost because Facebook isn't charged? Correct?
Blake Beus 8:45 Yeah. And it's part of the terms that you agree to when you create a Facebook account. And periodically, they'll send you an email saying, Hey, we updated our terms, which we all read, right? Yeah, I don't read any of those. I just assumed that they updated their terms to be able to collect more data on me and I either need to be okay with that or stop using Facebook. Yeah. But that happens within there. So there's literally nothing that Apple can do to prevent or Google or whatever whatever device you're on to prevent Facebook can from collecting data that happens within their app, they have every right to do that. There's no legal issues with that. There's no the big issue was data from some other source transferring back into Facebook and allowing Facebook to be this massive data collection company. But if you're inside the app, all of that data is fair game. So the old way of of of running a campaign for four or five years ago, and this still works like this isn't an old way you see people do this all the time was to was to run a campaign. Drop people on a landing page to get a lead. And then you follow up via email and a retargeting campaign based on the page views on your website. But the retargeting campaign The audience that makes up your campaign had to be created by pixel data. Yep. And with iOS blocking pixel data, you missing still run that, but you're just not going to get anybody that viewed your page with iOS 14. Yep. So you might still get the leads, and you might not be able to still email them. But they're not going to show up in your retargeting audience. Yeah, but now, you can run a campaign with some sort of in app. Re targetable data. Yep. And build your retargeting audiences based on that. Yep. And those can be video views. Those can be on Instagram that can be business profile visits. Yep. Interacting with posts, lead gen. Lead Gen in app lead gen, right. Because Facebook has their in app lead forms. Yep. So they don't have to leave it. And I'm trying to think of other ways that like, I know, there's
Greg Marshall 10:54 a way you got post engagements you've got, you know, clicked on ADD, you've got I mean, you can do combinations of these. The biggest, the favorite one, a lot of advertisers uses the video views. Yeah, it's one of my favorites, because you can track how far people have watched the video and just speak to the ones that have someone watched 100% of the video. Yeah, they're probably more qualified than someone who watched three seconds. Right. Right. So it's a it's it gives you a form of qualification when you do this. So and in app is great. The other people who've messaged your business, that's another one. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Messaging.
Blake Beus 11:27 That's another one. Yeah. So like,
Greg Marshall 11:28 this is a great way too. If you do in app, one technique I used to use a long time ago, as funny as I kind of come back around, was optimizing for messages for people to send you a Facebook Messenger. Yeah. Responding to Your ad, and then go back and forth with them, and then get them on the phone and then sell them. And I think there's, there's really not that much of a difference between and you let me know, because this is where your expertise comes in. But it feels like when you optimize for different objectives for years, people have always said, under no circumstances authorize for anything else, but conversions. Right, right. And the I guess the the logic was that if you optimize for purchases, it hits a different part of the audience, that target audience than if you used a different objective. Right. Sometimes I wonder, though, if we've lost that data from from the conversion side, does that actually make everything kind of more fair game? Because if you're if you lost 80% of your data, then that targeting capability is not the same, right? Yeah. But I always found that optimizing for messages work just as well as optimizing for lead that then I just tried to book a call talk to him on the phone. Yeah. Given you have a structured follow up process. Yeah. And that's, that's just my experience. And I even used the engagement objective, and the messaging objective, and in many times, actually, the engagement objective worked better than that. So you always want to test it. But that's, that's kind of my thoughts. What are your thoughts about the algorithm hitting different segments of that audience, and how's it impacted now versus your past?
Blake Beus 13:17 So my, my guess, and I would love to kind of keep an eye on this over time, is the optimizing for conversion. If your conversion happens off site, off of Facebook, or your own website, if it happens on your website, optimizing for conversion, is going to continue to get worse and worse and worse results over time. And the reason it may not have happened right away is Facebook still had a lot of conversion data, right? It's historical data. But that data gets stale. It becomes out of date and gets moldy and old. Yeah, and, and over time, but if let's say you have an audience, that's 100,000 people, and you're optimizing for conversion, what Facebook is trying to do is say, Okay, which of these people which five or 10% of this audience is ready to convert right now based on their past behaviors, but if a lot of their past behavior data is now dark, yep, you can't get that past behavior, then the, they're going to have a harder time identifying the five or 10% of that 100,000 person audience that is ready for conversion, and how they can track what's ready for conversion and say I have I have an offer for a freebie that's that's like the the five best marketing strategies for podcasts. And Greg over here has been signing up for you know, podcast guru overhears email list, and this podcast person over here and Pat Flynn. I know he's great. I love it. But he's got a podcasting course and you sign up for his freebie over there. Well, Greg is really ready to sign up also for my free podcast. You know, freebie, and so they can clearly identify that Greg is hot, he's he's ready to, to convert, you're good to go, he fits in that 5% audience. But if they lost all of that data from all these other advertisers, because the pixel is not tracking Facebook no longer no no longer knows, and that data that they have on conversions is, is old. Yep. And so that's why I think optimizing for conversions is probably going to get worse and worse and worse over time, which kind of sucks, it was a nice week, we could just tell the algorithm we want, this is the thing we actually want, we don't need to beat around the bush, we can just tell you and be very direct, we want to conversion we want to purchase or we want to leave form, sign up and optimize for those conversions. But now, it's like, we've got to, we've got to kind of hint that that's what we want, we've got to use other signals, we've got to feed other signals into the algorithm to tell it, these are the types of people that we're pretty sure are going to convert. And obviously, we got to test that to see which ones are actually converting and then say, okay, we want more of
Greg Marshall 16:06 these people. What about the so in app, it seems like the cost per action in app is always cheaper, like the traffic is always cheaper than the conversion or off off app? data, right? At this point? Yeah. With the with the changes. Is that do you think it's possible that if you choose the conversion objective and has less data, that you could get a better result using a different objective targeting the same assuming the audience exactly the same? Simply just because there's more data on the in app versus off the app? Because, in my mind, it always feels like when you optimize for conversion off app, the CPM or the cost for the traffic is much higher than when you do it for inside the app. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?
Blake Beus 17:01 Yeah, I mean, I've seen that exact same thing as well, that the CPMs are always higher for some sort of offline conversion, or off site conversion, than it is for some sort of in app or in ecosystem conversion. As far as why I think it I think a lot of it has to do with, with just the incentives that Facebook has, or Google or we say Facebook a lot, but or Google, any of them the things, the incentives, they have to keep people inside their app. So So think about it this way, say, say you're now Facebook, and your job is to increase the profit of the company. Every time someone leaves our app, that's an opportunity that they won't come back. Yep. Okay. And so I think they are want to incentivize advertisers to say, hey, let's do everything inside our ecosystem. Keep you here, because if someone signs up using a lead form in ours, in our app, they're not leaving our app. And they'll keep scrolling when they're done, which means they they'll see more advertisers, and which means we'll make more money. I'm not necessarily saying that's a good thing. I'm saying that's where the incentives are for Facebook to behave. And that's the playground we need to play in the app. Because if we're going to play in Facebook's sandbox, we got to play by the rules. And unless you're a government agency, you have you have zero, say on how Facebook sets its rules. Let me
Greg Marshall 18:31 ask you, here's a question. What about my my theory was also a lot of people are going for a conversion, specifically, towards very popular audiences. Does that bid get higher because it's more saturated with people versus using another bid?
Blake Beus 18:51 Yeah, I would, you know, now that you say that, that wasn't something I thought about, but absolutely, I mean, we've talked about that. And in general, the people that are optimizing for conversions are willing to pay higher pay a larger, pay more money for those conversions. I know. With with running, if we skip over into Google, and we start talking about search ads, yeah, there's a whole methodology of keyword research, which keywords are going to be the ones that are going to get the conversions. And, frankly, for me, one of the best things I always did that seemed to work is I would put in keywords, I would sort them based on the average bid. Yep. And I would choose the highest bid amount and bid a little bit higher than that. And because those were the keywords that were converting, the reason people were paying high dollar amounts 2030 $40 A click a click on those is because they're buying those people are buying Yep. And when you have a higher priced offer, this particular client that I'm thinking of here had had an offer that the starting price was $1,200 a month. You know, $30 a click is nothing if your conversion rate is high. And for the right people, their conversion rate rate was really high once they sign up on the form, and they had a good follow up process, and everything. So it didn't, it was great for them, their ROI was insane. Because people would sign up for this $1,200 A month starting at $1,200 a month, and they would stay with them for years and years and years because it was a service. Well, I
Greg Marshall 20:20 think so bidding in different parts of the auction makes a difference. And I think within App, you really should test it because you can't get a lot of value. I know, at least for me, I've always felt like, I guess other people talking about bidding strategies and stuff like that have always made it sound like if you do in app, it's like garbage traffic, like Facebook has given you like, the lower quality traffic. I'm not always sure that's the case. I've run a bunch of campaigns with engagements and, you know, video views and stuff like that. And I've seen, like, I pretty much back check, like to see who's watching or clicking it. And it seems pretty much like the same type of person that I want to go after anyways,
Blake Beus 21:07 I think I think that stems from a people people's mis understanding of the numbers they're seeing, and I guess let me put it this way. So you're optimizing for conversions, right? Your CPMs are higher, let's, let's say your CPMs are 10 $10. Yeah, per 1000. That's pretty high for a CPM. Now, depending on your offer, whatever $10. And so you get, you get a click through rate of, you know, 2%, whatever, you get a conversion rate, and once people land on your on your page of, of two to two to 4%, whatever, and you're thinking that's pretty good. You know, I'm making my sales, I'm paying a lot, but I'm making sales, and I'm profitable. And, and that's pretty good. And then you have, say, an engagement campaign or a video view video view campaign, where your CPMs are, I don't know. $2 really low, like, way 1/5 what you're paying for? And so for the same dollar amount, you can get five times the traffic. Yeah. But then your click through rate is point five. Yeah. And your lead lead signup rate is, is one. Yep. And so they're like, Ah, this is just garbage traffic. Yeah. But the thing is, is you are able to reach five times the number of people with the same ad spent Yeah, and your end result might actually be more profit. Yeah. Because you're able to reach out to more people. And so it's easy to just kind of write that off as garbage traffic traffic. But the reality is, is, well, of course, the other traffic was better, because you were paying five times the amount for that traffic. But this traffic could be more profitable, because the numbers are your the numbers are working out. But because the percentages are smaller, you're thinking Ah, that's that's garbage traffic. I'm not wasting my time with that, you know, something
Greg Marshall 22:59 that Mollie Pittman, so that caught my attention last week. And they're very successful. And scaling campaigns. In fact, I would pretty much say that's their specialty, is scaling. She had mentioned though, she was like, Well, you can't always bid for like that final event, forever, meaning not like you stop it. But like there's only a certain percentage of people in market to purchase today. So when you're scaling she was talking about, you have to have other strategies. Yeah, that aren't like optimizing from. She She specifically said, from AD to product page. Seems like there's only so many people who will see an ad and convert a product page, at certain budgets, eventually, you'll burn through that audience. And you'll have to optimize for lead opt ins, and put them through a funnel or put them through content and convert them that way. Which I thought was interesting, because you almost never heard anyone talk about that. But I take their word for it, because I know that they spend huge amounts of of money scaling campaigns. And to me, it makes sense because you're like, Well, if I had a 10 million audience, and I'm going after purchases, I can't spend unlimited. Because if it's only 5% of the audience at any given time, and I'm spending a million dollars a day eventually, I would have tapped out. Yeah, that audience. Yeah. And so yeah, but But you know, there's more buyers in there. Maybe they're just not in market today. Right. And that was interesting. That's interesting.
Blake Beus 24:29 That's what a lot of people and that's one of the reasons I like a lot of Molly's stuff. People don't realize that these audiences are fluid. Yeah, right. When I say this audience has a million people in it. And they're thinking, aha, there's a million little Gregg's and Blake's and, and whoever's in there, but at any given point in time, people are leaving that audience and they're joining that audience. It's that audience is is like this bucket of attributes, and there's a stream of water of people moving in and out this little section and yeah, water is a great pace. place to do it. Like you have this fishing hole. Yep. Right and this, the rivers going down, the fish can stream up swim upstream or downstream. But they're coming into this hole right here at this point in time, there's way more fish in the river. Yeah. But
Greg Marshall 25:15 this part is only like three or four that come through this section. Yeah, that are ready to get her on today to bite sizes three, and sometimes zero.
Blake Beus 25:24 Right? And so and so if you think about it, too, you also have people that are in that hole right now. But they just ate Yeah, they're not hungry. Yeah, you know what I mean? They're, they're in the market. But right now at this instant, they're doing something else. And that's something else could be I, you know, driving my kids to soccer practice or whatever. And so what you need to do is think about this more holistically, which we talk about all the time, as is holistic marketing. But think about it holistically. Going back to what I was saying earlier about the cheaper traffic, the one thing that's hard to measure almost impossible to measure is you reached five times the amount of people with the same budget, that's five times the amount of wareness, which means that next time they see one of your offers for something this or that, they're way more likely to click to click on that. And everybody thinks about the end event. And that's what Molly was talking about. You can't always just optimize for the end event. And so having something where you are basically back to the river river analogy upstream, you're basically find some way to whisper to the fish. There's some real good food down there. Just don't eat. Don't eat right now. Yep, don't eat here. You need to be hungry when you're down there, because that's where the good food is. Right? And so you're, you're basically telling people, Hey, you know, there's good stuff coming up there. Get familiar with things. And then when they are ready, they're ready. They're ready, that people sometimes take time you have people that are fast. People that take a few weeks, people that take a few months. Yeah. And so you have to kind of think about that holistically. And I think I was gonna say that's why probably a lot of your campaigns, we've talked about this before, where you have an engagement campaign, a conversion campaign, a retargeting campaign, a video views campaign. And maybe none of those are actually spending 1000s of dollars a day, maybe this one's 10, this one's five, this one's whatever. But when you have them all together, you seem to be making way more sales, even though inside of ads manager, none of them seems to be doing that. Great.
Greg Marshall 27:26 And that's like, for me, like personally like my business. I always have multiple types of those campaigns running at any given moment, using reach engagement, video views and conversion all the time. Yeah. And then on top of that content marketing there. And the reason is, because for me, I understand that I'm in this for the long haul. And I know not everyone's ready to buy immediately, I get a lot of people who reach out say, Hey, I've seen your ads, and I watched some of your content for like, a year now. Yeah. And then they purchased. But if I just like stopped any efforts, because it wasn't like that person didn't sign up, like right away, then I would have never gotten a plus, over time. I like to look at it just as marketing momentum, like a machine. Yeah. Over time, it builds up and becomes easier, just like content marketing, the first day you start content marketing is the least profitable. Yeah, right. But over time, it starts to compound. Because if people have seen you for years, your conversion rates are easy, people are ready to buy. But it's very, it's very easy to kind of look at well, if I if I put some out today and didn't get it, and our Hi impulsive world now, then it doesn't work. Yeah. versus looking at it like this is this can be a process, you know, this is going to take time, but if you stick with it, your results will be much better. But that's that's mostly where I think pixel pixel data and stuff like that, really almost train the minds of everyone to think even more impulsively than we already do. Right? Because it's like, Hey, we've got this tool that can get you a sale today. You can put an ad out and get a sale now. Yeah. And that's trust me. I love that too. No, it's great. Like, it's it's a great thing to have. But I think what that also trains you is to think that's how it should be always and you always get spoiled. You almost think like, well, if I put $1 out now I should get $5 back now.
Blake Beus 29:23 Yeah. I mean, how many times? How many times did you know four or five years ago? Was Was the advice put up 10 campaigns, and then you just turn off those that aren't converting within 24 hours, and then they got to the point where you need to give it a couple of days. Still that's really
Greg Marshall 29:39 impulsive. You actually need to have a couple of days when building a business and a couple. Yeah, no.
Blake Beus 29:45 It's like, you've got to have this kind of overarching strategy and none of this has to cost you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day. You shouldn't be spending hundreds of dollars a day unless you have already tested some things in there working you've and you've scaled up you have a good strategy and a good strategy for Follow up for your, for your whatever. But But yeah, I want to shift gears just a little bit before we finish this one, there's one other pixel three, zero pixel pixel three pixel list, data point that we haven't talked about that you've had quite a bit of success with. That's offline events.
Greg Marshall 30:16 Oh, yeah, offline events are great. And I do believe that they have stabilized a lot of the ad accounts, since the iOS 14 change. And they weren't great. Simply because and I don't even know all of like the technicality of I just know it works very well, you just download the data from your store, or your CRM system, wherever you're collecting it, and then re uploading it back into your ads manager. Or off, I don't even know the correct name, the offline events manager, maybe. Yeah. And then what that does is it matches the data back to be able to see if that person was online on that. And my assumption is that they're using probability. Is that Is that how that kind of works? I don't even know how it works. Yeah, completely. I just know that it works.
Blake Beus 31:00 Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, there's, there's there's kind of two different ways to do offline data. And Facebook calls it offline data, but they also have their conversions API. But to take a step back how both of those work. And I actually think if you have the capabilities to do both, you should do both. But how the offline API works is, I have a store, you come to my store you buy but as part of the buy process, you have to put in, you know, your your email address, your phone number, your physical address, zip code, zip codes, all of that stuff, and then you buy. But now I have that data. I can download a spreadsheet of that data. And or the I'm sorry, the the conversions API, takes that data and uses a program programmatic way to push that back into Facebook, to basically say, here's the name, email address, phone number, address, zip code of this person. And then Facebook tries to match that data with what they know about their users and say, okay, cool. This was Greg. Yep. The offline event data is very similar. Except for that you essentially manually download a spreadsheet of that. And then you manually upload that spreadsheet. And it seems like the exact same data, but I feel like every time I've seen both be turned on, the results are better. So Whoo. They're trying to figure out who that stuff is. It has a lot to do with probabilities, right? Because there's multiple Greg marshals out there. I don't know if there's some with the same zip code or whatever. Or maybe you've never given your address and ZIP code to Facebook. So they don't know that you're that Greg Yep. And so they they will apply a probability saying we're pretty sure it was this person. And once it hits a certain confidence level, they will attribute that in your ads manager. Well, I
Greg Marshall 32:46 think one of the key pieces to this, this is why I said if they're using probability is the time of purchase. Yeah, because that seems to be a data point that if you upload and offline events makes a huge difference. And that time of purchase, that's where I think these probability because then they're like, this is his full name. This is the city he's in. This is the time that our system sees that he was on. While also this purchase happened on the same time,
Blake Beus 33:11 we see that he clicked on his ad at this time. Yep. And, you know, a minute and a half later, we get this purchase event with someone that has the exact same name, same zip code, same whatever. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 33:24 that's that's the probability part comes in is the time that the title was purchased. Because then that really narrows it down. Right? Because it's like, if there are, you know, 10, grand marshals all in the same city, you know, all using Facebook, but there was a purchase made at this time, and I was on it this time. And this particular city, then I think they narrows it down a lot it kind of makes towards like it most likely was him. Yep. Right. So I think offline data is very useful. Using as much data as you can. So like help feed your accounts, I think is very useful. Because from the technical side, I feel like it probably does help optimize it, because it's giving the machine more data to work with versus 80% less. And I found that with the offline events, it just seems to stabilize. Yeah. Like there's not as much up and down it feels like and that's just been my experience.
Blake Beus 34:21 And that's like, this is where we kind of come back to basics. I mean, we've talked a lot about messaging in past episodes. And this one, we're talking about these old school tactics that kind of fell out of favor once the pixel got so good, that they're now coming back. And you're using these old school methods. It almost feels like we're moving back into the direct mailing. Ah, yeah, the Mac admin age, Dan Kennedy, where you're you're focusing on these foundational principles of psychological selling basically using Using words and things to do things and then doing some rudimentary data analytics, ie uploading a spreadsheet, like how old is that that is, but well, you know, the spreadsheet and it gives us more consistent data
Greg Marshall 35:13 you just made me realize from after having this talk about this, really all offline events is is the same as like, back in the day when you you know, maybe running a direct mail campaign, and you sold 25 people. And you're like, Okay, so I sold 25 people, where do these people come from? And you're looking, you're really like, you're using Facebook, almost in the same sense that you would use this your own brain back in the day Ryoga? Wha had these two campaigns this person? It sounds like they saw this offer instead of that one. So that probably came from direct mail piece a Yeah, this one came from direct mail he's been and you're just kind of like mapping it together, figure out. Alright, it looks like these campaigns worked. Yeah, it I spent $2,000. And I got $8,000 back. Fantastic.
Blake Beus 36:04 It works. Maybe we we run another test to target the ones that we felt like worked best to see if we can confirm Yeah, that that creative or geographic areas area was hot, and tried again. But that's really not a lot different. And it's probably going to get more and more like that we have all these fancy tools. There's a lot of businesses out there that are trying to solve this data connection problem automatically. And, and all of that you've got high row seats, and all these others. But the thing is, is once once all of those get big enough, they're going to also get apples on Apples hit list. So they will work for a time until they get big enough. And then Apple will be like, Nope, that's third party data. Get over to here. Well, you flew under the radar for now. But now you're on our block list. And now and then it will stop working. Yeah. But a good old fashioned spreadsheet.
Greg Marshall 36:55 Yeah. It's I mean, testimony,
Blake Beus 36:58 it's your data. It's your data, I bought data, I'm giving it to my advertiser to connect the dots. There's there's nothing wrong with that.
Greg Marshall 37:05 So yeah, so I think outside of that, I mean, using an app tracking can be very helpful. I would recommend testing and using it. Especially if you're someone that's thinking about being in business over the long term, I think it'd be very valuable for you to utilize it. And one thing that I think works really well, when you do a lot of these kind of an app, or downloading spreadsheets and stuff like that, I think it's useful to help the business owner marketer truly understand their business better. Because you're not relying on a machine where you're not even looking at it. You're like almost forced to really analyze things and go like, why did this work? Who are these people that are clicking on this? What are they doing? I feel like it almost forces you to research your own company better, which is more effective, I think, just for your own good amongst like, really, at the end of the day, all marketing and businesses is understanding your customer on a deep level. Yeah. And being able to speak to them and give them what they need. And I think by doing these techniques, it helps you understand that better, in my opinion.
Blake Beus 38:14 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So let's wrap it up. Greg. How do people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall 38:19 Greg Marshall Dotco, you can go ahead and book a free strategy session and
Blake Beus 38:23 Blake beus.com/sm Three is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall 38:27 So until next time, we'll see you later. Okay, bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 So we were talking about going viral. And we we've talked about how going viral is not the solution, not the solution, right? Like, like, a lot of people want to, they want to go viral, viral and everything you want to have that content that just takes off. But I think the words you used were going viral is not what you think it is. Yeah. Or something along those lines, right. So like, why why do you say that? Well, I
Greg Marshall 0:26 think, well, it's, what I do want to say is, I don't think it's not valuable. But it's not what you think like, going viral is not actually going to get you all of the sales that you think you're going to do. But there is a way to use it. Right? So most people have the idea that, well, if I can get this video or this post or picture, whatnot, seen a couple million times, then that alone will generate more sales. And I just haven't seen that to be the case in many instances. But there are ways to capitalize on that. So I know you said you had someone that recently had a post go viral.
Blake Beus 1:07 Yeah, so I have an office at. They call it a creative studio, that it's an old parking garage, they've converted into a bunch of different studios for artists and things and I kind of got in super early on they weren't entirely sure if it what what if it was going to be for artists or something else, or kind of working spaces. And so I'm, I'm the soul, not like artists sculpt or whatever, I just have my corner office and I just work out of it. But I like being around the creative energy. And I oftentimes talk with him about marketing and things and they have questions about all of that stuff. And we'll one girl she does. She she does these amazing. One one of these artists in name's Sarah Austin. Anyway, I'll mention her because you should go like check out her stamp. But she had, she does these amazing wood colored pencil drawings. And she had a real that went nuts. And she had four or 5 million views. And I think when she had that post go viral. I think she only had a few 1000 followers. Yeah. Right. So that was a big deal. Yeah, she's super excited about it. Got a ton more followers, I think her follower count went up by almost 20 grand. Yeah, like that. Super cool, like very exciting. And I was talking with some of the other artists there. And you know about that, because they all want to go viral and everything. And, and it turns out, she didn't really, she got a lot of followers got a lot of kind of traction and things. But none of that really converted over into sales. Yep. Right. And so none of it turned into selling of her art or anything along those lines. And so we were just kind of chatting about that. And I mentioned this to you. And that's where we kind of came up with this, you know, idea. Now, now she's putting into play some, some sort of a sales process, putting together some offers that she thinks might resonate a little bit more with the Instagram crowd maybe be a little bit more of an impulse purchase. And kind of exploring that a little bit. So it hasn't been a bad thing. But it's also like you go viral is super exciting and cool and everything, but it doesn't, it doesn't always translate over
Greg Marshall 3:25 into sales. Well, it's actually a good lesson, too, for if someone goes viral, they themselves can actually see that just being seen more, doesn't complete the actual sales cycle. Right, right. And so here's here's basically what Blake was talking about. She's coming up with offers and things like that is now what you can do is retarget. So anyone who watched that video, right or engage, you can retarget them with an ad with a direct offer. That's that basically sells something related to what that video was. Because one of the things that happens, posts that go viral on social media are never sales oriented. That's like the opposite of what the platforms actually want. And so if you go viral, it's not going to be something where you say hey, by the way, I have something for sale, right? That will almost never if it might even be possible say that will never happen.
Blake Beus 4:19 It almost will guarantee that if you have that in there, you won't go viral.
Greg Marshall 4:23 And so with that being said, if you go viral, the way to take advantage of this is to basically create retargeting ads that gives a direct offer and retargeting ads are something you pay for on these platforms, but they're very, they're very useful because that's how you can take advantage of all of that free reach that you got, right? But if you don't do that, and you only try to go viral. There's pretty much the reason why you don't get sales because there's no sales language in it right of saying you have something to offer them,
Blake Beus 4:54 right. And I like what you're saying is it doesn't really complete the circuit. It's it's part of the puzzle and If you just kind of take a big step back and look at just marketing in general, the the broadest form of marketing you need to do is get in front of people that are interested in your product service, whatever you're offering, and get them to become aware of who you are, who your business is, and everything. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. And going viral is just one of those ways. But getting people aware of who you are, doesn't complete the rest of that customer journey. Exactly. And it doesn't mean that all of those people are ready to purchase or even interested to purchase, even though they're in that, in that industry. It's just like, you know, if you're a used car salesman, you have this lot with all of these great cars on there. But no one knows who you are, no one even knows that the lot is there, you're not going to make any sale. Correct. So you've got to start putting some signs up and some other things to say, hey, we exist, and we're over here. But that, too, isn't gonna guarantee any sales either. Because once someone walks into the parking lot, you have to complete the sales cycle Exactly. And so you have to have in place some of these other things. And I don't know, I think a lot, a lot of times people think, Well, I have some products and things for sale on my website. So once they get there, they they will
Greg Marshall 6:21 die. That's absolutely false. And it never works that way. And you have to really sell it. And you know, we've talked about this before, I've worked with influencers that had hundreds of 1000s of followers and can't generate any sales. And it's not zero, like literally 00. And it's not that they're bad people or even their audiences are unqualified, it's that they're not using the right messaging and language to get someone to actually purchase and there's a skill behind that it's not, hey, you know, I have this for sale, buy it, it's you have to really persuade and influence the audience to even want to buy and a lot of that has to do with transfer of energy and emotion and excitement. And that's kind of the the side factor to how to make this all work. Because I've noticed that people that are building followings online, they they're very good at building community. And they're very good at the awareness, building awareness, right, but you have awareness, nurture, close, that's actually how you monetize whatever it is you're doing. But if you just only focus on the awareness part, and you're not nurturing, and then you're not closing, you're not going to be able to see the revenue and sales that you're working so hard to get. And that kind of that that basically takes away the mystery of like, well, we've got all these followers, but people aren't buying from me. And why? Why is that? Well, because you're missing a key piece of you actually have to influence them.
Blake Beus 7:55 Yeah, and because I'm a huge nerd, one of my favorite things I do on them on social media. So I, if I ever see a real or a tick tock or whatever, that just has millions and millions of views or whatever, I will oftentimes just go to their profile, and see what their sales process is like. And you can tell very quickly, those people that are making money off of their viral, you know, strategy. Yeah. And those people that have are making no money. Yep. And it's almost always this, right. The people that are making money are those that actually have a sales process in place with a direct next step. It could that next step could be a small kind of impulse type purchase, or join my email list, or some sort of next step, because social media is very non committal. I'm just swiping through things. So you need to get a little mini commitment. And then they have that next step. And then I will sign up for the newsletters, and see what their process is. And they increasingly give me the next step, next step, next step to try to get into purchase. And those that make really good money will have their own brand surrounding. You know, there's one person that has her own hair product line, and it's like her product line. That didn't happen overnight. That was an intentional thing that took her probably five years plus of her social media journey to create that. But now it's I'm guessing it's an extremely profitable channel for her because it's easy. It's like an easy transition that
Greg Marshall 9:32 flow and social media is the perfect awareness tool. Right? So you drive awareness and then when you talk about nurturing, that's giving them a small commitment, like you said, joining an email list, a newsletter, maybe watching a webinar or maybe consuming some other content, but usually the nurturing of free call. Yeah, and usually that the nurture sequence, goes from social media and then tries to move them off of social media, that's typically how you kind of nurture them. That's how you can also pre qualify who is really interested. So it's like, you're taking an offer and saying, you know, hey, here's this piece of paper, go check out our, you know, restaurant down the street, you know that the person handing those out, you can get a lot of those out there for awareness, but only a certain percentage will actually walk inside the doors to your restaurant. That's nurturing right? Now they're actually taking a look to see what do you have to offer the closes then to go ahead and actually buy something? Right, right. So we've got all these different food products that you can try? Would you like to buy one? And that's essentially how that works. Look at social media is just the perfect awareness tool to be able to get yourself out there and to build relationships with people. Yeah,
Blake Beus 10:50 yeah, absolutely. I think about this a lot. I think a good kind of comparison is Costco, meal free sample, right? Like, it's not a new concept. But as as someone with kids, the number of times we're driving past Costco, I mean, this has been different since COVID, starting to come back. But we would drive past Costco and the kids are like, Can we get some free samples. And then I swear, every time you go in there, it's over here. So that's actually 150 to $300, you know, payment to do something because I always find something that I want. But they get you in the door. Because I'm not driving past Costco and thinking, I need to spend $300 at Costco. No, but I would drive past Costco and think I need that buck 50 Hotdog for my kids, because they're hungry. And it's fast and easy. And it's gets good southern nursery. And so you know, that's a small little decision, I make that decision. And then it's game over. Because they've got me real good with everything in
Greg Marshall 11:48 this new computer. groceries, you walk out 1000 dogs,
Blake Beus 11:54 or this new thing, they always have these things that are only there for a few weeks. But anyway, but it's the same thing with your social media, right? You're getting them in the door. The your social media is essentially the Costco signup. Yep, right? That's what that is the Costco sign, and then that little booklet that they send each month with those deals, that's your social media. Yep. But you got to get them in the door next, and getting them in the door on social media is those join the email list or book a free call, or maybe here's $1.50 hotdog, you can buy something, get them to engage in some way off of social media. Yep. And then take them to the next step.
Greg Marshall 12:31 And I think the big kind of learning lesson you can take from going viral isn't what you think it is, is to put more thought, don't neglect the thought of the nurture and the closing sequence. Most people only focus they put so much focus on just the awareness, and they wonder why they're not getting the results that they want. And that's because there's literally no thought and to the nurture or closing. And if you take if you're someone who's very good at getting a lot of reach, and getting people to engage and, and communicate with you, all you have to do is start to focus on Well, what should I naturally give them next to basically prequalify them to say that they're possibly interested in taking another action, so that once they're there, it's a lot easier to close them. But it's pretty hard. You can't skip the nurture part. Right? Right. The nurture part is, people want to go awareness close, and get eliminate the middle part. And that's, that's a huge mistake. Because people don't make decisions like that they're not getting married off of a first date marriage, right? It's the first day then follow up dates and a bunch of series to kind of develop a relationship. They don't just say, hey, you know, great to meet you. Let's get married tomorrow, right. And that's what everyone's trying to do is they use awareness to close versus awareness, nurture, nurture, nurture, then close. And so unfortunately, the nurture part, you have to do it. Right. Right. And you can't speed up speed up through customers by when they're ready to buy. Yeah. And so you need to be in front of them. So that when they are ready to buy, they choose you. Yeah, right. Same thing with getting married. They don't just get married because you feel like it today. And they're just gonna get married tomorrow. You actually have to like put in the work and you think about what you have to put in the world. Think about this with your wife, right? Or your or your marriage relationship. Imagine if you were just like, I'm only gonna, you know, be aware to you so I can close your eyes, I can get something. Forget about me helping with the kids or cooking or driving anyone around or having a job and paying for things. Forget about all that. I don't want to do that. I just want you to do what I want you to do. And I'll show it what I want you to
Blake Beus 14:48 do. It's never never never gonna absolutely not. So I mean, let's talk about maybe some some specifics. I think a lot of people there's a lot of great information on going viral. out there, and I have a lot of thoughts surrounding that. So if you're the kind of person that has done a ton of research on how to go viral, you know, the best songs or the hash tags or, or how to do these little hacks to make people watch your video over and over and over again, through engaging or whatever, all of those things. Like how can someone shift from that mindset, because that is a very kind of, it's a different mindset, a siloed mindset into the nurture and the clothes mindset, because it's really not a, if you build it, they will come kind of situation that you've got to shift into this other mindset. And if people are like me, I have a hard time shifting from one mindset like that, where I've been singularly focused into this other kind of mindset. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall 15:47 I actually think, though, the way to shift and transition from one mindset to the other, is to actually ask someone who's really good at the nurture or the closing sequence and ask them for tips such as, here's, here's a perfect example, I come from the sales world. So I have a better ability to close and nurture more than the awareness part. Right? And so I actually have to ask people, well, how do you get more awareness? Right, Rudy, what are you doing to generate more of this awareness that you're doing? Because once they get in, I'm able to sell them? Right? When you go into a different mindset, you have to almost think all of these people that come through, you have to start thinking about speaking to them one, one to one mentally, right? That's the shift. The shift is like, Okay, what's their kind of inner ecosystem? Instead of thinking of mass, right? Because that's what awareness is, yeah, it's thinking in mass, how do I get the masses to start doing stuff? Right? Now you have to start thinking one on one. And that mindset is all about, well, if I had Blake come in, after seeing something, how do I need to speak to him? In order for him to want to take the next steps, a lot of it has to do with power questions, asking the right questions, and pretending you're actually speaking to this individual, and saying, like, what are their biggest desires? What are the biggest fears? What are the biggest benefits they want to get? What What would they like to ultimately achieve? And then start speaking this language, right? And so that language is a lot different than speaking to the mass, right? And that's how you shift your mindset into the nurturing clothes as you start to think one to one versus one too many. Right? And that's if you can combine those two. That's where you're going to be able to have a ton of success.
Blake Beus 17:41 Yeah. Yeah, I think I think that's really key is just trying to figure out what they want. So back to this artist. Yep. When I was talking with some of the other artists that were asking me questions, you know, how that would work. If you went viral and everything. My first question was, well, people who follow what, why would they follow that account? What what do they want out of that? And the answer was almost always, well, they'd like to maybe learn a little bit more about the technique, or they or they think the art is, is interesting, and they're trying to learn more. But when you go to their website, they're selling pieces, like physical art pieces, which is great. But there's no learning technique if you buy this physical art piece. So if someone's going to buy an art piece, they're simply buying it either because they like it, or they're big fans of the artist. But those things take a lot of time to kind of build up at scale. And so the first thing I said is I'm like, why don't you pair a physical art piece with something educational, and after talking a little bit I recommended. Let's find something that's really easy to do. I said, just do a quick time lapse of a small because she she made many of them make these smaller pieces that are kind of more approachable. I said, just record a time lapse of you doing one of these pieces in one sitting. So and then if someone buys that art piece, they get the exclusive time lapse video of that. And now Now they own on that video, and they're the only person that they have gets that video. But now they're learning. It accomplishes a few things, they get the piece of art, and it's a small piece of art. So it's not crazy expensive. They get to watch some of the technique and they can just learn by watching the artists themselves. It doesn't have to have their creative process interrupted by trying to explain what they're doing. Because that's, that's a concern. Yep. Because it makes it take a lot longer. And now they have this thing that kind of bridges the gap between what they're trying what the their followers are trying to get out of the social out of hitting the Follow button on their account, and making that sale. Yep. And so they're putting together a couple of those offers to test them out. And, you know, we'll we'll see how that works. But my guess is kind of that's yeah, my guess is too But that's the thought process, you got to think about, you're like, how do we how do we kind of bridge that gap?
Greg Marshall 20:03 You just have to. And I think that's why I read, I do recommend you reach out to people that are kind of opposite minded thinking, right? So nurturing, closing minded thinking, because like, for me, I have quite a few influencers that reach out to me, to help them close the gap. Because they're very good. I mean, I've got a couple of clients that get millions and millions of views every single week, across multiple platforms. But they, they're not super effective on their own, and selling the stuff. And so they have me to come in and actually tell them say these types of things. And that, in fact, we just had one. The other day, we did and just a few days, we sold 50, I want to say $52,000, it's like two, three days worth of product, and we sold out. And we so now I need to get more. And I keep telling him that we need to get more, but because I understand they're very good at driving that awareness. And if they can close the gap to being able to sell, right and nurture and close them better, then that's where they're able to put money in their pocket. Yeah, right. And just think like if we had unlimited products for this, so 50,000 and a few days, we probably could end up selling a couple $100,000 worth in a month. But we've run into this problem multiple times. And so I'm trying to have a talk with it with with inventory with inventory, because that's a whole nother game is when you're trying to scale inventory becomes a problem, when you become very good at the nurturer and closing, because then you have to plan this out, right? Like how do I ship out this many products, and this amount of time. So this is like a big learning curve. This, I think on the surface, people think generated money is like like a want like a single activity, and you generate it, but there's multiple processes in there, right? Awareness, nurture clothes, they got inventory, shipping things out. So this is like an ongoing thing that you have to just
Blake Beus 22:03 Yeah, practically. So I think that demonstrates one of the misconceptions I see a lot when I'm working with people and chatting with people about how this works. And it's a misconception, I think it's very easy to have happen. And because on social media, you have a person, the person is the face of their business, even if it's it's their account under their own name and everything there that face. And so it's very easy to think, well, they're doing all of this pretty much by themselves, and maybe they have their spouse or husband or whatever helping behind the scenes. And it's simply just not true at all they have they they reach out to people like you and me to help bridge those gaps, because everyone has this specialty of their skills. And if if your particular specialty is getting that awareness, your specialty is probably not managing inventory, it's probably not even anywhere in that realm, you might not even know you need to manage, right. And that's fine. Like you, you shouldn't expect yourself to understand all of those pieces. If you're if your specialty is getting that awareness. Closing probably isn't a great specialty of yours, because they're they're still quite different. And so what you what you need to do is bring in some trusted people that could just be like a friend or an accountability partner, if you're a small business, and don't have the cash flow to hire someone or that's a consultant like you and me and that's what you know, we help a lot with or if you're bigger, that's when you start hiring full time or, or something along those lines. But I mean, I have a I have a client that I've worked with, that is really big and kind of the guru and success area. And they have on social media, it seems like it's all just them doing all these things. And it's because that's a simpler message. But behind the scenes say you have about 15 full time employees. Yep. And several contractors that help behind the scenes of that whole process of nurturing people writing the emails, getting on the phone calls to talk them about closing and then and then closing those those deals. But this is a company that does millions and millions and millions every year in sales, and they sell annual memberships and the annual memberships are anywhere from 10 grand a year to 250 grand a year. And and but on social media it looks like he's doing all this stuff myself. Not the case.
Greg Marshall 24:33 Well even I'm happy said that because that was one of my biggest misconceptions early on was you know, you see guys like you know, I think one of the big players has been doing for a long time. Tony Robbins you know, they call the the guru model right, which is you have the individual and then they have this huge team. They've got hundreds of people working for them. But on the surface it seems like Tony Robbins is the one
Blake Beus 24:59 doing it. Ever directing everything,
Greg Marshall 25:00 but he's not even close. And the same with Gary Vee, right? And Gary Vee is one that everybody knows. And he has, you know, he's got a videographer, he's got editors, he's got this huge team of people that are distributing his content. He's got certain networks,
Blake Beus 25:15 even coming up with content ideas. Gary Vee is not the guy coming up with all the ideas.
Greg Marshall 25:20 He's basically just a spokesperson, he really is. And that's what a lot of these businesses, that's what they are, is they, they're an individual, any personal brand that you see, it's not one person doing all of this. It's one person delivering the message, and a lot of people doing all the others.
Blake Beus 25:38 And so if you're out there thinking, you need to do all of this yourself. And you're asking yourself, why can't I ever get all of this done? That's why it's, it's it's a job for like five or 10 people minimum, right? But everybody's got to start somewhere. And so if you're, if you're doing this all by yourself, and you're looking for, okay, I need to bring someone else on, a great place to do is like I said, the accountability partner, find someone else that's doing something similar. If you're good at the awareness, find someone that's good at the closing and say, Hey, can we partner up and I will help you come up with awareness, ideas, and you can help me come up with closing ideas, and we'll meet regularly, and then maybe I'll even do some of your work for you. And you can even do some of my work for me, and do that trade. And then as that starts working, you can start looking into, you know, consultants, again, that's what that's what kind of you and I have have popped into space. And consultants don't have to be crazy expensive, it kind of depends on on the interaction. But sometimes it's like, Hey, I just need someone to meet with me once a month. Yeah, what's your what's your hourly rate for like a once once a month, phone call, that's maybe an hour and a half or two hours long, to help me organize some of these thoughts, whatever. Or it could be a full done for you kind of a thing. There's lots of different ways to kind of make that work.
Greg Marshall 26:54 But it's, trust me, it's worth it. If you're if you're investing in this for the long term, and you want to really grow a business. These are investments you should be making. And I know for my own business, I've made these investments and make them every month. And it's I would never not do it now. Right? Right. It's part of the business. And I know you cannot, you just can't get rid of it's absolutely necessary for growth, and it's very valuable. And people know, like, I have my assistant, she does a ton of stuff for me. And I can't now I can't even imagine trying to do all the stuff she's doing on my own. Like if I just can't even imagine it. So these are things that you have to think and structure. But you know, we started with going viral. It's not everything you need. This is a very valuable point. You need nurturing, you need closing and you need a team to help you. This is not a one a one person smooth, right versus this is you really need to have support and multiple ways. And you have to have strategy. And so really think about your business, simplify it first and go get the awareness, nurture close sequence down for your business, and then start thinking how do I amplify it?
Blake Beus 28:08 All right, there you go. Well, let's wrap this up. Greg, how can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall 28:12 You can go to Greg marshall.co book a free strategy session. And what about you know, just
Blake Beus 28:17 blink boost.com/sm3 is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall 28:20 Great. Well Until next time, hope you enjoyed this, this nice combo podcast and I will talk to you later. Goodbye.
Blake Beus 0:00 messaging 2.0. So last week, we talked about messaging. And we gave a lot of different ideas concepts on on messaging. And I know a lot of people think messaging. It's boring talk, right like to talk to me about algorithms or, or targeting or stuff like that. But as we've mentioned, many times messaging is becoming more and more, it's more important, always been important. Yes. But with changes in data collection and privacy rules, which are only going to get more restrictive things like targeting and that are going to become less effective. Yep. And so messaging, which I feel like we're seeing this all the time is becoming more and more and more important to you. So you wanted to follow up on on on what we talked about last week, with some tests and things you've run this week? And give us kind of a rundown on what you're seeing with messaging.
Greg Marshall 0:53 Yeah, so one thing, and the reason why we're harping so much on messaging, if we could sell you on messaging is king, you will actually be able to control your, your success, right in the future when it comes to your business. Because this is the one lever that if you pull it will give you the greatest return. Alright, so what I want to talk about as a client as a direct test, so $1,000, the offer really didn't change much. The targeting didn't change much. And they spent $1,000. Got no leads.
Blake Beus 1:27 Yeah. And so they brought you on to kind of be like, this isn't work. Yeah, like we spent 1000 bucks got zero leads. When you told me this, the first thing I was like I asked was, what was their lead form broken? Oh, that's
Greg Marshall 1:39 exactly what I thought I couldn't believe it. Because it is so unbelievable to think. Even the worst of that will get you one leave for $1,000. Right? Yeah. $1,000 like something's got to be brought. So the first thing I did was I looked at the targeting, are they even targeting the right areas? Yeah. Are they who are they targeting? Is it? Are they like their landing page? Is it working? Are they saying it to a page? Oh, everything worked? Okay. $1,000.00 leads. So what we did was we, we swapped out the what she was saying. And the ads so we still so ad number one was selfie style. And number two was selfie style. So at least our videos like style video. Yep, selfie, just offering the service zoek. We did that. And so there was no change in like how look, we didn't like increase the production, or make it look totally different. We same format. What we did was we changed the words on what we said. And we made one major shift that I think may have influenced the success of this. We made sure that the message was all about the feelings that the customer on the field versus ad number one was about what we did, okay, okay, which may seem very subtle, but it makes a massive difference
Blake Beus 3:02 was this in was was what industries it's a fitness industry. Okay,
Greg Marshall 3:07 so one, one add number one was about leveling up, we do CrossFit. We can get your nutrition plans, we can do all that, right? That's showing the business. And number two was about how they feel. So what are your customers always say when they come in? Well, they're looking for a place to feel included. They just moved here. So they don't really have a gym to go to. They want to be a part of a community. They want to be able to go with friends and family. And you know, so I said, switch all the messaging to that, and talk nothing about the other stuff. Yeah. So we made that shift. And to essentially put on steroids. What we did was the background of the video. I said do the videos in front of the places where your customers live, because this is a local business. Okay. So instead of just saying, Hey, do we live here? We said, like right behind right behind her was like the main shopping center. Okay, that's a very
Blake Beus 4:06 recognizable thing. Vengo ooh, that's cool. I have never thought about that. So I
Greg Marshall 4:11 said, say this the area of your town, and then have in the background, something that they would quickly recognize. Oh, that's right. My neighborhood. Yeah. And then we target that neighborhood. Right? That's awesome. What that did was we spent 40 bucks and got five leads.
Blake Beus 4:27 Okay, okay, so So you went from paying $1,000 for zero read leads? Yep. Essentially negative infinity Yep. return on adspend. And then you went to $40 for five like five
Greg Marshall 4:47 leads right seems like an improvement to me it's it's a huge imprint targeting was the same targeting was the same.
Blake Beus 4:54 Ad was obviously less but the style of the video style was the same
Greg Marshall 4:58 but the messaging because think about what I had in the background plus what she said, yeah. That's the change in the ad hook in the messaging. And that right there, even to me, someone who does this all the time, that was shocking, the the immediacy of the response, right, which shows it's more about what you're saying, than anything else. Right? He's setting. And so that's just one example. There's actually another example where a client, in fact, I think they did so well, they moved off. Which is the point, right, which is the point because they started getting so many sales, is they essentially hired me to do the same. So they were like, Hey, we've been running ads, on or off, he spent several $1,000.00 sales. So no sales from this, right?
Blake Beus 5:53 Can I just pause really quick? I, I'm always floored at $1,000. I do. Really quick, really quick. If you're running, if you're running a lead campaign, and you spent a couple 100 bucks, and you've got nothing to turn it off and reevaluate. Like don't keep running it for 1000 bucks. If you're trying to sell something, depending on cost, maybe like it kind of depends. But if it's leads, yep, you spent a couple 100 bucks and you get nothing, turn it off, turn it off and reevaluate. Try again.
Greg Marshall 6:23 Well, and I think you know, the belief is I think, well, Someone's probably telling me, you just need to spend more. So I think their belief is I have to be spending more and more. Maybe I'm just not spending there's a
Blake Beus 6:34 time and a place for that. But that's when you're scaling. And when you've already kind of got the system down, you've already got the messaging down. And then you want to like scale in a big way, then yes, you do need to spend more and yes, your cost per lead will go up. But you need to have some leads first. Yeah. Thank you got it. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 6:49 And then and that's the thing is you spend more once you have things that are proven, so that you can stabilize your accounts. But that's for another discussion, discussion came back, get back on what you were saying this right here is, so they spent 1000s of dollars, no sales? No nothing, right? They're using Google Facebook ads combination. Okay, once again, we changed nothing. As far as the fact I never even changed. The targeting, I changed nothing. Actually. Everything just kept running both the problem was what the landing page said,
Blake Beus 7:26 Oh, okay. All right, change anything in the app zero. So the ads, were getting a good click through rate and that kind of stuff. Decent enough. Good enough. Good enough. Yeah, close to 1%. So that's how you start targeting. And that's how you start identifying where the bottlenecks are, like, if you're getting the ads, and the click through rate is good enough, then the problem is probably not specifically with the ads.
Greg Marshall 7:49 Correct. And so the client when they first and that's a good point, because when they first came on, they're like, Hey, I gotta change my ads, I got to figure out what's wrong with my ads. And I actually had to convince them the opposite. Nothing's wrong with your ad. Because he actually did a good job with the ads. I said, it's, it's what they're seeing. Once they click on it, they're not compelled. So what we do is we change the messaging to have more social proof. More about, okay, this is not that I'm saying this out loud. This is actually a tendency that I find with driven individuals. They speak the language of themselves. So at the top, it said, it was something about how to be in the top 10% of your class, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? Uh huh. And I asked, I said, What is the person that's going to buy this? What do they want? Do they want to be part of the 10%? Or do they just want to be able to get hired?
Blake Beus 8:50 Right? And this was on like a certification program. So you take this course or go through this program, and now you're certified to work as XYZ job in whatever industry? So it's like part of part of a certificate. Okay,
Greg Marshall 9:06 exactly. So it's basically, these are people that are looking to build a career in this industry. And what I asked was, well, why does Why would someone who Why would someone who is someone wants to be part of the 10%? They're probably already motivated. So therefore, they probably won't even buy this. Yeah. Because they would have figured it all out on their own. You're going after someone that wants to start a career get hired, doesn't know what to do and needs guidance?
Blake Beus 9:37 Yeah, they're shifting industries. Right, exactly. They're their career changing. They don't know what to do. There's probably a lot of just uncertainty on how to proceed.
Greg Marshall 9:48 So think of this. So the psychology of that person is more of they're afraid they don't know what to do. They need someone to hold their hand, not be in the top 10% They don't have the happens. Yeah, yeah, just think I can be part of the 10%.
Blake Beus 10:03 So many of them probably just want to, I just want to complete the thing. That's all I want to complete, and be qualified to get the job and do a good job.
Greg Marshall 10:11 So when basically change the language to that, really what you just said, complete the thing and get a job. Yeah, you, you want to get hired, start your career, start earning a good income, and you know, blah, blah, blah, all
Blake Beus 10:25 this sort of time qualifier in six months, or however long it takes to go through the program. And that program takes six months. There you
Greg Marshall 10:31 go, we changed it. instantly started getting sales, he got no sales before. Day we changed it without i. We didn't change. Yes, I think he thought I did. But I did not because I knew the ads were not broken. We changed the messaging within a day he got to sales.
Blake Beus 10:50 So $1,000.00 sales, changed the message messaging, not even turning the ads off, nope, no change in ads, just change the messaging, changing, targeting no changing nothing, and gets to sales, the next step gets to sales right away. And I remember thinking,
Greg Marshall 11:06 wow, messaging is so important that it could easily be overlooked because of the new ad setting, or the new this or the new that. Or even just maybe if it's not even that you're just you're addressing the wrong problem. Your ads may actually be okay. It's your messaging after that, right. And half, half the struggle, I think, when it comes to small businesses and their marketing is how to identify which problem they should address, right? Because if you don't know what you don't know, you and you're just running ads, you're thinking, well, then I must have an ad problem. Yeah. But if your click through rates are 1% or higher, whatever. And like I said, he did a good job on his ads, I thought his ads are pretty good. Then if it's pretty good, then it's just what they're seeing your landing page and the offer. And so that to me, those are just two examples. Just how much impact something and like I said, I mean, being an industry and you'd probably fall into this before, too. It even surprises me at times. How much thought needs to be put into the messaging and how much it really does impact the conversion. Because sometimes you can think, oh, maybe if I tweak this a little bit of that a little bit, it'll make a small impact, but not that great. But then when you start tweaking, these are realizing it makes a giant difference. I mean, you're talking about same ad spend, same ads, same targeting, one got no sales over 1000s of dollars and span. And another got instant sales with I don't even think was a couple $100 or something like that.
Blake Beus 12:51 Yeah. So I mean, that's, this is how I think about and how I explain it to anybody I'm working with is like, look, we have all these new shiny toys for marketing. But marketing has been marketing for a long time. I mean, ever since people have sold things, there's been, you know, salespeople, marketing, whatever. The thing is, is technology evolves very quickly. But But human brains evolve very slowly. Oh, yeah. And so a lot of the marketing strategies that worked way back when, when there wasn't a great way to track data or to target geographically or whatever, will still work now. And what they did is they spent time focusing on dialing in the message. Now, there's going to be a ton of people that will say, and I tell this to people all the time that will say you need to really figure out your customer avatar, and all of that stuff. And there's lots of worksheets and courses and things you can do. And I don't necessarily think that's a waste of time. But I also think sometimes it's pretty restrictive. Yeah, in what you're thinking about and can be, it can be a bit time consuming. Yeah, I guess I don't think it's a waste of time. But if people are struggling creating the customer avatar, I would suggest and I would suggest everybody try this is go just talk to some of your actual customers. And just just call them up on the phone, even if you're whatever, like email them and say, hey, I want to schedule a 20 minute call or something and just ask them some questions like, you know, why did you sign up and then what did you think about it and ask them if you can record that. And then you can actually take some of their exact words switch it around into an ad hook, capture, look for those emotions, look at those things and then start using that language if you don't have any customers find a competitor. Yep, see what reviews they have? See what emotions those reviews have the positive ones Yep. And then use those emotions in your ad copy and your sales page copy. You don't need to rip off the quotes or whatever but but look for those emotions like look at a review and say what what did they get out of this? Oh, they felt happy because they were able to achieve this. Okay, my product helps achieve that. So let's, let's use those same kinds of emotions in our in our language. And I think that's a better exercise than trying to dial in your customer avatar way, way
Greg Marshall 15:13 better, I think. Because you have to speak to the customer, right? So it's about the customer, not you. Yeah. Right. Like, always remember, yesterday, I was having a conversation with a client, where I said, you know, a lot of the stuff that is I think, pushed by well meaning consultants and marketers and things like that is a lot about like, how do you want to position yourself? And then, like, how do you almost force the customer to mold to what you're doing, versus reacting to the market and giving the market what they want? Yeah, and what they're needing? And I think one is a me first thought process, and another is a you first thought process. And I think you first always wins when it comes to, if you're a business, your job is to solve problems, right? Well, you're not solving your problem. Right? The business's job is to solve the customer's problem, right? So therefore, you should be thinking about the customer. And doing drills, like Blake said, looking at reviews, looking at what is selling the most out there in the marketplace? And why? And what are they saying? What's the market telling us? You you want to have a pulse on? What is the market telling us so that you can provide things to help people? Yeah, right. And I think by utilizing language and the emotions that reviews show, and testimonials, and and any of those kinds of and you can use Amazon's a great,
Blake Beus 16:49 I was gonna say Amazon books, like, if you have a product that solves a problem, go to Amazon and look for four popular books that address that problem. Read those reviews, write down the emotions, write down some of the features, the benefits, not the not the features, like
Greg Marshall 17:06 121 pages, yeah, or,
Blake Beus 17:10 or how many calories you're counting, if you're not those things, but how they felt after they maybe lost the weight or how they felt after they solved this this problem or how they felt in their new T shirt like I was, guys were buying me drinks at bars, like I talked about last night, right? Something like that, right? Yep. That's a much easier way to do.
Greg Marshall 17:29 And I think the most important thing is to not underestimate the power of your messaging and to be willing to test your messaging. And to really think if whatever you're doing right now is not getting a convergence, I always suggest trying the exact opposite. Right? And it sounds funny, but you don't want to make a slight variation of something that's not working at all, you want to do a polar opposite. And start because typically, what I find is people, they have a resistance to testing new ways or new languages, for a reasonable fear, a fear of maybe the market will react negatively to them, maybe their spouse will react negatively to them. Maybe they were brought up to never speak in a certain way or to never, you know, showcase something in a certain way. A lot of these are internal, self limiting beliefs of selling. When you think about selling most people think negatively about it. Yeah, well, I don't want to manipulate somebody, I don't want to twist someone's arm to buy something. I don't want to be considered the fool because I'm a salesman. And that's not you know, a prestigious career compared to doctors, and all that's false. Those are just things that we think other people are thinking, versus if you switch your paradigm to sell to help, and to just really think how can I help my customer, my audience, my marketplace, that's when selling becomes fun. And it should be more natural. Because if you're in business to help people to solve a problem, and you're only thinking about how can I do that? Naturally, your brain will start to think of things, you're going to start asking your questions like, Well, what did they need? Well, if they bought this, what else would they need? If they bought this? How would they feel? And how do I make them feel better? Or how do I make them feel the results quicker? If you start thinking of questions like that your behavior will naturally sell the audience because you're just answering those questions that the customers have.
Blake Beus 19:34 Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't have to like it doesn't have to feel manipulative. We've talked about that. I have a an a very reasonable but very strong resistance to feeling manipulate middle and manipulative. Yes, I just, I just don't have patience for that in my life, and I really don't want to be that person. But because of that when I first started running ads specifically for my products, I I struggled because everything I said felt manipulative, because I felt like I was taking this very complicated things with a bunch of nuances and distilling it down to a few sentences. But the reality is, is that you can't have this big complicated conversation in an app. Yeah, it's, it's, it's not going to work. And so what you need to do is simplify all that down. And to make that feel better for me, because I simplified the offer and solved a very small part of the big problem that I that I could solve. And that was step one of the solution. And then step two, once they bought step one, now, I had a better communication channel where over time, via email, or going live or whatever, I had their ear, and I could explain the nuances and explain all of these things and lead them to, you know, once they completed step one, we can go to step two, which solves, you know, the next problem that's bigger and a little bit more complex.
Greg Marshall 20:53 Well, and I think to the back when I was training a lot of salespeople to go out and sell their products. What I always said, like a hack that can help you with the manipulate, like, you know, just like not wanting to be seen that one is intent. Okay, your intent, as long as your intent is there, you should feel okay, communicating in ways to help your customer feel a certain way to be able to take their next steps, as long as the intent is to truly help them. Yeah, right. To me, that's the key, as long as your intent is to truly help them out, then you want to do everything in your power to be able to trigger this and trigger that and to get them to understand that if this is a problem that you want to solve, this is how you get it done. As long as that intent is there, and it's in the right, you know, it's positive and you're trying to do the right thing, then I think you should be fine, where you would be able to not feel so negative. That's always what's helped me when I've trained people to help them understand like, we're not here trying to fool people into doing something bad, right? Or not helpful for them. Yeah, the intent is that, then step away, shouldn't do this. Right. Yeah. But if the intent is I really want to help this person solve this problem. Well, what would I need to do in order for them to take the steps because as human beings, we all get our own way? Oh, yeah. And sometimes we need someone to irritate and trigger some things for us to realize, yeah, I do want to fix that. Or I do want to get better at that. Or it is time now to fix this problem versus waiting. So that's always been something that I've worked with salespeople on how to not especially newer salespeople, how not to feel like you're twisting people's arms or manipulating or leading them in the wrong direction? Yeah.
Blake Beus 22:52 Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I want to take a quick step back and just talk about because we brushed on this and but I want to talk about, you're running some ads, or you doing some marketing, we talked a lot about ads on here. But any traffic source, yeah, organic, or paid organic or paid, works the same, whether that's social, or SEO, or email or whatever, right? It works the same. But I want to talk really quick about how to trouble you, you are doing some marketing, and it's not working. Is it the messaging? Is it something else, you know, and how to how to identify, because we brushed about that a little bit earlier. But I'd like to take just a minute to do that. So So what are your thoughts? Let's say someone's running an email campaign. And it's not. It doesn't seem to be doing what they've got a list of 1000 people that should be pretty interested. And it's not working.
Greg Marshall 23:47 It's the messaging is, when in doubt, as soon as the message right when in doubt, as soon as the messaging but
Blake Beus 23:54 I would take one step before that. Run a couple of test orders or leads. Yes, nature's work, right, you're getting zero First things first, it takes five minutes, fill out the form yourself, make sure it works for you. Try it on your phone, because if people are clicking on a phone, and you have a mobile responsive website issue, take five minutes to do that. Eliminate that as a problem. First, make sure your lead form works and your purchase form works. Yep. But then on email. It's almost always messaging. Yes. Because these are people that are already familiar with the business. But with email, you have a couple places to look at messaging. Yep. Well,
Greg Marshall 24:31 I mean, number 190 9% of your work is going to be in the subject headline, right? They never open it then they never saw the rest of the stuff.
Blake Beus 24:41 So how do we know it's a subject line? Headline we look at open rate
Greg Marshall 24:45 the rates Yeah, so typically you look at if you're getting like under a 20% open rate, depending on the size of your list too. But if you're getting under 20% You can probably try to worse improve that. And then some lists will get as high as 30 or 40%, depending on how qualified the people are the relationship they already have. But most importantly, the the subject headline has to be something that will cause you to want to open it. Yeah. Right. And that's the key. And if you don't get that, right, everything else will fall apart.
Blake Beus 25:18 So if you're on, let's just give you some guidelines, if you're under 20%, open rate, put effort into making those headlines better to try to get closer to 20%, or over 20%. Sometimes those percentages are a little bit weird, because if you got the email list by doing this offer over here, but you kind of shifted a little bit, whatever you're doing. But that might mean you need to put in your email list or whatever, but but strive for that. So that's step one, step two, the body of the message. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall 25:46 once you get into the actual once you stop them, and you get them to listen to what you have to say, the only part of the work is done. Once you get into the body. Now you have to think, how do I hook them over and over and over again, to keep reading? Right? So what you have to do is take a look and go, Well, is this messaging compelling to me? Right, or to my audience? And you have to look at like, is it causing? Is it stirring the emotions of curiosity? Interest, maybe anger, disappointment, embarrassment, fear of loss, those types of emotions? Is this email doing that in any kind of way? Or even excitement? Right? And then when you look at it, you have to think, a lot, a big question I get, how long should the emails be? And the answer, in my opinion, is however long it takes for the person to get excited to want to do something. Yeah, I don't think there's any magical, like, it needs to be two lines, or it needs to be 10 paragraphs. I think it's, well, if I get the right person to open this, what what else do they need to see and feel in order to take an action? Right. So this requires you to once again, go in depth on understanding what your customer wants, what the pain point is, and why they even would open that email in the first place. And then align that message with that. So that it's a perfect message to market match. Yeah. And that's where I would look into is whatever your subject line is, the body needs to correlate with that subject line. But it also needs to have the same kind of emotional trigger when they're reading it the whole time.
Blake Beus 27:23 Yeah. And I would say, if someone's asking me the question, should my email be long or short? My first question is, well, how often do you email your list? Yeah. Because if you struggle to get emails out, forget long emails. Yeah, just go a short, it's more important for you to get emails out. Yep. Once you're consistent with your emails, and you're getting them out, and you're seeing some progress, and you have kind of a baseline, and you've got a process in place, then start experimenting many with long emails. But if you're hemming and hawing over email length, and you're doing spending so much time thinking about that you're not getting emails out. Don't worry about emailing. Yeah, and I think
Greg Marshall 27:58 sometimes we're so sometimes as as business owners, too, we can get caught up focusing on the wrong thing. That's actually the wrong question to ask. Well, I've done it many times. It shouldn't be long or short. The real question you should ask is, what message do I need to write to compel my customer versus long or short? One is like attack that the other was more strategic. And the other one serves better. The other ones just kind of surface its feature versus benefit. And if you're thinking like, there's, once again, it goes back to the is there a magical setting out there? That will unlock the pot of gold? Right? Like if I do this versus that, and we've all done it, but always discipline yourself to think that's not the right question to ask the right question to ask is, What does my customer need to see, read feel, so that they want to go ahead and take the next step. And if we do that, and you focus on that, you will get better and better and better at your messaging overall, it's like this is a skill that translates into ADS, marketing, landing pages, email marketing, SMS, marketing, all of that. It translates to everything. That's what I said, messaging is the biggest lever to pull when it comes to your marketing. Because if you can get really good at that, you can almost be a bad ad buyer, and a non technical email user and still get great results. Because I have a client right now that that does is they're horrific at the technical part, like they don't know it click the wrong buttons all the time. They they're constantly sending, but it works. But she's fantastic at the messaging like are you really, really good. And so she sells a ton of stuff. And she has no technical skill like well, she sent an email wrong list.
Blake Beus 29:58 But it still works because the messaging is Is that good? Well, and that's this is a skill set that will stay with you, and benefit you and your business forever. Yep. learning the ins and outs of intricate targeting will only be relevant for maybe six months. So if you're going to dedicate time into a skill, make it be this skill. Yep. And then you can hand off the tech bits to someone like Greg, yeah, to actually set it up for you. And and you know that that's just a much better use case. Okay, so email, it's almost always guaranteed you have a messaging problem. If you're not getting results from your email, ads, your click through rate, how do I know if my if my ad message, my ad messaging is bad, or my landing page messaging is bad, like which one
Greg Marshall 30:52 so I measure the two metrics you'll want to measure, click the rate on your link, click the rate on your ads. No matter what platform doesn't matter what platform you're running, always the same. How many people are clicking the link to your to go to action, whatever it is you're selling? Okay, you want 1% or higher? Okay, I've seen ads work just fine. I like point nice and close enough to 1%. But essentially want one out of 100 people to click it and
Blake Beus 31:22 sees it to click it goes and you can get higher click through rates, you really can. But if it's below 1%, you probably most certainly you have a messaging problem in your app.
Greg Marshall 31:33 Yeah. And if you're like hovering around point five, or point three, your messaging is way
Blake Beus 31:40 off. I would say one caveat is Google Display Network ads, which many people kind of hop into that later in their journey? The click through rates on those are generally quite low, because they're just kind of blasted. Yeah, so but we're talking like Word Search Ads, YouTube ads, like anything in like a feed are very visible kind of point. Great point. Because display is going to be you know, they're
Greg Marshall 32:01 going to show they're going to be super low. So 10,000 impressions a one person, you know, so they can only click once. Right, right. So great point, because these are the we're talking about in fee type ads. So search, tick tock feeds, Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, YouTube feeds,
Blake Beus 32:17 all that search ads, you could very likely get significantly higher 15 20%. I
Greg Marshall 32:22 see way higher. Yeah, search. So yeah, yeah, so that's a good metric, a good place to start in feed is 1% or higher. But if you're like point three or point five, you're way off, you're way off the mark, it's not, you're not a little bit, it's way off. But that message is not the message that's gonna work. Then the other metric I measure is just conversion rate on the page. So if if I'm getting a very high click, let's say I get a 2%, click through rate on my ad, right, which is great. But then I go to my landing page, and I have 0% conversion, then you want to fix the landing page, the ad is getting people there. But the landing page isn't resonating once they get there. And that's how I diagnose or the other I've seen it where a click through rates are really low. And the people that do somehow get to the landing page, do convert, but it's just the volumes not there. The click through rate is really low with the conversion is really high, then it's the ad.
Blake Beus 33:26 And my suggestion to most people, you tell me if you agree, my suggestion, and most people, if you have, let's say you have a good click through rate and a bad conversion rate on the landing page, I would I suggest people literally just take the same emotions that is in their ad, because that's working and convey those on the landing page. Yeah, restate them in a different way on the landing page, or even the same, or even the exact same like you could use the exact same headline, you could maybe add some bullet points to drive the point home or something like that. But but that works. And if vice versa as well if the landing page is getting conversions, but the click through rates are really bad on the ads, just take the same copy on the landing page and maybe rework it a little so it fits within the ad display where it's supposed to look. And
Greg Marshall 34:11 then run those. Well. Here's it. Here's like another hack, which you can do. If you don't even want to build out some long, elaborate landing page until you figure it out. You can just build like a simple landing page. And then just only test your ad messages, figure out which ad messages work the best and then build a landing page all of that. And that that can save you a bunch of time from spending hours and hours and hours building a landing page that you don't even know if it resonates or not. You can use the ad to pretty much test what your landing page should be. And that's that's a good way just to save time, obviously, if you're pressed on time.
Blake Beus 34:47 Absolutely. And you can take that a step further. You can use that same messaging in your emails. Or if you have a good email list and you're working on that and you know what kind of messaging works in your emails, use that messaging in your ads, test that out See what see how that works? You don't have to rewrite everything you can. You could I've seen people do this before, I think it's fine. You can use the exact same wording, and an ad and an email and a landing page. Yeah. Like, there's literally nothing wrong with that. If you know that that works. And it converts, then do it, oh, do it over and over again, change out the headline on your email your subject line and send out the same one. Not everybody opens every single email. No, right. And it's okay to have too many emails going out that have a very similar message. That's totally fine.
Greg Marshall 35:35 Once you find your messaging, though, you just want to build around that. Yeah. So everything around that message, start really dialing in. And this is for, like people who don't have their messaging figured out. There's different techniques to use for people that already have great traction, and are looking to expand. That's a little bit different.
Blake Beus 35:56 A bit of a different conversation where
Greg Marshall 35:59 we, yeah, we got to cover Yeah, how to that'll be another POC as observer we'll talk about, if you're someone who's already having some level of success. But you're, you're stuck, like you can't seem to expand your passcode,
Blake Beus 36:12 right, like everybody does that you you hit a plateau. And then you've got to learn a new skill I've run into
Greg Marshall 36:17 many times, and then it's, it's always kind of like you're banging your head against the wall. But then you eventually figured out where you have to go, well, it's got to, I have to be wording things a little bit different to address a different market, or to address a different type of product. And that usually is what will help help you get over the hump. But that could be another episode where we can talk about chat about that, or how to do that.
Blake Beus 36:41 Yeah. So I think you've got a really good understanding at this point on how important messaging is yes. And we talked, we spent a lot of time talking about algorithms and all of this stuff. And we will continue to talk about those things. But messaging is literally the first thing you need to figure out. And so definitely put some time and effort into getting that figured out. Testing multiple messaging, getting a little creative. If you're in a if you're in a loved this one, if you're in a geographic location and your audiences in that same location. Record yourself in front of recognizable things. Yep.
Greg Marshall 37:18 Which. Awesome, awesome. Awesome. Add hook. Yeah,
Blake Beus 37:21 absolutely. Not, not just in front of your office, because that's what I thought you were gonna say. And I was like, Well, I don't know. But when you said in front of the very recommend recognizable, or, or here in Utah, we have Ben Lomond mountain, right, like, like it's a very recognizable peak, and you can stand up on, you know, in this one street that goes right down and very iconic for Ogden could make that work.
Greg Marshall 37:43 I mean, there's so many things you can do. Like the next round of ads we're gonna make for her is actually, we're going to walk on the highest trafficking street and say, like, Hey, do you walk on this Boulevard? Yeah, each and every day and wonder where you should work out? Yeah. No, that's great. Another one's gonna be, we're gonna go to each housing complex, and say the name of the housing conflict, say, Hey, do you just move into SO and SO apartments? Right across the street from our location? Yeah. If you need something, come on, like so. Right. Those are, but you've got to put the thought into the messaging like that. Most people just do the you're I'm in my gym, or I'm just in my office or and there's nothing to like, hook him in.
Blake Beus 38:31 Yeah. Well, and you don't need a high production value. So you know. Yeah. And, and you're gonna feel dumb doing it to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, it is. You're gonna feel like people don't do they're gonna feel a little stupid doing it, but just do it anyway, you know, work, it'll work. Alright, Greg, how can people get in touch with
Greg Marshall 38:49 you? You can go to Greg marshall.com and book a free strategy session call.
Blake Beus 38:54 And then Blake beus.com/sm threes, the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall 38:59 So great. Well, until next time, work on that messaging. And I will talk to you later. Okay, bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 We want to talk about hooks like you this is something you brought up about it. And you were talking with me before we turn this on it was the the importance of add hooks, and you had some new ways you've been kind of thinking about add hooks. Yeah, thinking about how hooks work when you're working with clients, all of that.
Greg Marshall 0:17 Yep. So here's, here's a kind of a quick backstory. So when I first started running advertising, like Facebook, basically, and even email marketing back in the day, all you had was your ad copy and your ad hooks and, and what you put in the ads, right or in your messaging. And so I feel like I got really good at that. Okay, back, you know, back in the day, there was no such thing as pixels and all this other crap, right, and algorithms. So basically, back back, when you would create the messaging, you would spend a good amount of time really trying to write a good ad hook, and then good ad copy to follow that. And that's what made good ads. And I will say I had a lot of success running these ads, purely focusing on without using AI, or any, you know, sophisticated interest targeting none of that. Just good old fashioned ad hook ad copy, with a good ad creative and picture. And we were we were discussing that. I believe messaging is underrated, when it comes to how to get your ads to work. And the reason why I say that is because I see a lot of clients, I see a lot of people out there that when they push their ads out, they're so focused on the targeting, they put almost zero effort in the messaging. And so they may be actually in front of the right person. But because their messaging is not compelling. It's not it's not going to work, right. And that's the part that's the art and the skill of selling and marketing and how to make money basically, when you're running things is to actually have things that compel people to want to take an action. And so add hooks, is probably the most important and most overlooked thing. Because if they never actually stop, then everything after that, whether that's the captions below 100 email, your video will not be seen, right, therefore doesn't matter. Right. So then if you were to actually isolate, which is the most important thing, it's the ad hook, because without it, no one consumes the rest of the content. And you almost don't have to be so perfect on the content, as long as you can get them to stop and look at
Blake Beus 2:46 Right, right. Right. Right. So, I mean, like, so many of the people I've worked with in the past, you're right, they focus on the targeting and the mechanics of the ads. Like why do you think so many people are focused on on those things? And then the ad, hook or angle or ad, you know, tends to just be an afterthought? Like, why do you think that is? Because I feel like that's pretty universal?
Greg Marshall 3:12 Yep. I think well, here's my theory. My theory is they're bad at sales. And, and but think about the others. Yeah, this isn't a knock on people, because you can learn to get good at it. Right? What I'm saying is they're bad at sales currently, right? And they've never actually probably sold in person, or understand the fact of what you need to do to actually get a sale. And a lot of people have negative beliefs about selling, right, and that transpires and how they write their ad copy, or how they sell their stuff online, the same bad habit you might have in person is going to move on to the internet. And so for example, you see someone at a tradeshow. You ever see those booths where they're just sitting there? And they're not doing anything? Yeah. And no one's basically going Yeah, no, yeah. And no one's buying anything, right? It's not because their products bad and the person across product is good. It's that the other the tables, I have all the people, they have the ad hook they're selling, they're figuring out a way to get your attention to stop to go ahead and take a look at their products, and then go ahead and give you a persuasive message. That's where I think online is almost designed, like the perception is that you can hide behind the computer. Right. And so I think that's really what happens is you're, you're kind of taking that same habit that you would do in person and bringing it onto the internet.
Blake Beus 4:41 Yeah, yeah. I, you know, as as you were talking to me, it kind of gave me a couple of ideas and thoughts here. The first thing I want to say is many people that are starting running their businesses, whatever, they're there, they're an expert in an area and that area is Almost always, not ads and selling. Like even, even if they're selling a product or whatever their their expertise is probably in the logistics or the creation of that product or, or the distribution of that product and everything but but as the business owner or the founder, or whatever their expertise is probably not in selling. And so that carries over into, alright, I want to run some ads, let's do this, let's let's think about the logistics of running ads, all of these things. But the the hook is this creative. exercise that is a different skill set than those other things. And and you're 100%, right, you're not good at selling yet yet. This is another muscle that needs to be worked. And, and maybe I'm seeing all this through my own filter, because again, software engineer background, very much in the data side of things of the marketing and sales is where I approach stuff. And when it came to running ads on my own products. I I was bad at the copy. I even had one person that I worked with, too, we kind of did some some accountability group because she was starting something Her name was Monica and and she told me she's like, I'll be honest, your ad copy is boring. Yeah. It's just not good. Yeah. And honestly, that hurt. Sure. But I was like, your right. And it was not a skill that came easy to me. And I had to work at it, and do revisions. And I read books. Yeah, I started like copying other people's, like screenshotting other people's ads that I thought were good and putting them in a file. And And over time, they got better, and I started getting better results. But it was, it was not easy.
Greg Marshall 7:00 Well, here's something and just we do not want to downplay the importance of the data. Yeah, and understand, because you need both, ya can't just have one, very much an intersection of a lot of different skill sets when you start hopping into online advertising and marketing. But one thing that I think happens is when you're trying to write, for example, selling, right, if you are not familiar or have never done face to face sales, you will typically think more logically, yeah, right. And you'll put logical things on your ads like this product has this, it has that you can get this, you got 42 different things, whatever, whatever, right. And that's important that but that stage is secondary, right? It has to come after I capture your attention. And one of the things when you talk about the ads are boring. It's usually based off of fear. So just like selling in person, we usually try to dumb it down a little bit, or dial it down to almost not offend, or be too drastic with what we're saying. Or to not be like those annoying ads that we see Yeah, out on the air that was exactly exactly had all of those fears. Yeah, and those, that's just a normal fear, okay, this is normal, a normal fear of selling. And what you have to do is just overcome and test these different methods of being able to stop people, you know, in their tracks to look at your ad. And what you'll find is, it's not as scary as you think, right? When you write a little bit different, right? Or talk a little bit different, and how you're promoting your products, because I just had this conversation yesterday with a client, very common in professional spaces, where you have someone that has gone to school and has certifications and degrees. A lot of them are very upset about usually one or two people in their space, who are making a lot of money but who are deemed uncredible or uneducated, right in their space, and that they're making these bold bogus claims, right. And I always say the reason why they're selling so much is because they don't have that filter, stopping them from, you know, saying this is what we can do. And they're hitting that emotional point, right for the customer. Right? It's the customer doesn't buy off logic, right? Buy off emotion, right. And it's all about emotion. And it's very little about
Blake Beus 9:36 logic. Right? So I mean, along those lines, let me because this was a you're talking about fears, and these are bringing them back I'm not really but but is it possible to hit those emotional triggers and make bold claims while still remaining ethical? Yes. Right. Because because I feel like that's a lot of people's concern because we can all point to someone In our industry that is full of it. And they're making these claims especially No. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So many advertising guru. So how do you how do you balance your bold claims, while maintaining, you know, your integrity, that is probably a core value to anybody listening to this? Sure.
Greg Marshall 10:21 So this is how we would do it and in the fitness space is, we'd make bold claims, and then go ahead and give the like, the actual real truth and story of how to do it, for example, sell them what they want, and then give them what they need. Everyone does it backwards, if they're not having success with their ads. They're selling them what they need, and leaving out what they want. Okay, a good example would be, I want to lose weight, right? But what I don't need is a magic pill. Right? What I do need is consistent exercise, and healthy eating, done over a long period of time. Right? Right. That's what that's what I need. But as a consumer, I don't want to hear that. Because that's, I'm looking for a simple trick, you've probably already heard that 100 times before, right? So because of that, you have to, if you give them something to stop them, right? How you can lose your first 10 pounds in seven days or something like that, right? That gives them like a timeframe, that's short enough to get almost that like instant gratification. And then what you would say is now, if you do this system, you'll do this, this, this and that you get them enrolled, and then you transition them into a real program, right, almost without having to explain it. Right, you just do it, right. And that's what worked really well for us is where we were able to attract people that wanted to train and get fit and healthy. Give them a goal that they could reach in a short amount of time. And then just transition to the ethical stuff. Right, right. This this is a periodized program. Uh huh. You're gonna fall? I'm just not going to really tell you that. Yeah. Because then I know, you won't be able to track into that. Right.
Blake Beus 12:15 Yeah, and it gets me thinking too, is oftentimes the the full scope of what you're selling is a conversation that is very lengthy and very in depth, that probably happens, that communication happens over a period of weeks, months, years, let's talk specifically about fitness, right?
Greg Marshall 12:40 The talking about the full scope of what someone needs to do to maintain
Blake Beus 12:45 a healthy body weight, or maintain those fitness goals or lifestyle goal goals, that conversation is very complicated, because there's all these different areas. And if you try to have that entire complicated conversation upfront in your ad in your sales video, it's not going to work. Yeah, what you need to do, just to kind of restate, what you're saying is give them some sort of obtainable short term goal, that opens the door, to have them be able to be willing to listen to the rest of the conversation as you walk them through this program that teaches them all of these different ways. And there's so many different ways to achieve that in the health and fitness. There's lots of people that, you know, you'll hear paleo keto, all of these different things. And some of those work for some people, some of those don't work for some people. But that's a conversation that you can't stuff all of that into an ad copy. So you need something very, very simple. And that was the problem I was having. I was trying to stuff all of the nuances and everything into my ad, if when really what I needed them to do was to just try it out, yes, get some results. And then that would open the door for me to be able to communicate with him via email, or in now in my membership group that we do together, or, or all I can have those longer conversations over a longer period of time to explain the nuances and how to really take off with XY or Z
Greg Marshall 14:15 Exactly. And I think the biggest, the biggest takeaway to do ethically is to really just think well, what will get them to pay attention almost, if you struggle with this, like let's say you're highly highly educated, and tell us which is the are the ones that usually have the hardest time because they know so much about it. They know how it actually works, that they have this resistance, because they're like in my line, Is this really how it works, right? Take what you would want to say and say the opposite, right? And so for example, let's say you want to say well, you have to do complex super setting and you got to do three to five times a week, whatever say the exact opposite of that, right? You're going to use a simple technique, and that will work to get you extra Also in the next couple days, right? Use a portion of that and just say the opposite of what will act what you actually have to do. That typically is a good way to get the added or say something that you feel almost uneasy saying, when it comes to your philosophy, that's usually enough to do the correct ad. Right. Right. It should almost feel uneasy, because if you do it correctly, it will stop the person in their tracks. And they want to know, is that true? So you can take like, you know, in the fitness space, you can use like things like, you know, three, three ways personal trainers lie to you. Yep. Right, that will get people to stop and read and read it. Why gym members? Why gyms? Want you to sign a contract and cause you to become fat. Yeah, right. Or the little secrets that are unknown to X, Y, and Z. Customers. These are
Blake Beus 15:56 the real reason Planet Fitness has free pizza on Fridays
Greg Marshall 15:59 exact right? They want to keep you overweight. So you gotta keep coming. Yeah, they know you like pizza to stay. Yep. And the price point is low. And so I mean, you can have that conversation, and then you can and then that opens the door to something more lengthy, whatever. Yeah. So that's, that's basically what you want to be doing. It's just how do I stop them or tell them something that they've never heard before? That's like a really good way to get the attention as to say something that they're not hearing all the time. Right. Right, or that goes against essentially the religion? what's being said out there, no matter what industry you're in. So if you're like in the physical therapy space, they're always talking about injury prevention, and this and that, and that's like, it's not enough to excite someone. Right, right. So you'd want to say the polar opposite. Why physical therapists are lying to you about how to avoid injury and avoid overtraining? Right,
Blake Beus 16:55 right. And I think the other way to kind of approach this, because I mean, you've already said, say something that makes you a little bit uncomfortable. And when I think about this, and this is a shift that I had to do, as I had to start thinking about staging, meaning everybody's at a slightly different stage, and when you're creating a product or program or something, you're an expert in that area, but you've got to remember, it took you 510 years to get there. And the people, you people you're selling to this may be their first time they're taking a serious look at trying to solve this problem, whether it's fitness, or finances in their business, or online advertising or something like that. And so if you try to give them the entire seven course meal that you've learned over 10 years, it won't work. Yeah, they need, they need something that was going to help them fix kind of an immediate problem right now. And that's a very simple conversation with some simple claims. That's going to get them there. And then as they progress through, you know, stage one, you can move them into stage two, which is a lengthier conversation with some nuances where they can, where they now have that foundational understanding, because you, you know, you hook them with the foundational hook or whatever. And now you can walk them through the rest
Greg Marshall 18:11 of them, which is why that's the ad hook is so important. Because once you get on and the content you have, yeah, is normally enough. Because you have the expertise in your space. Yeah. It's you're just not able to get them in. Yeah. And that's where you should spend most of your right focus is how do I get the attention? To get them in? Yeah, because after that, it becomes easier because now I have their attention. Yeah. And then I can share the, you know, all of the expertise that I do have in my particular subject, and how I can help them out. But if you can't get them to sit down, and actually pay attention to what you're saying, there's nothing that could possibly get them to consume your content, right? Because they're not even sitting down listening. They're just like, it's kind of like saying, if people are walking by and you're just screaming out, yeah, like, Hey, this is why you know, you need a personal trainer, blah, blah. It's like, they're not listening because of walking. Yeah. Versus if someone's sitting down in front of you. Yeah, they're ready to listen and hear the message.
Blake Beus 19:18 Yeah. So so like, what if we pivot just a little bit here, and we talk about some ways that that people can get better either some resources they can do or some exercises they can do and, and you want to like even show you showed me a couple of ads? Yeah, like we could we could talk about those specific ones. Do you think there'll be Should we do that? Yeah, I think it's like for example, I screenshotted a couple ads earlier today. And for people that have access to the video inside the the membership group, you can actually hold it up there. If you have that screenshot. You could show it there on camera if you want.
Greg Marshall 19:48 Yeah, I mean, so I think I will have to definitely get this for you. But we've got the three reasons why women love this tea for their money. Add. Yeah. And they've got a before and after selling transformation there. And they say Side effects may include job promotion free drinks or father's blessing, right? Yeah. And to me, that's a very
Blake Beus 20:12 endless selling T shirts. Yeah. But they're using consum, some kind of humor. They're using a couple of key things that I would say your average guy would would love.
Greg Marshall 20:24 Well, what, what I think is even more important, is look out plain that is a bar. I mean, it's a black T shirt. It's, it fits well, but it's a black T shirt. There's not even writing. Yeah. And it's still got my attention that shows you that. Sometimes it's not even the product. Yeah, it's, it's just a promise you can give me right. And so you're talking about promotion, free drinks. And and, you know, one of the things that I think that's important that ad does, you know, it's targeting man, it's also doing a couple of the other ads that are in their ad account that I looked at, they're really kind of like tapping into the ego, of the man. And you're right, right. So free drinks. A bigger promotion. Right? Right, your father's blessing. Yeah. You know, and then some of the other ones is, you know, make it look like you can benchpress two times more than you can, like, think about that this is all ego boosting, that is kind of a good angle to take a very plain product, and turn it into an exciting product. And
Blake Beus 21:35 I think it's okay to be a little tongue in cheek because your average reasonable person knows that a plain black T shirt is not going to necessarily get them a job promotion. However, it does happen to kind of this part of our brands, it's like, but if I am dressing nice, I do feel better. If I have a shirt that fits well, I do feel better. And and that that does kind of translate. But obviously, they're not saying I guarantee this shirt will get you a job. Everybody understands that this is tongue in cheek humor. But but it works. And there is, you know, a bit of truth there. And I don't feel that that is deceptive. Not at all or unethical at all.
Greg Marshall 22:18 I just think it's funny. Yeah, it's funny, if you show it, it makes it interesting. And you go, like, there is that little piece in your head that's like, you know, I do have shirts that don't fit as good, right? When I wear them. And it would be nicer if maybe it fit better around the waist or the shoulder. So you start to like, you think about that. Yes, the file I you know, what I have had times where I wore a shirt that doesn't feel like it's the most flattering, or it's the best on my absolute. And I mean, just a little tangent. That totally happens with me, even just with plain T shirts, I've
Blake Beus 22:53 very square shoulders. And so if a t shirt is is cut so that it's more angled at the shoulders, then it doesn't, it doesn't fit, right. And it ripples in weird places. And I don't ever wear it even if it's a good deal at all. But and so getting a t shirt that fits well does make a difference. Legit does
Greg Marshall 23:10 so because you heard those other benefits, which, like you're saying tongue in cheek, we're having fun, it's humorous, it's this kind of creative, you start to consider buying that T shirt in your hand. There's there's nothing that like we all know, wearing a black T shirt is not going to make me benchpress two times or get a new job. We all know that. But it's the fact that now thinking about those end results, which is what a lot of men will like is to have a better career higher earnings. Get people to flatter them. Like that's core emotions that both men and women probably want to feel. And they're tapping into that and associating those emotions and feelings to the t shirt. Yeah. And
Blake Beus 23:58 who knows, it might even work simply because every time you put that T shirt on, you're gonna think Man, I bought this because of that hilarious ad or whatever. It might be more outgoing and confident. And like that does well, here's where it just
Greg Marshall 24:12 made me realize too. Here's how to drive more word of mouth. If you buy this t shirt, because the ad was kind of unique and funny and you're wearing it. I think you will tell your friends about it like Yeah, but this t shirt I bought from this company they've got this funny ad I saw this and it almost can be a conversation starter. No, absolutely right. Like I'm thinking like, you're hanging out with your friends. You're just chilling and you're getting into conversation and you know you have got a small talk. You start talking about this or that you know before you know you can like yeah, man I like this particular shirt and especially if the shirt actually does fit good or is made out of a slightly unique fabric for a T shirt right because I like some something slightly unique Think about it. Yep, that can bring it up in conversation. So because of that, now you've got the ad gets your attention, it makes it memorable. You get the product. And then you start talking to your friends about where you got this product. You may even show them just like I showed you. The ad Yeah, have a product. That is, I mean, that's invaluable. Oh, if you can create ads that spark that level of emotion, you can essentially grow as big as you want. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So So to talk about, like some real things that you can do if you're struggling writing good hooks, or whatever.
Blake Beus 25:40 The very first thing I would say is, write write several different add hooks. And when when I'm talking about an ad hook, I'm mostly talking about kind of your main concept or that first sentence. In the ad. It's a little bit broader than that the concept of an ad hook, but, but write that first down, but I would say don't do it by yourself sitting in a in a room by yourself in front of a computer, maybe call in a co worker or a friend that you think is funny or bounce ideas off one another. Do you remember back in the going to date me back in the 90s? deep thoughts by Jack Handey? Do you there was a Saturday Night Live thing? And they would always just have these kind of a deep thought and it was supposed to be inspirational? Oh,
Greg Marshall 26:26 yes, right? Yes, like random, right nonsense. And
Blake Beus 26:30 so for some reason, I read somewhere how they wrote those, and it's literally just two people in a room, they would usually bounce a tennis ball off of the wall, and they're just coming up with this, just a long list of crazy idea. And then they would pick the top, you know, handful of those in a session, work it around a little bit and turn it into this thing you have, that's a process that would work for creating asks right, like, sit down in a room with a couple people come up with 100 terrible ideas. Yep. But of those terrible ideas, you're going to have a handful of those that that you think you know what if we tweak this a little bit, it's going to be unique and clever and, and really resonate with our audience. And then you can run with that,
Greg Marshall 27:10 well, here's, here's kind of a. So one of the ad hooks, or I don't even use this ad, I use it just for regular content. And it works is using things that sound more specific as well. So for example, in the marketing space, we helped a client grow by over 2,000% in 30 days, and no, they didn't start at zero, this is just a very strong ad campaign that we had. That worked really well. And they grew over 2,000%. Now, I could use how we grew over 2,000%, which I tested that, and it worked. Okay. But then I switched it and tested another version, it says how we grew our clients account by 2,096%. And now and that one really took off. Yeah. And the reason for that, I believe is the how specific it was. It makes it more real, right? If I say how to grow your bids by 100%. That almost sounds like that's just so random. And almost too perfect. Yeah, to perfect. All right. I like that. But if you were like how to grow your business by 102%?
Blake Beus 28:20 Well, that's a little bit. I haven't heard someone tell me. Yeah, that's more specific. And for whatever reason, I believe that it feels a little bit more legitimate because it feels like there was some actual math that happened behind that, right? And you can do that with any industry doesn't have to be growth or whatever it could be, you know, fitness, how I lost 5.2 pounds,
Greg Marshall 28:39 what about 12 days, whatever, how I got seven more dates by wearing this t shirt.
Blake Beus 28:45 Right? Right, like how I or in the job interview space, right like that. I've seen that kind of that space is growing quite a bit right now. You know how I increased my salary by 33.5% by switching my internet, but by leveling my interview skills or something along those lines, right like that. And those are things that actually can happen. And
Greg Marshall 29:11 those remember that's touching on the point of what people want the end result for everything that we're doing is basically the same. Yeah, right. You want to be more attractive to the opposite sex. You want you earn more money. Yeah, you want to have more freedom, right? You want to have better relations with your family. I mean, these are like core desires of like, most people, if not most many people. Yeah. And you're most likely selling to many people. Yeah. So you want to talk about these results, because every product and every service that's out there usually is accomplishing one of those of that list I just gave it's very simple list. Yeah. And it's very funny how it's often left out in the selling. Yeah, products and services we forget to actually touch into the result that we all want,
Blake Beus 30:05 right? The emotional result. And I think there's some ways you can kind of remind yourself to do that I, I'm going to mention two books that I found helpful for me, cuz I'm like, again, engineering kind of mindset. The first book and this one was probably my favorite. It's called Great leads. I can't remember who wrote it, but you can just get it on Amazon. It's not very expensive. It's if you've heard of that, the the golden child of all marketing books, it's, it's that book that was $450, written by the guy back in the 50s. No, it wasn't Ogle Ogilvy. But it's, it's called, oh my gosh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna I think I can see the cover. I think I know you're, it was out of print for like 20 years, and then a company bought it up, and you can buy it again. Now. It's called whatever. Anyway, this one kind of takes those concepts. But instead of having it be a 450, page, textbook style, really big heavy book, they take it down and basically distill the concepts into hooks. Yes, they use the word leads. Yeah, for like the lead off of your ad. But really, it's it's hooks. So great leads is great hooks, and they just talk about these concepts in writing that first first line or that first hook of of your ads. So that one was really good. And the other one I would say is is not as good, but I liked it was copywriting secrets by Jim something. He's like, buddies with Brunson or whatever. Yeah, that one, that one was good. But in that book, he had this thing that, that I really liked, when you're trying to write an ad to capture emotions, if you're the type of person that it's very easy for you to write about a feature like, this has this many, you know, whatever get, he says after you write that feature with the data, put a so that at the end of it, and then put whatever the result is, and then at the end of the result, put, which means and then you attach an emotion there. And then once you have that sentence structure in place, Riri kind of rework that and maybe remove the soul that or the which means maybe lead with the motion, but rework that sentence and maybe even drop the data point the feature. Yep. And now you've got a decent hook. Yeah. But it was, it was kind of a process that works for me, because I'm a very kind of data driven person to attach a motion and result to what I'm selling, and then kind of rework it and I was able to come up with leads that worked. Yeah, and
Greg Marshall 32:33 I think that's the key is practice ran and spending the time I think that's the point is, if you were to allocate the time that you spend during the week, if you really want to take things to the next level, you should spend a large portion of your time on this, the Add hooks, because if you take how people usually break down their week, they're usually like, maybe there's 10 activities, right? Nine, nine of them are non revenue, generating activities, right? Logistics, shipping, product, design, all that stuff, right. And that's all important. And but but then they spend a very tiny amount of time on the sales and marketing, right? And the thought behind it, which in theory is backwards, you should be spending most of your time on the sales and marketing, and then come up with the delivery of that. And if you do that, I promise you the results that you get will be way better than what you're currently getting. Because now you're spending more time and thought your a lot of people are just doing as an afterthought, right? I've got this great shirt. All right, just throw some out there because the shirts so nice, it's just gonna person and that's backwards thinking, right? It's you have to go, how do I make this shirt sounds so amazing that people will buy anything? Because it's that amazing, right? Not the shirt is so good. I don't even need to sell. And that's sometimes the thought process that I believe people have is, well, my products are so good. I don't need to think that much about how to sell it right. And that's arrogant thinking. Because you're competing against a lot
Blake Beus 34:14 of people. Well, not only you're competing against a lot of people, when you start running ads, you're getting in front of people that have no idea who you are, who you are, or what your brand is, or anything like that. So you have to find some sort of way to stand out. Now, before we wrap up, I did want to talk about this because we did we chatted about this before and want to circle back about this. You're talking about brand voice and writing ads and how you've worked with some of your clients. And sometimes you get pushback by by them saying well, that's not kind of our brand voice for the ad or whatever. Like explain that a little bit. Let's talk about quickly a couple of solutions. And we're up this one up. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 34:50 so I think so a challenge that we run into when running ads and I've run into this so many times not funny is if we right Something that sells. So here's a story, we wrote, why I wrote something that was getting the most sales this particular client ever got. And the response I got back from them was, hey, we would like to stop this ad, even though it was making the money. We'd like to stop this ad because it doesn't sound like us, right? And we want to change it around and make it sound more like this. And then we ran that ad and it didn't it flopped. Right? Right. And it's a very kind of delicate thing to say, Well, mine worked better than yours. We should do that. Right. And, and no one ever I know, I don't want to tell someone what your work is not good, or it's not performing. But one of the things that you should be open to is, if you're currently struggling with selling your products, or you're not getting the conversions you want, you should have someone else write it for you. And be open to that idea. Because most likely what's happening is you're too close to the product or service. And you're right, you're writing and creating things too logically. And that messaging is not resonating with your audience. So when it feels like it's not your voice or your brand voice, that could be a good thing. Yeah. And that's not to be funny. But that could be a good thing. Because that means you're testing the total, totally opposite approach, which is what you need to do. If you're not getting the results that you want,
Blake Beus 36:26 right? Well, and you're not selling to you. Correct, your customers are different than you. So you might think this ad doesn't sound like us. But your customers may not know what you sound like that internal monologue you have going on. Maybe
Greg Marshall 36:39 they don't know who you are, they don't they don't know who you are, nor do they care unless you make them.
Blake Beus 36:44 Right. And the other thing I would talk about, and it would be to maybe explore a different type of brand voice. Yeah, for different channels, right, maybe you've got a brand voice that that works when you're selling in person, or via email, or whatever. But on ads, it's a different channel. And people interact with ads in a different way. So be open to the idea of exploring a different brand voice some different angles in your ads, because of the difference with which people interact yet with ads.
Greg Marshall 37:16 So I think you know, the key to what we want to wrap this up with is spend 90% of your time on the Add hook Park more than anything. Yeah. And that will that's the biggest leverage point that I think that you'll get is you'll see if you're looking for, like exponential growth in what you're doing. focus mostly on that. Because that's really what's gonna happen when it comes to a change in how many people are clicking. How many people are excited about your product. How many people take the offer, if you don't have the good ad hook, you won't get the results you're looking for.
Blake Beus 37:54 Right. Alright, let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall 37:57 Greg Marshall dot coat and you can book a free strategy call. And Blake use.com/sm Three is the best place to get in touch with me right now. Well, hopefully enjoy this episode and we'll talk to you next time. Bye
Blake Beus 0:00 Okay, common mistakes with messaging, this is what we decided to talk about. Right? Okay. So you're on the phone with clients all the time helping them run ads and everything. Let's just start talking about these mistakes, like people make mistakes with AD messaging all the time. And I feel like sometimes people are so worried to make a mistake that they maybe don't even run ads. So there's kind of like a flip side there. So how do we kind of help identify those mistakes and then demystify it so that people can start running their ads and not like overthink every
Greg Marshall 0:32 Yep. So I think, you know, one of the big mistakes, that's that's made when you're doing messaging is having the messaging be too like bland. That's number one, meaning bland, like there's nothing exciting. Like, I always like to use Dan Kennedy's example, he says, he gets a direct mail piece from maybe an insurance broker that just says, Hi, my name is Bill and I sell insurance call me. And then he makes fun of it says, Man, I can't wait. You know, like, there's nothing enticing, right? So that's number one. The messaging is too bland. Number two is not even having a call to action. Yeah. So like not being specific. Have you know, I talked with a client last night we're, that's what he was running into is he's doing as Brian Tracy, I don't know if you've read some of his stuff. But Brian Tracy talks about tap dancing around everything, but asking them to take action. Oh, really. So you would say you know, you do all this? We can our product is this. It's so nice. It'll help you do this. And then there's no ask. Then the customers kind of left with Okay, so what do I do next? Or and you've already lost them once they have to like,
Blake Beus 1:40 this. Brian trait I've never heard of does he actually teaches this as is like a method of No, no,
Greg Marshall 1:45 no. I'm sorry. So Ryan, trade Tracy is making fun. Oh, he
Blake Beus 1:51 points out. Don't do don't do that. Gotcha. Gotcha. So
Greg Marshall 1:55 sorry. Brian. Tracy was like, no, no. So he he teaches that a lot of people are afraid of the rejection part, subconsciously. So they end up doing all these things, except actually asking them to,
Blake Beus 2:07 I get that I get that, especially if it's like your thing. Yes, it's way easier to be to deal with that. You know, rejection, rejection, I was gonna say regression, yeah, thinking of programming. When it's not, your it's not your baby, right. And so you might be an expert in the field, and then you decide to split off and create a side hustle, or start that business or whatever. But now it's your baby. And it's hard to go out there and get rejected. So someone's unintentional behavior might be to just dance around with correct without actually being direct and say sign up now.
Greg Marshall 2:43 Yep. And that's, you know, that's, that's another conversation. And that's, you know, you can run into that, especially if you haven't done sales or stuff like that before, and you're not essentially used to the rejection. Or you just take it maybe a little more personally, you can work your way out of that. Because it's not like you stay there forever. And you either have or you don't, it's more of just you just have to train yourself to be okay with the rejection. But that's another big mistake is not actually having a call to action. Yeah. Or a clear call to action. Yeah, simply because most likely, it could just be you're worried about rejection. And but that's an easy fix. Put it out there. And eventually, you'll see doesn't hurt when someone says no.
Blake Beus 3:27 So let's really quick because if, like sometimes I think it's easy to talk about concepts, and the people get hung up on the actual implementation. So real quick, just on calls to action. Let's talk about Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and then maybe Google search ads, just to kind of how, how do you put a call to action each of those because the format's are different. Yes. Yeah. Right. And so what what are some good call to action? ways you can actually put that in
Greg Marshall 3:58 there? Yeah, I mean, so you basically just want to be as simple as possible, right? So with video, video is great, because you can have two calls to action, basically, one in the actual video, and then one on your ad copy when you're doing Facebook, and even on some of the YouTube ads when they're gone to display network. So the simplest ones are, you know, click the link below, go to the website, fill out the form, and then this is what's going to like give them kind of what's going to happen. Tell them by today, like very direct, right? What you don't want to do is leave it up to chance like, hey, we can help you out, whatever, whatever. And then,
Blake Beus 4:37 yeah, so if you're interested, yeah, consider contacting Yeah, don't use
Greg Marshall 4:42 words like maybe, or consider or any of those like those. Those are kind of iffy words be more direct. Like, would you like to sign up today? Yeah. Click the link below to sign up by today and get this essentially, good calls to action, or the equivalent to strong lead Ship words. Yeah, right taking leadership as the salesperson or the marketer, your job is to lead them to do the next step, because that's what the buyer the consumer needs and wants, is someone to lead them to the solution. Yeah, or whatever it is, they're looking for something, you know, it, maybe the product just is for pure vanity, or for pure, you know, pleasure. sell that, right, just selling yeah, that's, that's legit. Like those are, those are totally legit, legitimate angles, half our economy is built.
Blake Beus 5:30 So YouTube, Facebook, Facebook, you can put a button on your ads, whether it's a video or image, and you can have a button there that can say download, whatever. And then right next to the button, you can have some headline text that could say something like, you know, click the button to get it today. Whatever sometimes have to play around with the wording just to get it to fit character wise. So it's all readable on Facebook. But yeah, and then the the tough one, though, this is the one I feel like a lot of people really struggle with is Google search ads. And maybe not everybody's running Google search ads, because they're a little bit intimidating. Yeah. But call to action Google search ads, because you've got limited space. There's no images.
Greg Marshall 6:15 Yeah, what do you do? So I like I mean, calls to action, really, and it's feels like Google pushes this as well, is essentially, you know, same thing, like, whatever the offer is, right? So it depends on what you're matching. Right. So if you're matching a keyword, let's use fitness or fitness, how to lose weight, right? So your call to action would be, let's say, a common 190 Day transformation plan, you know, learn more, and then in your subtext, you can write this plan does X, Y, and Z, visit a website to go ahead and download or to buy or whatever, right. But the key really is the matching of what they're looking for, and the words you're using. So if they're looking for weight loss, you don't have to be super specific, like click this link. Now, yeah, you can just have the programming and apply because we're all trained now, to what we see an ad and it says something on search. We know like to click it, yes. So we don't have to be so precise on, click here. Now to do this, you can just use that in your sub headlines. And the key is just the words that they're looking for, needs to be one of the headlines and explain through. And I think that that does the trick when it comes to click through rates.
Blake Beus 7:33 I think with with search, it's easy to kind of get hung up, especially if you've done mostly Facebook or YouTube, other ads and search. But you got to understand when some when you're running search ads, someone is looking for skipping, they have a high intent to solve a problem right now. And so you don't need to say click here. Yep. Because they're already planning on clicking Yeah, they just need to know which link to click. Yep. And so you don't necessarily need to do that. In Facebook, you do need to say click here, because people are looking at funny animal pictures or arguing with their crazy uncle about different differences in politics, right? Like, you do need to say click here to get this or, you know, whatever, what
Greg Marshall 8:18 is in so Facebook and YouTube and all that. That's interruption marketing. Yes. Psychologically. Right. So like, you went on to scroll to waste time not to look for something versus Google search? Is you have been, you know, like, in your mind, you're like, I you know, where's the next travel location? I want to go? Yeah, how much are these flight tickets? Right? Or what's the best supplement? In your mind? You're already predetermined? That you're you're
Blake Beus 8:46 going to click on something. Yeah. That's why we're doing we're
Greg Marshall 8:49 not click Yeah,
Blake Beus 8:50 exactly. Exactly. So you don't need the the you don't need to interrupt them or grab their attention or whatever, you just need to be very clear on what they're getting. And what it's going to mean for them in your ad copy.
Greg Marshall 9:05 That's where message to Market Match is key. Yeah. Right. So if I'm looking at specific keywords, I need to just make sure those keywords are being presented to them, so that they know Oh, this is I'm at the right place, right? or wrong way to do it, when it comes to call to action really would be if someone types on how to lose weight. And you have and you're targeting that search term. And you put how to build muscle. Or one of your hands. Yes, not yet, which technically is one of the best ways to lose weight. But that's not what the person type.
Blake Beus 9:39 They're not looking for how to build muscle. That's not what's on their mind right now. So they're just never going to click on that link. So the
Greg Marshall 9:45 other thing I talked to you actually with a potential client, we talked about this was demand generation versus intent, right? So demand generation, the messaging is much different than it So Google search would be intent, because they've looked it up, they're intending to do that. Demand Generation is more on Facebook and YouTube, where you are where you're kind of convincing someone that they either have a problem and need that solved. Or there's some type of pleasure, or vanity or whatever that they should want. Right, right. And demand generation is basically, really educating them and irritating, whatever that problem is, or triggering that issue. to then get the customer want to do it. Now, demand generation marketing is a lot different than intent. If you could make the argument a lot harder, right? Yeah. Because you, you are trying to convince someone, it's kind of like cold approaching someone out in the street. You know, like, it brings me back to my fitness sales. I'd be in the parking lot of target selling gym memberships to random strangers who are obviously just going to target Yeah, right. That's demand generation, I have to create a Demand and you have to do a quick, right. So you have to be efficient with your wording. So when you're doing demand generation, which is interruption, essentially, you have to think of all the reasons why someone is going to tune you out. And you have to figure out how do I get them to tune in very quickly. Right, right. And then it's not just the first couple seconds, it's almost like you have to do over and over and over again, within the message, whether it's law, forum, copy, or video, it's like we have to get them to engage, again, to gauge again, it's not a guarantee, once again, to engage you have them the whole time.
Blake Beus 11:33 Right. Right. Well, and that's one of the reasons why. The best Save Video Ads, right, let's just pick them videos from the best video adds about every three to five seconds, they almost, it's almost like they have another hook or another cliffhanger to keep you watching. And for the most part, I almost never watch YouTube ads. But every now and again, I'll get one that grabs my attention and keeps it keeps me watching. There's like this, another hook another layup. I don't know if you want to, if you want to think of it, like another hit of the advertising drug, right? Like you're getting, like, um, what what are they gonna do next? The dopamine? Yeah. And almost always, at least for me, and I think this is probably pretty universal. But almost always, those are ads that have a various YouTube ads specifically, that have a very high quality storytelling framework. Yep. Right. They're telling a story about maybe how they solved this problem or something like that. Or maybe it's a funny story. There's these this sunglass company that makes titanium sunglasses, I will watch their ads every time they pop up. I can't even remember the name of the company right now. It's been a while but, but they're really good at storytelling. And it's geared towards men my age. And so it ticks all of my funny boxes about just being a guy at my age. And it's funny, and I will watch those and I haven't purchased it. But I've definitely clicked on a link and gone to their website and looked around. Yeah, which I never do for YouTube ads.
Greg Marshall 13:08 Well, and here's the thing. Do you have yours? Here's, here's my one that I see. And like, their name is V shred. Okay, shred is the company in its, its top targeting me because I'm always looking at fitness topics. Yeah. Right. And they're a fitness company, trying to get you to lose weight in a six pack, right? Yeah. And so what's interesting about them, they are very good. I heard they have 2300 different versions of their ads that they're currently testing. And they're all like, they're similar in nature, just they change out the front hook. Or, you know, they're just doing combinations, right? But basically, what they're doing is they, they're all story ads. So it starts right out the gate. They're like, you know, I never thought that I could have a stomach like that's like one of the hooks, right? I have a stomach like this. And then it's before and after pictures and the video. And then it's interviewing the guy on what he did and what his wife is saying. And like, as you can see, I've seen these ads enough to like, I pretty much know I can remember. Yeah. And this is V shred. I see their ads at least eight times a day. And they must be doing heavy retarget they must
Blake Beus 14:15 be and it must be working. Because that's that costs a lot of money. No doubt. It's worrying. Yeah, that costs a lot of money. You don't keep running ads like that. If you're losing money hand over fist, right? Like it's working. And this is where I feel like a lot of people get hung up. They're thinking, I'm not a storyteller. Yep. I don't know how to do this. I'm not good on camera. I'm not a good copywriter. I don't know how to tell a story in copy. I've seen ads on Facebook with good text and it's really great, but I don't I don't know. I don't know how to do that. So how do we help people like bridge that gap from this like place of insecurity? I don't know how to do this today. Let's get something out there and start going just fine.
Greg Marshall 14:56 So basically, here's what I here's the ultimate hack. to film yourself or a customer, or someone who can communicate this message, if you don't feel comfortable, and then find a video editor to edit it, and give them send them a link, something that you've seen and say, can you make something similar? Yeah, that's the ultimate hack. So if you don't know what to do just do that. And if you don't feel comfortable camera fine, just someone who does who looks like your target customer you're trying to get Yeah, right. So it doesn't always have to be the other work around that we use. For people who don't like to be on camera, or feel self conscious is we do the voiceover method. So we have them speak. And then we put in pictures, like the roll photos that are that are based off of their business. And we put it in like a little story for him. And those worked really well. So and So there's ways that you can do video ads without having you have to be the talking head. Yeah, you can do it from a voiceover you could even hire someone else to do voiceover, what I recommend is just start putting things out there. And a story like format of basically, the scripting would be your ad hook will get their attention, right? irritate the problem, provide the solution, have a call to action, just do that every single time. Use that
Blake Beus 16:21 in that order. Right? And that's a very simple formula that literally works. Every, in any industry for any any type, any type of thing. And if you're thinking, Oh, what, what? What's a good hook? Like? How do I come up with a hook because I gotta grab their attention in the first few seconds. One of my favorite and simplest ways to do a hook is you tell the end of the story at the very first in the first three to five seconds, like, and so then I ended up without realizing it that I had the six pack abs. But let me tell you how I got there. Boom, right, right. Like you just go right and you went with the end result that people want. And then you go back to the beginning and you tell your story, throw some emotion in there, whatever. But it's, it sounds really hard. I think the other thing I would say like along the lines of what you just mentioned is Get Started get putting them out there. But But understand that you're not going to knock the ball out of the park the first time this V shred, yeah, I have 2300 videos of different combinations of videos, probably same clips that they've kind of sorted around and whatever. They didn't get there by just coming up when we can and saying, you know, we should do Yep, record some videos. It's something that they've been doing for years and years and years. And they got there. So one of my favorite motivational quotes or concepts is, you want to know how to make something really good? Well, you have to make 1000 Shitty versions of that thing first. And that's This isn't this the same thing, you want to make really good video ads? Well, you have to make 1000 really terrible video ads. First, it's more important to just get started and start going. And then kind of just keep redoing, honing, tweaking, whatever. And if you think about whatever your business is, or whatever your specialty is, that's how you got good at that. Yep. In your business, right. And so, of course, that's how you you need to do it. This is just a new skill set that you just need to hop on board and start doing
Greg Marshall 18:17 well. And to build on that yesterday when I was talking to that prospective client. And this is what I share with a lot of clients. Basically, I tell them, Look, there's no magic formula that gets it done immediately on the first try. Right in, what it is, is you have a structure of how you should do things, but then you have to test the little bits within that structure to get kind of your fully optimized product. And so if you go into it that way, you should have less stress. Because it's you won't have that pressure of I have to make the perfect advertisement right away, or my messaging has to be perfect. And it's one and done. That's the other thing a lot of clients run into is they like they'll even ask this question like, so. Can I change what this says like? And I'm always surprised, I'm like, Well, of course we can. Absolutely. We can change what this says anytime. So therefore don't fear testing different messages or add hooks? Yeah, because it's not like you do it, and then you're not out of touch. And it's like, no, I can't change it. Now it's it's too late. So when you have that kind of mentality of thinking that if I don't get this done perfect the first time, then, you know, you know, it's not going to work that's going to prevent you from trying things. Yeah. And if you're not trying more, you know, more test more things to see what works and what combinations, you're not going to be able to get the best results that you're looking for.
Blake Beus 19:45 Right. Right. I think one of the keys to all of this testing, we talked about testing a lot is to maybe shift the way we think about running ads. So when I talk with people about running ads or marketing or whatever they they'll say something along the lines of Okay, it's time we need to run some ads. Yeah. So when can we get this done? Yeah. Well, the reality is, is you're, you're never going to be done. Yeah. So what you need to do is shift the mindset and say, Okay, we need to put 10% of our effort each week into ad creative and running ads, right. And whether that's outsourcing it to someone like Greg, or doing some internal stuff, or just trying to figure that out, what you're doing is you're saying this is part of our weekly process or regular process. And we're going to carve out some time to just keep working in moving forward and seeing what's working and seeing what's not. It's, it's just, it's, it's this marathon that never, never ends. Not saying that this is a terrible thing. It's just part of the process. It reminds me of, I grew up working on my grandpa's cattle ranch in I grew up in Wyoming, his ranch was in Idaho, but they were really close, just right across the border. And my grandpa worked on that, from the time from the 1930s. Right? He worked on that forever and ever. And one of the things I learned from him about working on the ranch, I asked him once, and how do you know when to stop, stop working for the day, when you're done. He said, Well, you're never done, you just put in a good day's work. And then the next day you have more to do. And that's it's just, you just, it's just this thing, you you always have something to do. And that's not terrible, it's not the end of the world, it's not bad. It's just, there's more to do. And that's the same thing with ads, you're just need to constantly keep putting some time and effort into it, putting some money into it, even if your budgets tight, you could do $5 a day for a week. And then and then evaluate the results. And then you spend the next two to three weeks finding out some ways to tweak it. And then you want to test where you're spending the $5 a day again, but you're running, you know, what you think might be better or whatever and see which which performs better. And just keep going
Greg Marshall 21:53 that well. And what you're really saying is, it's a mindset,
Blake Beus 21:56 it's a mindset,
Greg Marshall 21:57 it's your mind should be not how do I get some ads running? And then that's it. That would be the assumption of it's an event, but it's not an event. It's a process. Yeah, you know, it's it's part of your business, right? And if you look at I always and I'm sure I've said this in other podcasts, if Coca Cola still runs ads, I'm pretty sure one of the world knows who Coca Cola. But if they're still running ads, that means that as part of their business, it's you can learn a lot from just watching that. Because if your small business thinks you don't need to run ads, yeah. And they're running ads, you know, you've got to kind of, you know, backwards, because that's kind of how they got it right. As they figure out their sales process. They figured out promotional strategies. And they keep you know, now they're buying TV spots and stuff. And it's the equivalent, like scaling your ads, right? You don't start there. Right? We don't we don't start at we're gonna buy a Superbowl ad. You start with rule by a little ad on Facebook, or we'll buy a little spot, little TV spot in our local area. And then when we start getting more sales and growing, and we maybe go to regional, then we maybe we go to increasing budgets on Google, and you start you just keep growing. But but you don't start there. And that's where I think prevents most people from actually even try it. Yeah. Is they assume similar to fitness? Well, if I can't run a marathon today, what's the point? Right, that doesn't make any sense. It's like, No, you know, the person running it, once upon a time couldn't run around the block. Right. Right. But they built up to it. And that's, that's what you have to do. It's,
Blake Beus 23:39 it's exactly what you got to do. You've got to keep working on and I would make the argument that literally every business that makes revenue should run out. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, well, even if it's 50 bucks a month, it doesn't really matter, even if that's all you can really afford. And you're just a teeny business, run some ads, say each month, say, Okay, I have enough room in my budget, to drop 50 bucks in ADS this month, great. Run 50 bucks and ads, see what's working. Because that's how you're gonna get moving forward. I help a lot of people with just organic social media. That's what the SM3 group is, we talk about it quite a bit. I oftentimes tell people, hey, organic is great and fine. You need to get in front of new people that don't know you. So if you have followers, basically, only a percentage of your followers are going to see your content if you're just doing organic stuff. Yep. Maybe you'll show up in search or whatever, from time to time, but really, really not that much. Yep. The guaranteed way to show up in front of new people all the time is to run some ads and it doesn't have to be crazy expensive and it doesn't have to be time consuming but just get started and try it out.
Greg Marshall 24:43 Well and you just got to think like you always have to be promoting whatever it is you have whatever your product or service because still the way people are, you know new people are going to be introduced to it right? You can't just kind of keep it a secret and think people will eventually find out because it's just there's too many distractions, like, if you if you think of this is a good exercise to do, if you think about one individual, right? And you go this one individual if I do not talk to them, does that mean no one's talking to them? Or does that mean? They're just not thinking of me now, because there's all these other people out there being communicated all day long the average person sees, who knows how many ads for him? I don't know. So if you're not talking to them, it's kind of like your wife. If you don't talk to your wife and have a relationship with her, and you never call or text her, how long do you think that marriage is gonna last? It'd be toast, it's gonna be done. It's done. Yeah, someone else is talking to you. Right? So you have to be thinking about, you have to nurture every individual, whether they're a customer or not, you have to look at the whole market and say, I need to be talking to the market continuously, constantly. And always. Because once again, like one of my favorite things, Dan Kennedy says, you know, customers, they are the most disloyal group, not in a bad way. Just if you're not giving them value, they will leave you in a heartbeat. And find someone else who will.
Blake Beus 26:12 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And. And so yeah, I mean, really just just keep going. Now, we started this off kind of talking about, you know, the right kind of messaging, we talked, you gave us a good script, on how to come up with messaging that works for that script also also works for text ads. Yeah, you can type a script that follows that same model. And that would work. What are some other you know, are there any other mistakes people make when they're writing? When they're coming up with how to message or how to communicate? Their offer or whatever to clients? Yes,
Greg Marshall 26:46 speaking in the wrong language. So for example, speaking in what you think the customer's pain point or desire is, versus what it actually is. Right? So I have to, when I talk with clients, especially ones that are a little bit more brand focus is usually where I run into this, where they're like, Yeah, my brand, is this my brand? Is that the branding these? What, the way I translate that is I, it's about me, it's the wrong mindset. Right? You're not that's you're not actually saying the customer, right? So when they speak in that, so speaking about what you think they want, or what you want them to want, is another huge mistake versus what they actually say, the customer like the what the customer actually wants, right? It's very common to say, look how much we had this discussion weeks ago about my own business, where I said, I know that they need something like this, but I don't know how to deliver it to them. And I initially thought it was one way come to find out it's a totally different way. Now. Good thing. I've been in the game for a while, but I understand you have to be flexible. Yeah, like if you think it's one way, but it's another well, that old way that you thought it's gone now. Yeah. Now it's all about this because that's what the customer wants. Right? And if I don't give the customer what they want, I don't have a customer. Yeah, so you understand. So that's a big big mistake. The other mistake believing people buy exactly like you hmm, okay, this is like a gigantic This is a sin, basically to commit when it comes to doing your marketing. Because I hear this Yeah, I don't ever buy anything on Facebook ads. Yeah, well does that so I so that I guess all industries worthless. No
Blake Beus 28:36 one No one knows. Facebook became a multi bajillion dollar company for no reason or no reason they fooled the whole world. People are buying whole advertising. Their whole business model relies on paid advertisements, and no one's making money.
Greg Marshall 28:49 And that and I this is where I get this the most though, is email marketing. Yeah. Okay, I get this all the time. I, I'm not going to open an email. Like this is the business owner saying, I never buy anything off email, emails, annoying me. text message marketing annoys me. And they're saying all these things, right? And it's kind of like, we're not selling to you.
Blake Beus 29:13 Yeah. And nor are we selling to people like you. You've already solved this problem. Yeah, you're the problem solver. We've we're working on the people that haven't solved this problem yet and they act and behave completely different and here's the thing if it works it works Yep. That's there's no harm in trying out email marketing, no harm in trying out text marketing. I get really I really struggle with the people that will say emails dead texts dead let's not even give it a shot. Everything's let what if Hear me out what if we try it and if it works, we do we keep doing it. Right? Like what's wrong with there's literally nothing wrong with that, but some people just don't want to do it. I want to circle back to the brand thing. Because one of the companies I'm working with right now is go Going through a branding, exercise or whatever. And and I'm not going to say that that's pointless, I actually think it's worthwhile. But when your brand is so set in stone based on a brand exercise, that your marketing doesn't work. That's not good. Yeah. So if you go through like a branding exercise, and you come up with a brand and say, Okay, this is where my brand is, that brand needs to be flexible and shift based on what your customers respond to and react to. And the other thing, and this is kind of a higher level topic, but a lot of people when they start thinking about branding, they'll buy some brand books, when they talk, they'll they'll they'll see how did Apple handle its branding? And how did Tesla handle its branding. The reality is, is your business is not if you're listening to podcasts, your business is not anything like those businesses, and you can't follow the steps that they follow to make your stuff work. Those are statistical outlier businesses. 99.99999% of all businesses out there do not operate like those businesses, they simply don't. And so looking to those businesses to get ideas is fun and interesting. But most of the concepts there aren't super applicable to your business or your brand. And so what you need to do is maybe have a flexible loosey goosey brand, that is defined by customer interaction. And then you solidify that over time, based on what what the customers want, how they respond, and how they spend their money. They're basically voting with their dollars on on how your brand should be. So keep kind of doing more of that
Greg Marshall 31:35 well, and the brand that they you know, put together, quite frankly, they built it based on the same concepts we're talking about. They provided something that is of such huge value, that it's a no brainer to the customer, and they tell more customers to buy. And the referrals go up, which is why those companies are so viral, so profitable. And they can charge a premium. It's because it's not because they thought of a cool thing first, as far as how to look and appear, and then show that to the customer. I started buying because it looks cool. It's actually the other way around. They created stuff that people loved, and couldn't get enough of, and provided so much value first. And then built made it just look sexier and sexier over time over time.
Blake Beus 32:27 And you think apples been around since the 70s? Yep.
Greg Marshall 32:30 What's the first Apple logo from the 70s to now does not look the same, right?
Blake Beus 32:35 No, I mean, it's similar, because the companies are still named apple. But there's been a lot of changes, but logo is only one piece of the branding. Back in the 70s, Apple was branded their company persona was this scrappy company where you could have this, you could build this stuff in your garage and could connect to everything. And now Apple is not this scrappy company. It's polished Hill, it's everything. But they had to go through each of those phases. And they had to shift, right, because that scrappy computer company in the 70s and 80s worked. But then in the 90s, it started to fade as Microsoft started becoming this business professional kind of brand. And so they reinvented themselves to be for creators. And that reinvention took them 1215 years. So they were also flexible. And you got to realize that so if you read a brand book that talks just about how Steve Jobs did the rebranding, when he came back, that's not entirely relevant to you and your company. Tell me about
Greg Marshall 33:34 Steve Jobs when they had zero customer. And guess what he was willing to do? Pick up the phone and call people and say you got to try this new computer that I got this new product, hey, investor, take a look at this the same principles that we all need to do. And we're never above any of that.
Blake Beus 33:53 And you have to go through those principles to get to this to get to that level, like like all of them, all of them do. And they spent millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in branding, advertising to get there as well and to really seek that brand. But you know, you if you're listening to this and you own a title company, that's just not, that's not going to have that's you're not going to be the Steve Jobs of title companies, right? That doesn't mean your business can't be wildly successful and be everything you need that business to be in and help 1000s and 1000s 1000s of people you totally can. But your brand is not going to not going to be like that. But you can run some ads, you can you can have a very personalized voice. You can come up with messaging, you can follow the hook scripts that Greg talked about. And you can start seeing some serious results without having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to solidify your brand.
Greg Marshall 34:43 Well just you know, to kind of cap this off here. Think customer first. And that's how you'll have your most powerful messaging and avoid the mistakes of thinking you first versus customer first because that's usually where the messaging kind of Next up is your thinking more about you versus the value the customer is desiring, and speaking in their language. And so, with that being said, I hope today was valuable. Yeah. Blake, how can people reach
Blake Beus 35:14 you? Just go to Blake beus.com/sm. Three, that's the easiest way to kind of get in touch with me, Greg and I run a membership where we talk more on all of this stuff, and answer your questions and everything. Plus give you a bunch of things that make your life easier every month with your marketing efforts.
Greg Marshall 35:34 And yeah, you can reach me at Greg marshall.co cio.co. And you can book a free strategy session where we can go over how we can grow your business in the best way possible for the long term.
Blake Beus 35:45 All right, we'll catch you guys later. Bye
Blake Beus 0:00 Recap of last week we did some testing. Well, you did some testing about what we talked about on our last episode. Yep. About being where customers at being okay, spending a little bit more money from a CPM perspective. Yeah. Give us a rundown on on what we talked about last week. And then let's talk about your tests that you ran and what you found.
Greg Marshall 0:23 Yeah, so. So basically, to recap, last week, we were talking about how this individual is talking about data, and really researching where your customers at, you know, and focusing more and more on where they're actually at, versus what the advertising platforms recommend that you do, which is to put the ads everywhere, right, and that, technically, it is cheaper when you do it that way. But in a way, it could actually be more expensive. Yeah. Because if you're wasting money on placements that aren't converting, or your customers aren't there, then it doesn't matter how cheap it actually is. And so with the tests that we ran, last week, I ran one on my account, and I ran a couple on some clients accounts, after analyzing what actually works for for the specific offers, right. And I found that by running them on the placements that their customers are actually on, including mine, you get a lot, although the CPM is slightly higher, you're actually getting I think more for your dollar, because that dollar is not being spread out to so many different platforms, right? That the customer that you really want to see it is not actually seeing it as many times as they need to be right. And so that's what I found is although you technically and there's all these prompts, especially in Facebook, that will tell you your cost per result is going to increase if you don't use all the placements. just disregard that, because this is where you have to think, Where is my customer? And right, how do I show up in front of them regardless of the cost, because you have to work out your math anyways on cost per acquisition to revenue you're making. But if you're not actually in front of the customer, then you're essentially wasting money. So therefore, it's more expensive.
Blake Beus 2:14 Right, right. So let's define CPM. And I know we define this a lot. But if someone's just hopping in right here, CPM is cost per 1000. Impressions. So what what is an impression specifically in that context?
Greg Marshall 2:28 Meaning so an impression when when you run the ads is when someone sees the ad? Okay, so that's, like, if they're scrolling, and they just see it, they don't have to do anything. Okay, that's the impression.
Blake Beus 2:39 So here's the question I've always had in regards to impressions that I've actually never looked into. And I'm curious if you know the answer. So let's, let's talk about Google Display Network, right? Those are the ads that show up on someone's blog, or whatever. So if I'm running some ads, in the Display Network, very, very cheap cost per impression, like the CPMs are very, very low. Yeah. I, I'm a user, I hit the blog, and I see the same ad four times on that blog. Does that count as four impressions? Yep. Okay. So that's why the cost per impressions are so cheap, because one person is causing four impressions. Yeah. Which basically cuts the cost cost of that impression. The CPMs in the reporting by 75%. Right, like,
Greg Marshall 3:28 yep. And so that's basically how they counted. Yeah, if you're, so if I'm reading, you know, espn.com, and I see one of your ads on there. But I see it four times, because maybe it's placed at the top, and then he scrolled and maybe it's within the article, that's going to count as two impressions and more if I keep looking at it, right. And so, so impressions are great. And I do, I do see some value in them. But I believe where the impression is happening is more important, in my opinion, then, you know, how many times you're seeing right?
Blake Beus 4:00 So you're saying it's worth paying more? From a CPM perspective? Yes. To be in front of your correct audience,
Greg Marshall 4:08 correct? Yeah. Because it makes sense. It's just like, Well, why would I spend, you know, less money to talk to people that are not my customer? Yeah. That makes absolutely no sense because I can't possibly gain a customer. Right?
Blake Beus 4:24 Going, I could probably get a really cheap billboard. Yeah. If I wanted to put a billboard up in China. Yeah. For products solely in English in America here, but it wouldn't do anything. Really sad. It'd be really cheap advertising, but it won't
Greg Marshall 4:39 get any sales. So actually, it's very expensive. Yeah, so then it would be like a waste of money.
Blake Beus 4:44 It's like, it's like buying a shirt just because it's cheap. Yep. But then it doesn't fit right. So you never wear it. Like I never not even once exact. It's more it's better off to it's more expensive than buying a more expensive shirt that fits right that you wear all the time.
Greg Marshall 5:00 Exactly, yeah. So that's how I like to view advertising. And when you're especially when you're running paid, and I've pretty much always had this view, but you're constantly getting influenced by Facebook or Google or whoever, always wanting and recommending that you do a certain tactic. When really, it feels like it's not serving my best interest to serve in their best sense. Yeah, it almost makes
Blake Beus 5:24 you feel a little crazy, though. Yeah. Because you're like, well, it's working for me over here. But, but they keep telling you over and over and over again to do to do. It's crazy.
Greg Marshall 5:34 I liked that you brought that up, because there's actually a point since I, since I've done that I have received 10 phone calls from Facebook last week. Really? Yeah. Like, they want me to get on the phone with an advertising rep. And that my results could be better. I've made a few adjustments. And of course, I already know what they're going to tell me. Yeah, they're gonna say move it all. It's automatic placements, and changes and change. And all it's going to do is make them more money and make my stuff less effective. So remember, we talked about the theory about why you think they do that? Yeah. And the theory is basically, which also makes sense. If I can get great results on a single placement, and it does really well. And it's, you know, turning a profit, then I don't really have a huge incentive to spend more. Right, right. Because if I'm very profitable spending x amount, like if I was getting a 10x return, that's bad for them. Because I'm not going to turn it up. Nope, I'm gonna keep it as that budget. And that's it, and there's no more spend. So if you think about it, it makes sense why they want to keep pushing all these other, you know, placements that convert as well, is because if they're not, what's the recommendation? Spend more, you're not spending enough? Yeah, you got some results, you got to always spend more and
Blake Beus 6:57 more. Yeah, and I? Yeah, I always feel like even with these machine learning AI, you know, things like performance, Max and Facebook had their CBO. And they've done some other things as well. Those things do perform well, because of how machine learning or AI works. When you have bigger datasets, and to get a bigger data set, you need to spend more advertising dollars, and then they can totally work. But if you're working with a small budget, yep. And small in this context might be big for some but small in this context, I would say is anything under $500 a day?
Greg Marshall 7:34 Yep. I would agree. I would say the like the budgets. It seems like the people who recommend the automatic type placements are people that are spending 1000s And 1000s per day. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Because you need a giant data set to make that
Blake Beus 7:53 work. And that and that does make sense. And machine learning or AI can totally help in those circumstances. Because if you're spending 1000s a day, you're you're very quickly going to saturate small audiences. So you need to go find more people out there they exist, they're just harder to identify. And so it does make sense. But if you're working with a smaller budget, this is just a strategy that just doesn't work. And frankly, a lot of people will their business probably never ever, ever needs to go above $500. If you're gonna have a very profitable, very successful business with multiple marketing channels, without without going over that budget, not everyone has to be a Coca Cola, or Pepsi or McDonald's that has, you know, a 10 million 100 million dollar a year advertising budget, right?
Greg Marshall 8:41 Well, if you think about it be spending 500 A day it's about what 15,000 A month. So if you get it three or 4x return on that you're at 45 to 60,000 in revenue. And then if you're able to capitalize on repeat purchases off the new customer acquisition, you can grow yourself into 8090 100,000 or some million dollar a year business Yeah, which most people would be pretty happy, very happy with. It's a comfortable living as long as your margins are pretty good. So in this case, and this scenario, and I'm glad you added that context is really we're talking to the business owner that is doing $500 In a day in Aspen or less Yeah. Because most business owners that's what they're doing. Right I can't remember the exact statistic but I do know it's a very low percentage that of how many businesses actually reached a million dollar revenue per year mark yes, not as many as you think. I mean, the internet will make you think like everyone has ever you're the only millionaire that not out there but that's not true at all. If you look up the statistics and it's very that's a that's a big milestone if you can hit a million dollars a year. That's that's pretty good. And so So yeah, so you can definitely reach a million dollars a year spending $500 there less Yeah, and over time that will compound as long as You have a strong business model?
Blake Beus 10:01 Absolutely. Absolutely. So what what do you think is a good way to kind of test this out for Aranda, some listeners listening right now they're like, Okay, I want to test this out for me? Would it be? Would it make sense to just say, okay, my budget is going to be $50 a day, $100 a day, and I'll run it with all placements for a week just to get a baseline, and then I'll back off and run just targeted placements out, you know, what would you think this?
Greg Marshall 10:29 I mean, if someone were to ask me, yeah, like, just directly, like, hey, you know, I'm thinking about doing this, I would say, in my experience, based on all of the ads that I've run, that's been a lot. I would say, like, if it's on Facebook, the newsfeed and the stories option, those are the earth placements. Those are the two placements that I would say, just focus on those, forget about the other ones to get those data. And then if you go to Google, I would say search or YouTube ads, okay, okay, those are the two places that I would go, I would stay away from display. And so either you have a gigantic budget, which we just went over, you're most likely not going to want to go to anyways. And those are going to give you your highest return. So I feel like news news feeds the same even if you go Tik Tok, or any other platform, always choose the newsfeed over any display, we ran into the Zealand LinkedIn member, yeah, when you run website traffic campaigns, if you have display network enabled, your cost per clicks will be like 25 cents. But then what you'll notice is no one stays on the site very long, no one converge if no one does anything. And the second you turn that off, and you only have the newsfeed the cost per clicks, go back to what they're supposed to. And so I would always recommend newsfeed no matter what you're doing, you always take out display or Audience Network or anything that sounds like that,
Blake Beus 11:56 or in video stream, or any of those people aren't in the click to go off. They want to just keep watching, but
Greg Marshall 12:04 it's just those replacements to give, I feel like a lot of vanity metrics. You know, like you've had 100,000 impressions, but 95,000 came from in stream and Audience Network. And it's like, that's not going to drive your bottom line. So the other thing that I typically recommend, okay, nothing is like set in stone. There's outliers out there. But I would say, if you're doing e commerce, right, or lower ticket products, you could stick with Facebook, and you can even start to test out tick tock, since CPMs are really low. And that'll allow you to get more volume of traffic and the numbers will work out. If you have high ticket though. Google and YouTube are better,
Blake Beus 12:46 in my opinion for E commerce, or just are just high ticket just high
Greg Marshall 12:49 ticket. Okay. Yeah. For high ticket, I believe. Those are better.
Blake Beus 12:53 Yeah. So when you say high ticket, just to define that we're talking like, maybe a consulting thing, at least
Greg Marshall 12:59 five $600. Okay. But you could get away with even higher priced products. Absolutely. So I would say if you're, if you're charging a lot more, you tend to get better results. And you know, I use personal training in this too, because personal training, technically is higher ticket because you're buying four or $5,000 training packages, right? The mindset is different. So think lower price point equals higher impulse, higher price point equals more logical thinking, right? And because of that, think of Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok you're scrolling, you're really just wasting time. So you can just impulsively buy things, right? But when you're like, for example, YouTube, you're like kind of searching things out your mindset mentality is a lot different, right? Especially if you're targeting based off of keyword searches. Yeah, or topics, that really means that person that you're getting in front of is actually in the state of mind of the exact product you're selling.
Blake Beus 14:00 Plus, along those lines with YouTube, people are generally on YouTube to spend some time. Yep. And so they're willing to watch an ad that's interesting and relevant to them longer. Yep. And so with a higher ticket product, oftentimes, you need a little bit more time to explain the value proposition. And so YouTube is a really good fit for that. Yeah. Because you tend to get more time. I mean, you were telling me once this was a while ago, but you had a client that was, I don't know, a chiropractor, physical therapist, something, something along those lines. And you had a YouTube ad, and your average watch time was something like seven minutes. Oh, yeah. Or something like that. Remember?
Greg Marshall 14:42 I did? Yeah. It was to actually the gentleman. Oh,
Blake Beus 14:47 yeah. So the average I mean, think about how much selling you can, you can do. We're explaining the value proposition you can do in seven minutes of an ad. How long you remember back in the day when people actually have ads on TV, they still exist. But I wouldn't sit there and watch a seven minute ad. But if it's highly relevant, and interesting to that person, which you can do in YouTube, because you then all the search history and everything, you can get a seven minute and are highly,
Greg Marshall 15:18 highly qualified. Yeah. Just think of someone that just walking around and thinking about buying your exact product. Yeah. And then you serve them an ad of that exact product. Like it's a perfect match matches the market match. And so that's why I think if you have higher ticket, it's better to like your opportunity to essentially make money is higher on YouTube, then, you know, Facebook and Instagram just because of the mindset, our high ticket buyers on Facebook and Instagram. Of course they are I'm not saying that they're not there. What I'm saying is, you may see a better performance on YouTube, because of where their mentality is. And the other thing that I find is, if you're targeting people on YouTube, and they fill out your lead form, and they get on a phone call, the quality of the person is higher, also, because of the mindset, then I find that a lot of those sales turn around pretty quick. Yeah, like less than seven days interest. And quite often they can. I've actually had some ads on YouTube for my own business where the person bought, like, an hour later. Oh, really, like after a phone call? Like they saw the ad they clicked they booked the call got on the phone, they purchased all like that, really? No, no thinking about it. And but it was because individuals like I am looking for this, which I of course I knew because that's what I'm targeting.
Blake Beus 16:44 And you made the video, you made the video content basically resolve objections, probably before they even got on the phone with you exactly. And so for the ideal person, it's a no brainer.
Greg Marshall 16:53 Exactly. And so just think about that, when you think about placements be where your customers at, and where you're gonna have the most probability of success. And the other thing I've been telling. Lately, I've been talking to quite a few fitness trainers wanting to sell their services out of their gyms, and I've been trying to move a lot of them to YouTube. And the reason why is because YouTube number one, personal training services are technically high ticket, right? Like, you're not gonna get anything really for like less than 300 bucks. Okay. All the most of the programs are being sold or 2345 $6,000. So with that being said, YouTube's a perfect match for that. It's also a perfect match for that, because I was talking to a trainer yesterday, who will be launching her ads soon, and we'll keep you updated on it. I said, How many courses have you seen on YouTube ads to build for personal trainers? She said, I've never seen more. I said, How many have you seen on Facebook and Instagram? How To Grow Your Fitness following and all that Facebook? That's all I've seen? Yeah. So I said, so it's most likely that the market is saturated. And it's all the same offers over and over and over and over again to the consumer, right, you're seeing over and over and over again, the same offer just a different location, right? So that kind of makes it where your CPMs are gonna be higher, because you're competing in a highly competitive audience. And then the offers all sound the same. Right? Right. So you're going to spend more and be a part of they're going to associate with all being the same versus if you go to YouTube. They don't really know. They're they're not seeing these offers, right, particularly locally. Yeah. So because of that, and there's this level of like, and I don't know if you've ever run into this, but there's his level of YouTube, like when people see you on YouTube, the perception is, wow,
Blake Beus 18:48 there's like an authority there. You know, what I mean? Builds authority. Yeah. And so
Greg Marshall 18:52 you also have that, that that can go into play. So anyways, what are some of your thoughts on, you know, placements and targeting? And are you along the same lines of this thinking?
Blake Beus 19:06 Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I've, for a long time felt that there were ulterior motives, with a lot of the cues that they have in the platforms about how you should run your ads. And, and some of the defaults and things they put in place I felt weren't necessarily in the best interest of the advertisers. But were in the best interests of say, Google or Facebook, namely, specifically the geographic targeting Yeah, like you when you when by default, when you target people in America on Google's the default option, which is like three or four clicks away, you can't see is, is people that live in America have been to America recently or are interested in America. If you're targeting America, you have to change that to people that live in America, or else you're going to retargeting people all over the place. And so they always have these cues. So I guess my main takeaway from this is from a placements and all this perspective is, as you're going through and running the ads, trust yourself, run those tests, verify everything that they're claiming. And you can keep listening to to us, because we're doing these tests all the time, you can kind of skip some of those steps and just run right to the targeted placements. But you definitely need to do that, or else you'll be spending money and you'll that you don't need to spend to not have any actual benefit. Yep. And so if you want to be profitable, if you're running on a smaller budget, or whatever, definitely stick with those targeted placements. And think about which platform people are on. I know, we talk a lot about Facebook and Google, they're definitely some of the bigger players out there with the industries that we work with. But there's mean tick tock is is growing from an advertising perspective, really cheap CPMs there. I've seen some pretty interesting results from from an E commerce perspective. On tick tock, yep. Like little demo demo videos or whatever. Pin Pinterest still exists. A lot of people forget about that. But Pinterest, including me, yeah. Pinterest has a full advertising platform, they have millions and millions and millions of daily users. And people use Pinterest in a different way than they use the other. The other ones, people actually use Pinterest, very similar to the way people use Google, if you if you think about Pinterest as a search engine first, which wasn't what it was initially, but it's kind of how people use it. Now, if you think of it as a search engine first, and you're just having, you know, search results, but in pin form, then there's some really interesting opportunities there. LinkedIn is another one, if your people are hanging out on LinkedIn, they have a full advertising platform. It's a little bit clunky, yeah. But I've seen some amazing results there. And they probably have one of the best in my opinion built in. Bot, like message bot? Yep, advertising platforms, I've seen that it's in. And I've seen some really great results there. For higher ticket offers the best offers, I've seen, there have been something like, Hey, let's get on a call and chat three others. So a good way to book a call for consultants, or if a phone call is part of your funnel, the and your people are on LinkedIn, the LinkedIn messenger, bots are a pretty interesting advertising way to go and, you know, get targeted on those things. And you're definitely gonna see better results.
Greg Marshall 22:43 Yeah, and I think you know, the moral of the story, basically, with all the testing and things like that is, number one, know where your customers at. And then number two, get the message in front of you. Right? I mean, you've got like 80% of the work done. If you're literally showing up where your actual customer is at, and you're putting something in front of us, then all you have to do is figure out, how do I get them to respond. But what you don't want to do, which a lot is advertising platforms, I feel like maybe not intentionally, but probably most likely, intentionally, is encourage you to put your placements everywhere. Yeah, and to almost be wasteful with what you're doing. Because it's in the best interest of them versus you actually putting it in the right person's face, and getting the results that you want. So it's it's amazing how simple of a concept that is. And even as I consider myself a veteran and buying ads, you still can get it. So if I'm getting influenced, I feel like someone who maybe doesn't know any better, for sure is getting in on that. Because they don't know any better.
Blake Beus 23:50 Yeah, well, I think it's causing an unintentional side effect of people getting frustrated and then not even advertising. Yep. So so they're putting these cues in here saying, Hey, do do all this stuff, push, push the auto placement button button, push CBO push performance, Max, we'll just automate everything for you. And then the results aren't going to be that good, but their profit margins are better. But then you have a lot of businesses that would potentially be really great businesses where the founder, the owner, whoever throws their hands in the air says not nevermind, because literally advertising can take a business from nothing to huge, yep. When when done right. And so there's I feel like there's this entire kind of hidden layer of businesses that have really great products really great offers really great people running them. But this advertising piece is frustrating enough that they never see the light of day in a in a big way, when the could well and I
Greg Marshall 24:51 think a lot of these advertising companies they you know, they're salesmen just like us, just like anyone else. They know that the consumer ever wants to hear automatic? Yep. And set it and forget it. Yep. And that type of language, so they kind of know how to dangle that in front of you these these products are basically that, you know, just let us do the work for you, which, you know, most likely is not going to be as they don't have as near as much investment and you're succeeding. And here's the other thing. I have seen campaigns, this, I'm thinking of this one client, how I got him. And when he gave me access to that account, I couldn't believe what I was saying, really. So he so Google, agreed to, like, build his ads or something like that, and had convinced them that he needed to spend like $500 or six hours a day, okay. And this individual had the money to do so. But I went in there and there was like, I mean, I think there was like four conversions even ran this for like weeks.
Blake Beus 25:58 The average order value or was it was
Greg Marshall 26:01 like a 40 $50 product, it was performing Wow, horribly. And it was all set up by Google. And I'm like, so Google set this up, encourage you to spend a whole bunch of money, and you're not getting any results. And when I say a bunch of money, I mean, what is you know, 500 times 10? Or has five grand? Yeah. And he got four sales. I like it. So that's like 280 bucks and sales. We spent $5,000. Yeah, it's it's just, that's insane. I mean, I couldn't believe and I was like, Google actually set this up. And he had suspicion like, these ads, they're not working very well, even though Google literally made them. So I understand the psyche, because it in theory, it would make sense, right? Who would know the advertising platform better than an actual Google rep or a Facebook rep or whatever. But you gotta remember the people that they're hiring. These are just salespeople that yeah, and most of them never run out of their life. Yeah. And so when they give you advice, it's, you know, it's from a script, you know, piece of paper that their sales manager told him to say, and it's like, I've had so many phone calls that reps like this, where I'm like, that just doesn't seem to make sense, right experience. Yeah, actually running and paying money. I've never seen that work.
Blake Beus 27:16 Yeah, you know, it's, it's just got me thinking. The psychological term for someone convincing you that you're crazy is called gaslighting. This episode definitely needs to be called gaslighting. gaslighted gaslit like Google gaslit like
Greg Marshall 27:35 Google Facebook, where they convince you that you're literally going crazy and you're like, I don't feel like I feel like this is what it's telling you.
Blake Beus 27:45 So, anyway, well, let's let's wrap. Let's wrap it up here. Yeah. How can people get in touch with you Greg?
Greg Marshall 27:51 You go to my website, Greg marshall.co book a free strategy session.
Blake Beus 27:55 And you and Blake Beus stock comm slash SM three is the best way to get in touch with me. All right. Well, I
Greg Marshall 28:00 hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'll see you guys next week. Okay, bye.
Blake Beus 0:00 All right, so you were talking to me about all sorts of things. You tell me what you wanted to go over today? Because like you've got a better plan on today. Yeah. And what I do?
Greg Marshall 0:10 Well, I listened to a podcast yesterday, I want to give credit to the guys names. I think it's onic or UNeek. I can't remember exactly how to say it. But he had a podcast with a gentleman that was on there. And he was talking about data, and how he uses this software or this thing that he created, you know, 11 years ago, on how to predict buyer behavior. Okay. And he says, what he he worked on the Donald Trump campaign. Oh, what other political campaign
Blake Beus 0:38 in the 2016 20 2016? Yep. Interesting. And so
Greg Marshall 0:43 he kind of shared what he does, to help people win the elections, he had, like, over 1000 wins, really, in politics. So sounds like he knows what he's doing?
Blake Beus 0:57 Well, I mean, I will say, politics is where you get some of the most sophisticated advertising especial, especially presidential politics in America. And so even though you may not like a particular candidate, or you may prefer whatever all of that aside from an advertising perspective, there's a lot of interesting strategies that can be learned by looking at how they're doing their online ads, because they have massive budgets, they have huge incentives to do a really good job, they have access to some of the most intelligent advertisers and creative advertisers out there. And so it's a good place to learn, oh, great strategies,
Greg Marshall 1:36 what he shared was, basically, what they would do is figure out, they come up based on the research data that he had 10 to 12 different messages that most likely would work based off the data. And then they would test those 10 or 12, to then figure out which one or to resonate the most, okay, and then from those one or two, have 100 Something variations of those one or two messages. So
Blake Beus 2:05 when you say one or two messages, not talking specific wording, but you're talking like angles, right, but I believe, a message angle, and then you just find a bunch of different ways to say that exact same thing. Correct that, okay, that's what it sounded like. If I were to sum up American politics, advertising and the messages they're getting out there, I would put it kind of in that realm, and that there was a handful of messages. And they just say that over and over and over again, but in different ways. Yeah, they say it in, in debates, they say it on commercials, they say it in interviews, they say it in press conferences. But if you notice, it's almost always the same small set of messages set in a different
Greg Marshall 2:45 way. Well, and the interesting part about what he said was applying it to business, he says what you would do is, you have to figure out first what platforms your customer is actually on. And then know their customer, you know, know your customers very deep. And so he used an example of a chair company that was running, I guess most of their ad spend on Facebook, to sell chairs. But then he asked them why. And they said, We don't know, we just started on Facebook. And so he said, alright, and he uploaded their data on who buys chairs, and found out that Facebook was number four, as far as traffic sources, where that buyer was okay. And number one was Pinterest. So he said, if you're putting on your dollars at the number four platform, versus putting it the number one, you're not going to be as efficient. So he talked about how most businesses do this, they don't actually know exactly where their customers at, and dedicate their budgets to the right message and where they're actually at in the platform. And my question to you was, I've noticed, like in the E commerce world, Facebook, Facebook ads works extremely well. Right. And I always found that the placements newsfeed like the newsfeed is where all the conversions come from. Yeah, but Facebook always pushes you to do automatic placements. Now, obviously, they want you to spend money everywhere. But I always do notice that the cost like the CPM traffic for that for the newsfeed placement is cheaper when it's under automatic, than if you just say I only want the news feed. What are your theories on that? And would you say it's a good or a bad idea to only put it on the news feed.
Blake Beus 4:41 So I think it all kind of really boils down to how efficient you're trying to be with your budget and everything along those lines and how big your budget is. I don't think they're wrong by saying that putting it as automatic placements is a good move. But I think that information comes from From massive accounts with massive amounts of budget, because if you if you do that, you need to reach a much, much larger audience. If you have a smaller budget, though, you need to be very efficient with that budget. So one of the things I think about everybody's seen, like the typical bell curve, right, like the graph of that bell curve, where you have the slope that comes up really high in the middle, and then it goes down kind of at the edges, yep. And you have these, if you look at it in in quarters, like so this quarter down here are outliers, this quarter right here is leading up to the main group, this quarter, whatever. When you're running ads, your audience looks a lot like that you have a product or a service. And there are a group of people, it's a smaller group of people that this is the exact thing they've been looking for. It's perfect for them in every way. If you have a smaller budget, you can just mark it to Val, those people. And you've got a big enough audience, that you can make sales and be profitable. Yep. Now, as you start getting over into the larger part of the population, you're going into a group of people where it's maybe not an exact fit, but it's a good fit. It's something that's helpful, something that's useful, but it's not perfectly exactly what they need, because they have some slightly different circumstances. And that's going to be the largest percentage of the audience. And so if you have a big budget, you can burn through that smaller, perfect audience, and perfect group of people much faster. And then you have to start marketing to this larger group of people. And when you do that, having lower CPMs. So you can reach a much, much, much larger audience can still be extremely profitable. Yep. Because you couldn't you just couldn't spend that amount of money on that small group of people got it. And so that's how I kind of look at it and think about it. The other thing I look at too, is like, what, what are the incentives? Have we talked about this before? What are the incentives of Facebook? Right, like, advertisers are Facebook's customers? And
Greg Marshall 7:06 let me also interject? Because this also goes into YouTube ads, and performance Max. Yeah. How they? I don't know if you do this, but you to me, it forces us to now use it on Google Display. Oh, can you can you can know this? I think this applies to Facebook. I think they're all going to this? Yeah. Yeah. Like you have to advertise and write to me these lower profitable channels.
Blake Beus 7:34 Yes, yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here. This, this is I start, I look at things in, I try to look at things in a very holistic way and try to look at what what, why everything's happening. And I also am a nerd when it comes to behavioral economics, which is essentially matching psychology of why people buy to buying an economics and things in it's it's nerdy, but that's why. So you have these companies that are publicly traded Facebook, Google, they're big companies, their incentives are to show profit, not only show profit, but show an increase in profit. At at the end of every quarter. Yep. And so even though they dominate these markets, their incentives are to prove to their show shareholders that not only are they profitable, they're increasing in profitability. So they have this constant pressure to come up with new ways to increase their margins and improve their bottom line. And, and the ratio of their expenses to their revenue. And so, so constantly, you see this with Netflix, they're constantly raising their prices. I'm like, You guys dominate everything. You've been profitable for 10 years? Why can't you just chill and be profitable, maybe even discount every day? But no, they keep raising their prices, because their incentives are to show to the shareholders, that they're continuing to increase in profits. So when you understand that principle, you start understanding why some of these things can happen and why these companies have this, this pressure to continue to do that. Now. If you have Facebook has last I looked at 1.251 Point 5 billion people that use it every single day. That's just under a quarter of the entire population of the planet. Every day. Yeah, logs into Facebook. Yep. That is market saturation, right? Like that is so how to be how do you become more profitable if you already have all of the eyeball inventory that you can possibly get? And you already have hundreds of 1000s of advertisers spending money with you know, how do you become more profitable, you're already profitable, but how do you become more profitable? You have to start coming up with new channels. So you have the Display Network, you have these new things like for formance Max with YouTube where, where you have to, if you're gonna run ads on YouTube, you have to also run ads on some of these other channels that that that never worked that don't work with you, they, they require you to spend money on those channels, right. And the same thing is with Facebook, Facebook keeps coming up, they have their audience network, which is like Google's display ads they have in stream video ads. So they can say, hey, we have this new inventory up. But and and they might even start shifting over to, you know, forcing people to do that. And so when you take all of that into consideration, these this is why they're doing some of those things, and to advertisers were thinking, well, that's stupid, that's not helping us make money. They don't, they don't care. They're trying to increase their profitability. Now, I'm not saying this is a terrible thing. And they're evil for doing all this stuff. I'm just saying understanding the incentives is what helps you understand why some of this is happening. And when you understand why some of this is happening, you can kind of start to predict and see moves and be a leader and and a front runner and some of these new strategies as an advertiser, because I can't I can't call up Zuckerberg and say, Hey, why are you doing this? This is stupid. Yeah, this is affecting my agency. He doesn't care. But if so you don't you can't really change that direction. But what you can do is be one of the early adopters and early understandings of a lot of these things. And that will make you stand out to the crowd instead of being reactionary to everything. Yep.
Greg Marshall 11:26 And I think, you know, one of the things that I've been using for years is, even though this goes against what they tell you to do, I've been using only the newsfeeds placements, like my E commerce clients, all the ones that only do that have higher prop profitability than the ones where we use automatic placements. I've tested it over and over and over like, I mean, I don't know how many tests every single time only having the DSP placements, although the CPMs are higher conversions are better. Yeah. And your cost per purchase or cost per leads are better. Yeah. And so that's something where I just found interesting that he mentioned, because it almost feels like the advertising platforms are trying to go away from optimizations. And this gentleman was talking about optimizing more, right? And I've always thought, Well, how do you do that? If the advertising platforms are essentially trying to get away from that? Even though, to me, it makes the most sense. If you look at data, no matter what it is, if you want to get the best results, focus on the part that's getting the best results. Yeah. And get rid of the rest. Yeah. So one of the challenges that I feel moving forward, especially when you're executing certain placements, is to try to get that control of where it should show. Yeah, because those are always the best, highest converting channels. Yeah. So I don't know what some of my thoughts on that are. The CPMs go, it almost feels like maybe they try to penalize you when you do that. But you're still getting the cost per result that you want. So it doesn't matter. But it just seems like the CPM goes higher. No matter what platform, you're when you try to isolate the placement.
Blake Beus 13:19 Yeah. And I think this just goes to show that it's really important to look at your actual numbers. Yep. And maybe not trust the numbers, the ad platform is reporting to you not because they're lying to you. But because it's very difficult for an ads platform to be completely accurate. But then you look at the your actual numbers, we spent just your high level numbers, we spent this much in ads, we made this much revenue, we know this revenue came from our email list and not from ads. And we know this part of our revenue maybe came from organic, but this came from ads, and then run those numbers and be like, alright, we're doing good, we should keep doing more. Plus, spending more on ads built up our email list, our email list is almost pure profit when we sell off the email list, right? And so just looking at those high level numbers, and then constantly testing, you know, that you've probably heard the saying, you know, you know, what, the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result? Well, that's not really true for marketers. Yeah. Because you're not testing even if I run the exact same test in two months, you know, Audience Network and and all the placement, automatic placements versus feed placements. Even if we run the exact same test in two months, so many things would have changed out behind the scenes with Facebook's algorithm and Google's algorithm or whatever and how they handle ads, that you're not running the same test. And so you need to run those exact same tests to see, are my conclusions still valid? Because there's been all these other things that change that? I don't know. They don't publish all their changes, we don't know. So we need to kind of constantly run that and that's one of the things I really like about you, Greg. You're like, well, I'll tested again. Yeah. And you tested again, you're still the same. Yep. And and but as soon as that changes, you'll know, oh, whereas all of the other advertisers and marketers and media buyers or whatever, they will get burned. Yeah. It'd be like, Oh, this used to work what's going on? Yep. And
Greg Marshall 15:16 so you have to constantly constantly test and question what's going on at the current state. That's, uh, that's what I'm constantly doing is looking at, well, it looks like this is what's going on right now. And making those adjustments and other things that I noticed is when you're running the ads, suck with with attribution. So we're doing this test with shutting off a certain channel with our ads to see how much it's actually impacting them. And the attribution and all of our data shows that it wasn't that impactful. But as soon as we've shut it off, we have seen a massive impact. Yeah, a big drop in app purchases. And so that's another thing is to try to figure out like, where are the app platforms missing? The results? Like not giving themselves credit? Yeah, right. Because this channel is, as soon as we turned it off, we've already seen like, literally like a 70%. Drop. Oh, wow. But that's not what it shows when it's turned on. Yeah. And so that's like, an interesting thing is it's almost like you have to test turning on turning off. Yeah. To figure out what's impacting the bottom line? Yeah.
Blake Beus 16:33 Well, I think we're constantly kind of will and we'll never get to kind of where this was, but we're constantly kind of moving towards getting creative with how you detect the success of an ad, like you used to have to do with direct mail marketing, and with billboard advertising, or whatever. It's, you got to put it up and kind of see and then look at your high level numbers, you don't have the direct feedback we got. There was that sweet spot for about 10 years where none of the ad platforms cared about privacy. So marketers could have really accurate data. Yeah, well, now there's a lot of privacy concerns with iOS 1415, and upcoming 16. Those are going to have a lot of changes. Google has announced their advertiser sandbox, which, which on Android is going to,
Greg Marshall 17:23 which is always good news for marketers, yeah, more changes.
Blake Beus 17:28 And that's going to impact some things as well. And so you got to look at those those high level numbers. And you got to, you got to think differently about things like one of the things you were talking about earlier, I want to circle back to was, was Pinterest. I mean, how many advertisers that listen to this, you know, podcasts out here
Greg Marshall 17:46 have even spent $1 on Pinterest. I know not I mean, I have but not many know, Matt, and full disclosure, probably maybe maximum $1,000. Man, yeah, pictures.
Blake Beus 17:58 And it's Pinterest feels. It's been a while since I've run some ads in there. But it feels kind of old school. It's kind of clunky. It's probably improved since I've used it. But that might be kind of a turnoff to people. But it's if your audience is there. Pinterest has a lot of ad inventory. A lot of eyeballs look at Pinterest every day. And the people that are browsing Pinterest have different buying behaviors than the people that are browsing Facebook. Oftentimes people that are browsing Pinterest are looking to do something. Yep. Whereas if you're on Facebook, you're looking to kill some time. Yep. Or argue with someone about
Greg Marshall 18:35 politics. Yep. Most likely.
Blake Beus 18:39 It but if you're on Pinterest, you are in your typical Pinterest user is in a creative, I'm going to make something I'm gonna create something. I'm looking for ideas, I'm looking for a product concept or whatever. And that's a way different buying mindset. And a good buying mindset if you're an advertised. Exactly.
Greg Marshall 19:00 So I think you know, so So going back to even channels. So here's like the next thought process. What would you do? And the case where, let's say most of your customers are on Instagram. Okay, right. But when you advertise only on Instagram, the cost for that placement is much higher. What, to me logically makes sense to disregard that? Because already there Yeah. So you just have to like make that work. Yeah. versus saying, we'll target audience everywhere like Instagram audience everywhere. That's a question I have because to me, sometimes when I'm working with clients, they will believe that their audience is on one channel, but it's actually on another And then they almost want to force you to go where they want, where they wish it were, versus where it's at. Right? So what are your thoughts on isolating channel? For example, if all your customers are on Instagram, would you just advertise on Instagram? Or would you take the Instagram audience and advertise everywhere? What are your thoughts on that?
Blake Beus 20:27 I mean, it all just boils down to testing, right and budget, if I have a smaller budget, I would just I would just advertise just on Instagram, and then find ways to make that offer more profitable to cover the cost of the, you know, the increased cost of that traffic, the increased CPMs of that traffic. And some ways you could do that would be bundling or a special offer or upsell or, or maybe you have a freebie and then you do most of your actual selling via email or text messaging or something like that something that's a little cheaper, the more impactful if I had a bigger budget, then I would definitely be doing some testing to try to find that Instagram audience or I would maybe use the Instagram budget and I would lose money audience to build retargeting traffic and other places. Yeah. And then I'd be uploading customer lists and things to other platforms, and then try to follow them around a different places. Understanding that the cold traffic would probably not necessarily be profitable yet. But you'd make 5x 6x 10x row as return on your ad spend on your retargeting and your email efforts after that initial cold kind of introduction.
Greg Marshall 21:36 So here's my thought. So I'm thinking of a customer right now. Most of their purchases happen on Facebook, right? Would you my theory or thought would be to put more budget? They're spending 100 hours of their
Blake Beus 21:56 time? Is it a product like an E commerce type thing? Okay,
Greg Marshall 22:01 okay. They love what they're in this situation. They're one of those where they wish or want the audience to be on Instagram? Do they
Blake Beus 22:11 want it because they feel like they have a better representation of their brand on their Instagram, social media, or I think
Greg Marshall 22:16 it's mostly because they feel more comfortable, okay, with using it with using Instagram, okay. And so they believe that they're honest as air, but most of their purchases, like 85 90% happen on Facebook. And so in my mind, if you if you just like, eliminate advertising platforms, and you would say, if one channel got you x and another underperform by, like 80%, yeah, I will get rid of the underperforming, put all the money into the top performer. Yeah. Now one of the challenges that you see with ad platforms is, at what point? How much? How far can you go? Before you can no longer do that?
Blake Beus 23:03 Yeah. Because I would say $100 a day, that's still a small budget. I mean, to some people, they might think, Oh, my gosh, that's all that's a big budget. But in the grand scheme of things, that's a that's a teeny, that's a teeny budget. Yep. And so as far as scaling that up, you might, you might blow through that. Tiny, perfect audience. Pretty quick. If you were to go to say, $300 a day or $500 a day. Yep. So yeah, I don't know, either, then you have to get a little bit more creative. But if you're scaling up, and you're still profitable, then you have additional revenue to, to put put money in other places, right like that. And that's how that works. You got to get a little bit more sophisticated as you scale up.
Greg Marshall 23:46 So I think, you know, that case, when they want to squeeze out as much profit, you think we'll just keep an eye on one platform focused on that. And that's gonna give you your highest return on adspend. Yeah, for that type of a budget. Right? Obviously, when you start spending $500,000, a day or more, yeah, you have to expand the where are these can go? Because like you said, there's only so many perfect customer. Yep. In one channel. Yeah. And so that's something that I'm thinking about how to best serve the lower spending customer, right? Yeah, how to get them the highest return maybe would be just to focus on one channel, and only do that one channel. But it was just interesting what this guy was saying, because what I thought what I thought was interesting about the the information he was stating is when you're talking about political campaigns, and you're talking about one message, he literally said he only focused on one message once he figured that out. Yeah. And that is it. And I thought that's interesting because of because of the size of the budget. Yeah. I thought, well, how do they do that? Well, I think and he was saying, Facebook. So he mentioned they were doing this on Facebook, and you know, they're spending? Oh, yeah, millions and millions? Well,
Blake Beus 25:12 I mean, I looked at it, I looked at it, I haven't looked at the 2016 numbers, but I looked at the 2020 numbers. And off the top of my head, Donald Trump on Facebook alone spent about $120 million in ADS. And that was just in that, like that year, like that wasn't, I don't think I even think that was total over a couple of years, I think it was just that year. And Joe Biden spent, I think, just a little bit more like five, 5 million more or something like that, so that they're spending some serious dollars. I think the one difference you got to understand, though, is they don't care about profitability. That's sure they're not trying to make sales. Yep. Right. And so they have a stack of cash, and it's gonna get spent. Yep. And so when this guy's talking about, you know, we're focusing on that one message. It's, it's about saturation of the entire population. And it's not about making sales. So their success metrics are different. Yep, then, you know, a company that's trying to sell a product. Yeah, I think there's a lot of good principles we can use, we've got to understand, they can be a little more wasteful, they can because because it's an all donor money, it's not their money. And it's an all or nothing thing. And all of that needs to be spent by voting day. Right. And so, but the singular message does apply in other areas, other businesses, it's just easier for, for us as humans to make a purchase, purchase decision. If our message isn't all over the place. It's very singular. And that's hard to do. And that's why you got to know your customer and everything. But in politics, it's easy, it's even easier. And and if we start if we start diving back into politics, the easiest message that will have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort, as far as coming up with a message in politics is the other side sucks. In practice, I'm great. But that person sucks. I don't need to tell you how great I am. Because that's common knowledge. But let me tell you all the way that other guys, right. And so you'll I hate that that's what works. But that's what works. And it's very easy. It's much harder in a business to come up with, you know, reasons why someone should buy, if you have a clear competitor that has a little bit of bad PR out there, then the that that company sucks, and so it can work. And I've seen that on on Facebook, I keep seeing this ad and it says something. Cancel, Click Funnels this is the really rare you've probably seen. I'm sure that's working because I've seen that same ad for six months. And I'm sure it's performing them. And click funnels has, you know, a very polarizing brand, brand reputation, right. And and, and so this, this person is capitalizing on that. Right?
Greg Marshall 28:10 So it's interesting, because as we were talking about messaging, all I could think about was, how do you spend $100 million on Facebook? And that burn through literally every single person that would be in that? You know, political class? Yeah. But it's just,
Blake Beus 28:31 I think that's the point. I think they want to burn through everybody. They want everybody to see that message. Yeah, they don't care if they get ad fatigue at all, because they want every single person that's on Facebook to see see that. See that message. And here's the funny thing, though. Even in 2020, I don't think I saw very many Trump or Biden ads. Yeah. Myself, it was weird, but they were blowing a lot of money, which makes me think maybe they're targeting a different age demographic or something like that. Or while the
Greg Marshall 29:06 places here's where I saw they were using Google discovery ads heavily. That's where I saw a lot of the, the advertisements. Yeah. And when I say a lot, I'm talking a lot Hmm. So but but only in a short span. So I didn't see anything. And then like that final month. Yeah. It was like, I could not go anywhere on YouTube. Without see. Yeah. Like it was above every meal. I was watching on the side. And I was like, Man, I wonder how much is spent on this campaign? Because a lot Oh, I can't I literally can't go anywhere else seeing it? Yeah, it's
Blake Beus 29:45 it's interesting. I mean, here we're here. We're having local elections here in Utah. And I've seen quite a few local YouTube ads. Okay for for a couple of candidates. There's, there's one party To the candidate in Utah, that there is a clear effort to get that person not reelected.
Greg Marshall 30:10 I actually think I think I know what ad you're told. Yeah. And and is it an industry man? Payroll? Or is it was a pre roll on YouTube as
Blake Beus 30:19 the ones I've been seeing. I see this on Facebook, but I've seen it on YouTube quite a bit. And so that that's been pretty interesting. But I think, you know, as, as advertisers get a little bit more sophisticated, you're gonna see just more and more digital ads for local local stuff, because it's not as hard. It's I mean, it's more approachable now for for someone than it used to be. Yep. So yeah,
Greg Marshall 30:46 yeah. And I think YouTube is, it's like TV. Yeah. Right. I mean, they literally have YouTube TV. So when you're trying to mimic maybe TV campaigns, YouTube is a great example. This other gentleman also brought up. I'm glad that we said that, because he said the new thing that they're actually focusing on is, and I can't remember how he described it, but it's TV advertising. But not like the traditional TV advertising, like streaming TV advertising. I think so because he was saying right now, the, the tracking and all that with IP addresses is the wild wild west. And he referred to it as just like Facebook was years ago. And he's like, so that's where we're actually focusing most of our efforts. Right now. Interesting is a place that's not as controlled, basically. Curious,
Blake Beus 31:38 I'll have a look at that a little bit.
Greg Marshall 31:39 Yeah, it was an interesting, when he brought it up. I was like, wow, you can even see the interviewer was like, really? What's that? Yeah. So that'll probably be the next thing. And then they'll put the clamp down on that eventually, when they figured out that use? Yeah, with too much information. But yeah, I just thought the interview was interesting, just because of talking about optimizations and what you can do. And I've always felt like, I've I mean, I wouldn't consider myself Ultra data. But maybe I am, because even back when I saw personal training in person, I actually did segmentation without realizing that's what I was doing. Yeah, I would figure out while my buyers are basically like this, so I'm just not gonna talk to anyone unless they look like this. And what it did was it made my efforts very efficient. Yeah. And I would exceed my goals every month. Yeah. And I with less effort, because I just only focused on that group of you that group of people. And if they didn't match that, I just not that I would like, ignore them. I just didn't put much effort into that. That group.
Blake Beus 32:49 Yeah, one quick story from my sales days, I used to sell office equipment. Online, it was like an e commerce Store. But it was that it was early enough that a lot of people still weren't comfortable. Okay, punching in a credit card number on a website. So they would call and then we would take their orders over the phone. Now I'm like, I would never get my now.
Greg Marshall 33:12 Reverse. I trust the internet more than college. So
Blake Beus 33:17 it's funny. But anyway, so I worked at this company for a while. And I was always kind of in the bottom third. As far as sales goes, I just, it's not something that comes naturally. Yeah, just. And then we have this guy come in that I end up being really good friends with. And he instantly in his, like, second month became number one, number two, and he was constantly number one, even even above people that were had been there for a long time. And so I was friends with him. And I was like, Man, why, you know, why are you doing better? And, and he kind of couldn't really pinpoint what he was doing different. Yeah. So just in talking with him, because essentially, it was kind of natural to him, whatever. He was doing different. But what I boiled it down to was, we would get enough calls in the day that you could spend your entire time on the phone. Yep, whatever. And I was like, well, that's how you get the sales. He was really, really good at determining very early on in a phone call that this person was not going to make the sale. Yeah, pre qualifying. Pretty good, right? So just based on on the phone call, if he knew they weren't going to make the call or weren't going to buy something and they were all over the place. He will work pretty quickly to get them off the phone. And sometimes it'd be sometimes his strategy would be, you know what, let me check you check on that. And I'll get back to you and you just wouldn't
Greg Marshall 34:43 waste my time.
Blake Beus 34:46 And I'm not saying that wasn't necessarily the best, but I had I felt like I had an obligation to help everybody as best as possible. And so he was spending his time filtering people out and then focusing on those that made the good sale. Had the big sale. And then those people that were interested, if they needed a little bit of effort or a follow up phone call, those were the people he would call, and I would try to follow up with everybody. Yep, then he was only following up with the good prospects. And then after I put a little system in place for me, that worked for me to identify and filter out those people, that would be good prospects versus not, I started getting up to number two, number three, constantly. But I was terrible until I did that.
Greg Marshall 35:24 Well, that's, that's the key. And that's almost if you bring it back to marketing advertising. It's almost like what you're doing when you're segmenting customer list or placement or whatever, you're basically just saying, I'm only gonna spend my time where I know, I want to get the biggest return. Yep. And just ignore everything else. That's honestly, I'll never forget this, because I was always told in the sales world have as many appointments as possible, you need to be calling all day you need to do you know, all this activity. And when I did it, that way, I would generate a lot more sales. But I would also be spending a lot more time a lot more time. And then I remember I literally cut like my work day by like, 80 90%, when I was like, you know, the only people who really buy are people that kind of fit this mold. And so if they don't fit this mold, I'd rather have no appointments. If I can't find that person than 10 appointments of unqualified because you're just wasting your time. I'm just like burning energy versus can feel busy look busy. I feel that way about meetings a lot of times. Yeah. So meetings, we don't really need to do that. And I just find that. How can we apply that same thought process to our advertising and our marketing? Right? So can we find a channel where basically most of the stuff happens? And what? What would happen? If you just said, I could get more units of sales or more volume, if I was on all channels, but I would also be spending more money and energy without getting an exponential return. Right? Versus what if he just went to one channel knew I could get more by expanding channel, but more is not always better? How do I get more efficient? Yep. And just focus on that. That's, that's constantly what I'm thinking about? Yeah, how do we be?
Blake Beus 37:27 I think we're gonna make fish. And that's what makes you stand out, right? Because if you go talk to a typical traditional agency, they're gonna say, We're gonna let you on all these channels, you'll be in front of millions of people. Yeah. And, and they're kind of incentivized to do that. Because they kind of want the advertising process to be complicated. So you feel like you need the agency. And I think when people come to you, they're like, we're just going to advertise on one place. Yeah. When you're like, Well, yeah, if that's working for you, why why would we expand until we blow through it? And you know, that all of that, but if it continually works, and we can scale up with the budget you guys have? Why do we need to do something more complicated? We don't you guys don't want to do that? We'd like Yeah, I mean,
Greg Marshall 38:09 I think and that's always, that's always the challenge is, in general, the overall message that I feel like you're told most of the time, is to do more, without an explanation of why and what the trade offs are. Right, right, like, so if you do more, you can get more. But like the ratio of effort versus return is not like, it's like scaling ads, right? You get your best returns, lower spans. But when you start spending an unbelievable money that you start to get, what do they say there's diminishing returns diminishing? It's
Blake Beus 38:49 a point of diminishing returns? Yeah, I can't
Greg Marshall 38:51 think of that word. But basically, that's what happens, right? How do you view other ad platforms and more activity, you have to look at as that can also be a form of diminishing returns because you only have so much time, energy resources to get the returns you want? Yeah. You see, I'm saying like, so if you want high returns focus on the area that could get you high returns, and stay focused on that.
Blake Beus 39:21 And if you must have all sorts of other channels, maybe just do some low dollar retargeting? Yep. Right? That's, that's kind of a set and forget type of a thing. Yep. Right. Even if it's five $10 a day, whatever. So you're still showing up? You'll probably be profitable on that traffic. Yep. But you don't have to put a ton of effort into it. Yeah, that's fine. And I feel
Greg Marshall 39:40 like that's probably the best use because every time I analyze accounts and see what works the best it what it really is, is focus on like the most profitable things that are doing and how do we just do more of that? And discipline yourself to not do anything
Blake Beus 39:59 when You got to understand, we got to wrap this up because it's getting old but you got to understand to Facebook's a big place. Yep. So if your most profitable traffic is on Facebook Yep, newsfeed. You mean you've got hundreds of 1000s of people and most, most clients unless they're selling something selling something low dollar, most clients, 1000 customers is a big deal. And 1000 people is not very big of an audience. Yeah. On Facebook, right. And so you've got quite a bit you don't need to expand to all these other channels if you don't want to right Facebook, Google, whatever, whatever channel it is, but so anyway, let's wrap this up. Right. How do people get in touch with
Greg Marshall 40:39 you? Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session
Blake Beus 40:43 and Blake beus.com/sm. Three is probably the best place to catch me right now. So
Greg Marshall 40:46 until next time,
Blake Beus 40:48 Kay, we'll catch you guys later. Bye, right
Blake Beus 0:01 Okay, performance Max, what is it? You said it's the new thing. Everybody loves it. I know nothing about it.
Greg Marshall 0:08 Well, and I'll say, I don't know if everyone loves it. But I do know that perpetual traffic, the podcast. Yeah. And the couple of gentlemen there that run it. They sound like they absolutely love really performance racks. And here's the brief explanation of what it is essentially, instead of doing, you know how, when you build your campaigns on Google, you would say like, if you have a target audience, you'd fill out like your own search campaign, its own YouTube campaign, its own display. Like to reach them all time performance, Max puts all that to one, huh? Okay, so all the placements are kind of batched into one. And then what it does, and, you know, once again, this is new. So supposedly, what this does, is it picks it essentially does almost like its sales cycle, for all the different placements for you. So it kind of like, for example, let's say we were trying to sell Blake, instead of like me creating all these campaigns and forcing each campaign on you, everywhere you go. Performance Max is going to say, well, Blake's in market for a new camera, right? Because he's in market for a new camera. He's showing up on this website. So we'll show him some display, then we'll show him some content from a website, then we'll show him a YouTube video, though. So it's kind of like it chooses individuals, and then uses the placements as it thinks it's best necessary to get you to convert.
Blake Beus 1:36 Okay, gearing, placements and part of the journey based on the person viewing the ads. Correct. So you set up a bunch of assets. And then behind the scenes, Google knows a bunch about a person. Yep. And so they start showing you placements based on that. I'm guessing some sort of escalation as they see more and more, maybe there's higher intent. content a little bit later after, after they're more aware, something like
Greg Marshall 2:07 that? Well, yeah, here's the here's the thing that they're mentioned, I have run a couple of these campaigns is test. Okay. One thing that I do notice, you can either force or not force. And so far, the recommendation is to not force where the customer goes to. So what happens is, if you have all your tracking pixels on your website, Google's actually sends the person to the page that they think is most relevant to help the buyer journey. Okay, right. So instead of just a landing page, it is send it to a blog post first, and then something second, some third, okay. And my initial thought was probably the same as yours. Well, how would they know that? Right? But this one, so the, the guys over at perpetual traffic that are using that are saying they're getting like, insane results, okay. And they're, they are noticing that the landing pages are different, they're sending them to different parts of their website that they would never have to send them to you. And so this is the part where you're probably similar to me. Where I say, Wow, you really could just like, do I trust giving up all of that, I guess, control on the buyers journey? Yeah. Just to Google.
Blake Beus 3:18 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I have a lot of thoughts. And this is something I mean, this is my thoughts are centered around. We've, we've talked about this different businesses are different places their journey. Yep. My instant thought after you explained to me what it was, is, my guess is perpetual traffic, guys. And gals are working with bigger budgets. Yeah. And with with more established with more established businesses with more pages on their site. And therefore, you have more touch points that the algorithm can use to learn what a person is doing and what types of people are doing. And it probably works really, really well. When you have big budgets, large traffic volumes, large site with organic traffic even, and all of that. And I think that's great. I hope that they point out on the on the perpetual traffic that their experience might be different. Because if you're running ads, and this is your first time running ads, and I've got $100 a day, which is a big budget for me, you know, that's three grand a month on ads. Crazy, right? I I'm going to set this up. And I have a website that has four pages, you know, homepage, an offer page, a thank you page and About Me page and maybe a place to contact so maybe five pages. I'm going to follow. I'm going to follow perpetual traffic's advice on this performance, Max. It's probably not going to work for you. Yeah. And that doesn't mean the perpetual traffic is wrong. Yep. I'm what I'm saying is different. It's businesses need to need to function differently. Right. And those were my initial thoughts. What are you thinking? Well,
Greg Marshall 5:07 number one, they did mention that. It seems like they're one of the few that love performance max time. They've mentioned that there are several other, you know, digital Google Ads specific kind of gurus that don't believe in it. And they do not think it works. Okay. So they have mentioned this. Now, one thing that I did notice, they didn't point it out specifically, but I did notice, like, kind of off the cuff, they had mentioned, what they were spending, and it was it was a significant number, like 1000s a day or Yeah, so they're like in the 1000s, multiple 1000s per day. Yeah, versus a big,
Blake Beus 5:49 that's a big difference, right? If you're spending $1,000 a day, that's 30 grand a month and adds it. A lot of businesses aren't to that point. Yep. And that's fine. But yeah,
Greg Marshall 6:01 what you're saying about budgets? 100? Yeah, correct, though, because it is, when they mentioned that, there isn't a mention of like, starting at $10 a day in your space spending? I think they even said, like, a minimum $100 a day. Yeah, right. And so, my, and the, here's the other thing that they had mentioned is this can take up to 90 days, to really work. I
Blake Beus 6:29 don't doubt but I'm also thinking $1,000 a day for 90 days, to get to start working. So you got to have 100, I mean, you're gonna I mean, you'll be making sales at that point. But what I'm getting at is, you've got to, you've got to commit some serious funds. Yeah, it's not like you're gonna lose $90,000 That whole time, you'll make sales, but you have to be prepared to stick with it. Yep, and have your delivery down and everything. Because the other problem is, if you're not used to spending those types of budgets, you as a business might struggle with the delivery, you have that much in sales, right. And so then you have to end up turning your ads off, or reducing the scope of the ads, because you're scrambling to deliver. And then you're not getting the benefits, because you didn't you didn't let it learn for the 90 days or whatever. But that being said, I do see this as something that could be extremely powerful, especially, especially for companies that are big, because marketing campaigns and campaigns can get super complex if you're trying to manage every little piece. And so I can see this being extremely powerful. I just think there needs to be some caveats. The other thing I would say, too, is I don't know if you said the minimum was $100 a day, I don't know if that's Google's minimum or the perpetual traffic guys, were saying that that was the the minimum I for something like this that needs a lot of data to learn and work. I would want to be well within the minimum. Oh, yeah. Before I would even attempt it. Yep. Because if you're going to be just at the bare minimum to try to get this to work for 90 days, probably not, it's probably not going to, you're probably not going to see all of the benefits from it.
Greg Marshall 8:15 Well, I think, too, they they are mentioning that. This takes time, this is probably something so new, that that's why they're doing it more than like the day to day person. Because these individuals just have bigger budgets to actually justice all out. And so they just I think they didn't specifically say that, what their budgets were and things like that. But you can tell based on just listening to the podcast, you can tell that, you know, they're not spending a little bit they're spending quite a bit and they're really, you know, a lot of it is is talking about, you know, 20,000 30,000 40,000 and all the data points. And one of the things that I'm curious to get your opinion on, when I ran a couple of these performance just to see, like what this even does, right, I noticed that I have a very large bulk of the budget went towards Display Network. And my thought is, I don't know if I love that. But I also don't know if that's part of what Google knows. Right? Yeah, my thought is, Google display network can sometimes be challenging because you know, they can put them on websites that maybe don't make any sense. Or I'm not really sure the quality of that traffic.
Blake Beus 9:38 Yeah. I I mean, I'm laughing because I have such a love hate relationship with Display Network. Yeah. And every time I've worked with anything in Display Network, and let Google kind of decide the budget, it's blown. Yeah, budget on the wrong thing. Yep. And put Don't get on the wrong sites and the traffic i get from those if I dive into it and look at the leads we got from those is low, low, low quality. Yep. And but I think the key is you said especially cold traffic. Yep. I love display ads for warm traffic, people that already know who you are people. So I can keep showing up. That makes a lot of sense to me. The Ultra but cold truck and that's see I started laughing because this is where I get a little conspiratorial, or I'll dive into the My conspiracies here. But none of this is is found I have no evidence, yes, but this is, this is just me thinking that I sometimes wonder if Facebook and Google, they come out with this way to Hey, let us manage all of your things. So that they can kind of prop up the channels that are less profitable for them, but they have a large inventory of places to put ads. And so they'll dump budget into these things. Because that channel in isolation isn't really profitable for them. But when we have this thing where we, hey, you know, here's Google, we have 10 billion websites of Google Display ads on there. None of them are really profitable. So let's manage your budget. So dump money into those areas. And you'll get tons of impressions and it looks good on paper, but maybe, maybe isn't quite the best.
Greg Marshall 11:29 I think what you're saying to correct me if I'm wrong, but really to, to kind of build on that it feels like maybe the competition is getting so high on the most profitable channels, that it makes it harder for newer businesses and things like that. So they try to pretty much like, move some of that traffic over to other placements to give you the perception that the cost of traffic has dropped. Right? That's that's what it feels like to me.
Blake Beus 12:01 Do they blend the CPMs? Between all of that? Is it like a in the reporting? Is it a blended? CPN?
Greg Marshall 12:07 That's a good question. I when I looked into reporting, I think it is a blended, but you could probably split it out if you can put placements because I did. Here's some of the things. Some of the placements, I saw when I ran this performance max test for this one account. They didn't look great, right. So like, I don't know if there's a way to exclude certain types of sites or whatnot. But I remember having quite a significant amount of impressions on I remember a website where it was one of those like, very minimal, like when you go to visit a website, it's almost like, like it's built for not getting quality traffic. Yes, for lack of better way of saying it looks like it's just built to just get clicks. But that's it, that there's not real, qualified people reading this website. And so that's, that was one of the things that made me turn it off. And maybe I turned it off too soon. But according to them, their recommendation is, over time, if you're optimizing for conversion, it'll the system will learn all the sites that don't convert sure and stop showing it, some of those and so
Blake Beus 13:16 I'm okay with that. If they would just give me a refund on all that traffic. Right. Like, it'd be like, but you get like you guys get to keep all that money.
Greg Marshall 13:24 Yeah. And that's, that's the tricky part are spending money and watching it. And almost like, I'm not smarter than though Google algorithm. But I can tell you, like, you know, a website, that's not good. It's not going to convert immediately.
Blake Beus 13:39 Right? And I'm totally, I think it's great that you learn which sites are not going to convert, but I gotta blow a bunch of money to make that happen first, and then again, that's fine. If you already have a bunch of traffic, and you're you've got your sales cycle down and, and all that stuff. This is probably an amazing way to really scale up. Yep, big. But if you're not at that point, I can see this being a bit frustrating. Well,
Greg Marshall 14:07 one of that, so the targeting options, so here's like the big thing that they're the most excited about. Okay, so in the past, they talked about platform. Okay. And Platt like placement targeting right, so you use YouTube or search or display. And essentially what you're doing is you're using the placements as you're targeting this. Now they're talking more about audience time, right? And so they're saying like, if I target let's say, in market for cameras, time, directly, I'm following the people that are in market on cameras all over the internet. That's what seems to be what they're the most excited about. Interesting. Is it now these things have transitioned to audience targeting versus in the past, I guess only key word or parameters like that placement. Right.
Blake Beus 14:57 Right. So let me let me restate Because, because it used to be that I could say, Okay, I, I'm I'm targeting cameras, right? And then I would show up on camera blogs, camera, YouTube channels and that kind of stuff. But what you're saying is, it's switched because Google knows so much about people and their search history and everything. You could target cameras. And Google might know that Blake is interested in cameras, because I've been looking at them and Googling them and watching YouTube videos about them. But then when I hop onto a site that has a completely different interest of mine, say, cat, yep, I could see ads for Canon for cameras, because they know that I'm me. And even though I'm on a cat website, yep. I'm in market to buy a camera right now. And they're gonna keep showing correct stuff.
Greg Marshall 15:50 That's exactly that's a good,
Blake Beus 15:52 that's a good adjustment. I like that. That will be really interesting. I would love to see if that if that expands outside of just is that inside only performance Max? Or is that something that that you can show? Outside of that in a more targeted fashion? You
Greg Marshall 16:04 could use it outside of it. Okay. But I guess performance Max, is, you know, it's like the old kid.
Blake Beus 16:12 I mean, it makes sense, because it's on all the channels, I can see that.
Greg Marshall 16:16 I here see that? Here's my hesitation. Okay, so when I run, for example, when I run YouTube ads, or even some search or and display ads in the past, one thing is if like I noticed, if I don't exclude certain things, all the money goes to some of the traffic, right? So I've learned this the hard way with YouTube ads. Like, if you don't exclude certain placements, you'll get a lot of your ads showing kids channels. Yep. Right. Which is, it's tough to justify, like, you know, if it's on a kid's channel, they really got to
Blake Beus 16:53 say, and this is not to interrupt you, but I did interrupt you. So what are you going, this happens to me in my house, right? So all of my TVs are connected to my YouTube account. So because you know, my kids are younger, whatever. And so when they watch something on YouTube that's associated with me, Google doesn't know that my kids that my kids are watching, they might think that I just love you know,
Greg Marshall 17:19 hey, Bear. Watching my little
Blake Beus 17:23 kids. Yeah, so. And so it's, that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Greg Marshall 17:31 And that's, that's the challenge. See, because I do believe that performance Max might run into that same issue, right? Because it's connected to your device. If my kid is on Disney World, calm watching cartoons, he may be served the ad. And so that's my thing is the placements are, are difficult, because if you don't exclude them, the other one is mobile apps. Like if I don't exclude mobile apps from campaigns, I ended up let's say, you spent 100 bucks, like $80 of that will be on mobile apps. And then when you look at what mobile apps, then you look and go there's no way that people are they're just playing Words of friends or something like that, that I've got foreign clicks from that. And those are
Blake Beus 18:14 accidental clicks. You know, like, who's driving me the worst, those drives? We I bumped into that a lot. And unfortunately, it's not necessarily easy to turn off mobile apps. It's very convoluted. But yeah, I was I was working with a client that had a business to business project. And if we forgot to shut off mobile apps, yep. It would dump so much of their budget into Clash of Clans. Oh, yeah. And they will get a ton of clicks. And no one would fill out the lead form, of course, yeah. Because they were playing a game and they accidentally clicked the ad because it takes up half the screen. And it's just that was that was the place I was thinking where a lot of budget could be done. Well, can you exclude that with performance Max? Or do you have to have it turned off?
Greg Marshall 18:58 That's the thing that at least when I ran it, I couldn't find where to exclude it. Oh, interesting. So it's, maybe it's possible, and I was looking in the wrong area. But I can exclude. And that's the first thing I thought of, I saw performance when I said this would be perfect. As long as I can exclude mobile apps, and kids channel and TV and TV distribution. And I would be this Yeah, I'd be all on it. But I couldn't. And so then as soon as I went to my report, to see all the placements of large majority of my impression is looked exactly like when you run Display Network, and you don't shut off mobile app. It's it's all going to mobile apps and things where you're just like, I don't know, but this doesn't seem like the people that are playing these games, or going to buy it
Blake Beus 19:47 and they might be the people. They might be the people you're after, but they're not in the buying mood. Yeah, if they're playing. It drives me nuts. If someone's playing a game. Yeah, they're not going to fill out a checkout for me. at my site, they're on dumping their credit card number. They're in the middle of a freaking game. Yep. And many of those games use triggering mechanisms based on timers. Yep. Because you can't leave the game for very long or else you lose out on whatever. And so that's yeah, that's, that's frustrating. So
Greg Marshall 20:17 yeah, so with performance Max, you know, I just wanted to kind of wrap this up, I want to talk about performance Max, give it a shot, if you have a big budget and understand that, according to kind of the leaders in this space, right now, they're saying it can take up to 90 days to really see the results. So really think you know, if you can stomach 90 days to do that, great. But outside of that, I would just highly recommend maybe looking at doing individual channels at the moment till you can work your budget up to, to those kinds of levels. Interesting. I'm curious to see where this goes. Yeah. So the the idea, and in theory, this sounds like a fantastic product. Now, I just think the kinks need to be worked out as far as placements. Because you know, how I feel about places when I see those mobile apps or kids channels, I'm just thinking, this is not a placement that should be in there,
Blake Beus 21:16 let alone spend a majority of my budget.
Greg Marshall 21:18 And unfortunately, that's what that's what's happened. And maybe there are some better and different ways to do it. So I'll stay tuned and we'll report those back to you when we learned but outside of that, Blake kind of get a hold of
Blake Beus 21:32 Blake beus.com/s M three is the best way to get in touch with me right now.
Greg Marshall 21:37 And if you want to get ahold of me, it's Greg marshall.co. You can fill out the form we can book a free strategy session. And until next time, we'll see you later. Bye. Are you wanting to 20 minutes right? Yeah, that's
Blake Beus 21:49 great. I was
Blake Beus 0:00 Let's get let's get to lifetime value. That's what we talked about today. Right? Lifetime value. Yeah. So why is that important?
Greg Marshall 0:06 Yeah. So I think lifetime number one lifetime value is, you know, they call it LTV, right. In marketing, you have to abbreviate everything, right. So, LTV lifetime value. And the reason why lifetime value of a customer is super important is because it allows you to understand how aggressive you can get with your marketing and advertising, especially if you're doing paid in any way, whether that's paid ads, influencer, paid marketing, high levels of SEO paying for an SEO team, you can figure out how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer. And so lifetime value is probably the most important metric in a business, in my opinion. Because if you don't kind of constantly work at trying to increase it, you're just not going to be able to get the business growth results that you want. And you're not gonna be able to have the profits, and you most likely will miss opportunities, if you have good lifetime value of a customer, right? And that's one thing that I find is, if you don't like for example, let's say your lifetime value customer is way higher than you actually think it is. And you might not be aggressive enough to acquire those customers, simply because you haven't figured out what your lifetime value is.
Blake Beus 1:25 Yeah, yeah. So I mean, one of the things every time I talked about lifetime value, most people understand what the metric is. But oftentimes, they don't know what the metric means. And I think you summarized it really well. Most of the time. When I talk with people about it, they they know well, yeah, that's how much money I make over the life of the you know, the customer. That's that's what the metric is. But what it means is what you were saying how aggressive you can get with your marketing and tech marketing tactics and things because once you know that, then you can scoop up more of the market share exactly. But if you don't know what that actually is, then you can get aggressive. It's, it's almost like most people don't think a whole lot about it other than, hey, that's profit, yes. And not think about it from a standpoint of acquiring new customers or finding out finding new people to help or whatever, right?
Greg Marshall 2:14 That's actually a good point. Because I think you're right, in the sense that people are not thinking about it, they like they off and they're just like, Yeah, my lifetime value may be XYZ, right? But they're not, they're not realizing that they could use that like data point, to actually take more action or to drive growth in their business. And I think typically, where the customer gets kind of caught up is like, and I've run into this to lifetime value is again, theory, that's great if they're worth $10,000. But I can't spend $9,000 Get them, right, because it's 10,000 over their lifetime, not immediately, right? And so you have to almost balance the two between lifetime value, and then cash flow turnaround. So like, how much cash do you get from the right away? Right? And then how fast can you essentially survive and reach that lifetime value?
Blake Beus 3:06 Right. And I feel like when we start talking about that, that it's very easy for people to envision that from a single customer standpoint. But they forget that you're signing up customer, whatever the product is, or service is, you're signing up more than one customer at a time. Yep. Unless you're one of those companies that only works with one customer time, which is very rare. So you're signing up multiple customers at a time. And so as you sign up people, you can start seeing the cashflow come in from people you signed up maybe a month ago or whatever. But then you start seeing the cash flow coming in from the people you signed up a year ago on their secondary purchase or their upsell or their, their renewal of the membership or subscription or whatever. And, and so you end up having, I don't know I think of it like stacks, right? You're you're stacking on top of each other. And you have this this this life cycle where you just kind of keep going up the hill, even though it's a little bit up and down at first. If you do your if you if you have an eye on the lifetime value can keep growing, growing, growing. And then you can get to the point where well yeah, I can spend $9,000 to get a 10,000 back customer. Because I know actually because I've been working on my lifetime value. This no longer $10,000 It's $50,000 for my lifetime value. But that's realized over five years instead of, you know, lifetime over to what I was calculating before. And so now it makes perfect sense to spend $9,000 to get that $10,000 Customer whatever. Yep. Right?
Greg Marshall 4:43 Well, and I think too, you should aim on. So here's like some actual strategies you can use to try to figure it out. And then what you should do so if you just started out, it's a little bit tougher, but look at maybe a competitor's business, and see what their lifetime All right, what are they most likely getting? Is it? Do they stick around for six months? 12 months, two years, right? What's their average order value and do your research that way, if you're just starting, if you've been in business for at least a year or more, take a look at all of your customers. And then it takes time, but just figure out how long people are staying around. Or how many purchases are they making right? Over a 12 month or 24 month period, right, and then come up with a number that is average, right? Because you're gonna have some people that are like, really like, their lifetime value is massive, like I have some clients that their lives. But if I based everything off that, that may be skewing the numbers in the wrong direction. And same with people that are maybe shorter, so take the average of what all of your customers are doing, then once you get that lifetime value, average, then what you want to do is some ways to increase it, think about how can I get them to purchase more, right, so you can actually have them buy more at the point of purchase, you can increase your prices, you can try to get a like a subscription model where they're paying each month, you can come up with unique product offerings for that audience, to get them to buy more, there's a bunch of different ways that you can use to increase the lifetime value your customer which you should be obsessively thinking about. How do I get them to stay on longer, pay more, buy faster, and get more offerings for me?
Blake Beus 6:30 Right, right. And, and one of one of my favorite tactics is great, what's the next logical step for for my customers to get. And it's like, starting a business is complicated. Coming up with a product line is complicated, or package of services or something like that. And if you're just barely starting out, or even if you've been in business for a few years, you you're not where you could be. And you can only really focus on a small set of things at once. But once you kind of get that down, you can start saying okay, now I've I've service to these clients. Yep. What's the next logical step that I couldn't do two years ago, but maybe I have the cash flow, or the bandwidth or the staff to be able to execute on right and you see this all the time with the guru model is quite easy right to, to see this, you'll see them launch some sort of a product or a service. And then the next logical step might be group coaching, or consulting. Right, the next large logical step after that might be a retreat that's like a $10,000 to go to, you can escalate pretty quick. But you don't have to have all those pieces together. At first. Yep. And you don't have to make sure the next logical step works for all of your customers. Because there's, there's going to be some that will will need that next logical step. And some that won't. Yeah. But you see this all the time. Another way I've seen people and businesses improve their lifetime value is just maybe simplifying the process. So one of my favorite examples is Amazon, they kind of pioneered the two day shipping. Yep, and the Amazon Prime, where you could pay one fee and get free two day shipping one fee once a year and get free two day shipping. Well, that kind of locks you in it makes it so much easier for you to keep buying more from them. Because you pay this one fee. And it's like, well, I'll just get it on prime. And I'll just I'll just get on with prime, you almost feel obligated to use those because you pay Yes, you pay for you pay for it up front. But it's it's insanely convenient. And I think that single innovation right there has allowed Amazon to to grow way bigger than than many other companies.
Greg Marshall 8:40 Well, and another strategy you could use for lifetime values, you can ask yourself the question, why is my lifetime value of a customer not higher? Right. And once you come up with some of the reasons why you can start to fix that, and plug that hole like that's one thing I like to use when coming up with just ad campaigns and landing page ideas is what is preventing the like think negatively Oh, yeah. Why would someone say no to this offer? Why would someone not stick around? Why would someone not keep buying more and more from me, that typically will help give you the answers. Yeah, what you can fix, essentially, to get better results. And this is like, like, I tell my clients and this is my own personal belief as well. Optimization never ends, right? Like you're just constantly. There is no end. Yeah, it's it's not like okay, I've arrived, I have my perfect lifetime. Trust me, Jeff Bezos and his crew. They're still thinking about how to increase the lifetime value of customers. And they're very rare, right? And so this is part of the the journey and the game is to continuously figure out how can I provide more value so that the customer sticks around more often? buys more often buys more things, and refers their friends and family to us? Yeah,
Blake Beus 9:59 yeah. It's, it's a unique thing. And I mean, you might be thinking about, you know, it's easy to kind of pick them. I like picking on boring businesses, right? Because there's so there's such an underserved model. And I say boring lightly is title companies is one we pick on quite a bit here because title companies provide a valuable service, but you don't see a whole lot of marketing campaigns aimed at getting title company clients for marketing or whatever. It's this kind of boring model. But it's, it's an interesting one. But there's so many things that they can do to improve increase that they could say, Okay, well, we provide the service. What if we found customers or taught workshops to people on how to buy their second property as a rental or something like that, right, so now you're turning a customer that typically buys maybe once or twice in their life buys a home, now you might find a company customer that's going to buy maybe five or six times in their lifetime, because you've showed them how, how simple the rental purchasing process can be. And you are the clear company for providing the title services, sales purchases, and things along those lines. So there's so many ways to make this happen. And it's so easy to just forget about it or not think about it, because you're focused on delivering for your clients or, or the next product or whatever. And, and taking a step back and actually looking at this stuff is is super, super important. Well, I
Greg Marshall 11:26 think the next question, typically, I think people will have as well, what if I just sell like, you know, I work a lot of T shirt brands, right? Or low cost items? Well, how do I increase my lifetime value of a customer? If it's just like I have a T shirt? Yeah. Or I have a watch or a necklace? Or whatever? And basically, the the simple answer is this, always come up with the next product for those customers, meaning that part never ends, you want to continuously be coming up with new product, new product ideas, because that's actually how you increase your lifetime, lifetime value of a customer versus only trying to increase the price on the front end. Yep, that's like one mistake that I feel like a lot of the, I guess, lower cost items, type businesses, the mistake they make is, they're not making enough new products for their customer to keep purchasing. They're just kind of trying to tweet the price of their one product
Blake Beus 12:28 or, or the marketing materials, or the ad materials or something.
Greg Marshall 12:32 And that to me, that's the wrong approach. Because you can only squeeze out so much from like, let's say you go, well, you're selling it for 30 and say 35. Well, why that? Versus if you made 10 new products from that same customer? You can get 300. Right? I mean, absolutely. So which one would you rather have? And I think one you can control better than the other because the market will only pay so much for certain products. Therefore your strategy, I believe should be? Well, that's what they'll pay for certain products. Let me get the more of those products, while reducing my customer acquisition costs.
Blake Beus 13:08 Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, you could think of more T shirts, you could think of related products, right? So if you sell T shirts, maybe maybe there's something related acts Yeah, hurts or shorts or sweatbands. Or something else. That's an easy just, well, yeah, add that on. Whatever that is, the other thing you could do is you could have bounced back sales, right. So every time someone buys a product, in 24 hours, you shoot them an email or a text or something saying, Hey, if you buy something else in the next 12 hours, we'll toss it in the box, no extra shipping, just just buy it, because we're already shipping this other thing to you. And so that's an easy way to just bump up your your initial kind of order value. And then lifetime value could have deals for returning customers are saying, Hey, we heard you loved this, this shirt or this, this whatever, we have this new line that's related or buy this as a gift to someone, right? There's got to be someone in your life that would love this also, right? You could do
Greg Marshall 14:07 subscriptions. So I have one client that sells hair products, they've created a subscription model called a hair products. With jewelry, let's say we use jewelry, you can, if they're buying a watch, come up with a different version of that same lens or offer them more watches more often than more necklaces or rings. Or the point is you have to continuously get you need to create new things for your customer to buy. And that's how you really increase the lifetime value of your customer. Especially if you're in kind of like that product business. service based businesses can be you can make the argument they could be a little bit easier for lifetime value because service typically, people need services built over and over and over again, not just one offs. Yeah, it's almost rare to have service based businesses that are like I don't They need this one time and never again. Yeah. Right. And so because of that, and service based businesses, really, the simplest way to do it, is to get them on a membership or subscription model. Yeah. Right, and then just retain them as long as possible. And that's really how you can increase your lifetime value. And that
Blake Beus 15:18 model works really well. Yeah, I'm glad you use the word retain, because I was gonna bring up retainers for like, you know, legal fees, or whatever you see this all the time with, with big companies, they have a legal firm on retainer. And what that means is they pay them money every month to handle a handful of things. And if something bumped comes up, they kind of have this buffer zone of basically prepaid legal hours, that they can say, hey, come take come square up this thing for us or whatever. And and I think that model could very easily be used in so many other industries, but it's just not the norm. And so people don't think about it a whole lot. But for a service based business business, the retainer model could totally work really, really, really well.
Greg Marshall 16:03 Well, I think, if he spent a lot of your time thinking about how can I get repeat, repeat purchases, then doing the membership subscription type model makes the most sense, because it happens automatically, right? And you don't have to keep chasing them down. Yeah, to get them to buy over and over again, and then your job becomes just make sure that the service is good, and that they really love what's going on, so that they stick around as long
Blake Beus 16:30 as possible. Yeah, and your your job shifts from constantly trying to find brand new people, to that part's a little bit automated. Yeah, too. And then the next thing is, is basically communicating the value to them, which you and I've talked a lot about, right? Because the retainer model is very similar to how you run your business, essentially, right. And, and we've talked about how you communicate the value to your clients and customers, because sometimes they're an expert in, say, selling T shirts, yep, you're an expert in advertising those things while need the while they need to work together, they don't always understand the value you're providing, because that's not their realm. And so you have to spend time explaining that value. But that's a shift in your business. But But that alone provides a lot of value and makes the retainer worth it
Greg Marshall 17:21 exactly. And all of my businesses in the past have always worked off of essentially a retainer or more, what you would call E of t model, right? Where people are paying every single month to go ahead and have us provide them services. And to me, that's it's a great way to build a great cash flow, right, predictable cash flow, which helps you to increase your lifetime value of your customers and get more customers because of that constant cash flow coming in. That gives you essentially what it does, it gives you time to let the customer value play out. Yeah, without having it to be like I have to keep selling over and over and over and over again. Hope and then you know, kind of risking it with well, how do I although this customer can be worth a lot in the future, I don't have the cash right now to be as aggressive as I want to be. And so that kind of helps to fill in the gaps there. So I think with lifetime value, the biggest, the biggest thing we should focus on is repeat purchases. I like to tell clients, the money is not made on the first sale, it never is. The money is made on the second sale and every sale after that. And if you have that mindset, you behave differently, then if you need to make a profit on the first sale, because you will spin your wheels, essentially forever. How to make that work, because there's too many variables that you don't control. You can't control how much competition is in the market for ad space. You can't control you know, Seo 100%, right, you can't control influence of marketing 100% There's a lot of things you really cannot throw, at least not 100% control, but you can control how many things you can put in front of his customers in order to get the maximum value.
Blake Beus 19:08 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm gonna guess if you're listening to this, you might be thinking okay, cool. Well, maybe let's get people on a contract or whatever. And I there's definite pros and cons of say like a long term contract. I mean, legal companies with the legal retainers, that's definitely on a contract. I know businesses that they sign up people for money month after month service, but there's there's no long term contract. It's a it's a basically you pay for the one month and if you want to cancel the next month, you can Yep. What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of that? I'm sure you've seen both sides of it as well.
Greg Marshall 19:45 Well, I come from my first job, basically was selling contracts. Okay, right. And then I've, over time gone away from that. So there's pros and cons, right? So the pros and contracts Bay See is, it's almost like you're guaranteed not guaranteed, but closer guarantee the money up front whether you do a good job or not, right, right, like the person, they, you know, they could have a billion complaints. But you still get paid. Right? Right. So that's the pro, you will get paid, you'll get your money, nine times out of 10. All right? The cons are, sometimes it can make you lazy. Because you know, you're gonna get their money anyways. And then the cons can also be you have worst customer, like the customer experience is not as good. Oftentimes, yeah. Because they're because there's no incentive to keep them, then it's kind of like, you're just letting it happen. And there's no like real reason for you to make sure the customer is actually happy. Yeah, because sometimes that cost you more money to do that. So it's actually less profitable to make the customer happy. And that position, which logs are wise can hurt you. Because once that contract is done, they're telling all their friends and family not to sign that contract and not go there. So you could be losing customers, or you don't even realize just because of the contract now, on the no contract the pros are, the conversion rates are easier, because people like the opportunity to I can get out anytime. Yeah, some of the cons that can come from that are just people can cancel easier. And you actually have to make sure every single month to keep them Oh, darn right, Oh, shucks, he actually have to do your job. So those are kind of the cons from a business standpoint, the con is the money's not guaranteed, right? Unless you do a good job. And so there, there are pros and cons, I tend to like the no contract, just because I do want to at least hold myself accountable for like, trying to do a good job, right customer versus if I get you in a contract. And it's just like, Well, I'm gonna get your money no matter what. And there's no incentive for me. And if you try to cancel, you can't because you're gonna kind of Yeah, and it just, it just feels icky, or
Blake Beus 22:06 that way. Yeah, I've noticed. I mean, let me put it this way, there's clearly a time and a place for a contract, you get that. Typically, I think that works a whole lot better for larger businesses with a very complicated thing. And both sides need to deliver and hold true to something. But for smaller businesses, almost always, I feel like the the the month to month is just a simpler transaction all the way around simpler sales. Like you said, you don't have to put as much effort into trying to sell it. You don't have to go over all this legal, whatever, it is just a Let's sign up and try it. It makes the explanation of value easier. And a lot of people don't think about that. But it's so hard sometimes to explain the value of something complicated, like running Facebook and Google Ads ad strategy. When it's so much easier to just show that Yep. Right. And so the no contract allows you to just say, let's just do a quick trial run. Yep, see how this works. I'll show you how I'm working. And then you can take that first month to show them how that works. Yep. And and it's so much easier for that value to be explained. And then and then they can continue to sign up.
Greg Marshall 23:25 Well, and there is one, there's one card that I actually forgot to mention that, depending on your business strategy and goal can make or break things. So if you basically if your objective is to build a business to sell it, then the big pro to a contract is the people who would buy it. Love that. Yeah, because they're investors, and they typically don't really, they typically don't really care about the customer experience. They just want the money, right? And how much money can I get this in the future? And how many of your customers are locked in? Versus if you're not trying to sell a business doesn't matter. But if you're trying to sell it fit, everything is month to month, they're probably not going to be as interested in your business because it could all leave you know, overnight.
Blake Beus 24:17 Well, that's a really good point. I've never, none of my businesses have ever started. And what I'm doing right now has never been with the intent to exit or sell in that way. And so that's something I don't think about a whole lot. So I'm glad you brought that up because that that is a completely valid point. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 24:35 I mean, if you're trying to get a big payout, like let's say, because there are you know, this is like a sport almost where there are people that just want to build this company with the whole intent of selling it to someone, then I highly recommend that you get contracts in your business to make it more attractive. Yeah, just from you know, from just a logical standpoint, and investors gonna want to know What type of money? Am I going to basically guaranteed every month? And how long do I have these customers? And the reason why I know that just from gyms in the past that I've seen been sold. Yeah, that is typically the difference because I've worked at two different types of gyms, ones that are contract based ones that are month to month days. And the contract based ones tend to sell faster at a higher price point. Oh, because they love guaranteed the contract guaranteed that that makes a ton of sense. So yeah, so that's, that's a con if, if you are planning on selling your business at some point and want that option, then you you definitely don't want to have a contract.
Blake Beus 25:36 Yeah, yeah. super interesting. Interesting. Okay. So I had one last thing I wanted to bring up. And then you know, you, you have more, but this is this is the last thing I wanted to say. One of my favorite ways for subscription models, or like prepaid model or whatever to increase the lifetime order value is something that's easy, but hard at the same time. And I love this strategy, it's, you get on the phone with everyone that has cancelled because they didn't like your product. Yep. And you ask them, Hey, I know we already lost you as a customer. I'm not trying to get you back. But what would have kept you? Yep. And then make those changes? Those are the people that are gonna give you the feedback that's going to pivot your business in the best way possible. And they're insanely uncomfortable conversations. Yeah, well, they'll
Greg Marshall 26:30 give you honest feedback, honest feedback, right? honest feedback.
Blake Beus 26:36 And doing that, and implementing those things. I mean, some of them are just going to be jerks, right? Like, whatever. But taking that feedback, and really looking at it, and maybe evaluating it with a business partner, or, you know, a colleague or something like that. And implementing some of those changes will have a huge impact, because they know what you might not be seeing, yeah, would be an improvement. And then you make those improvements and boom, you're you're doing way better. You're you're retaining customers longer. All of that stuff just starts blowing up. Everybody's happy. Everybody's happy, except for that one person.
Greg Marshall 27:12 But I think in the long term, yeah, having those conversations are always you know, they're always difficult, right? Because no one really wants to say, like, you did a bad job, you, you're this done or whatever. But if it happens, there's two ways to look at it. One, you can completely ignore it, which I don't recommend. Or two, you can take the the insight and make it stronger to make sure it never happens again. And I always like to use sports analogies, right? If you lose, you know, if you lose a game, yeah, because the other team was just draining threes on you all day, oh, then your job is to go, I'm going to lose in every way possible, except by the three. Right? And so you can use that competitive spirit that energy to go, don't get too emotionally attached to the whatever they say, and don't take it too personal. Just take use it to be able to go, if I'm going to lose, it will not be in that fashion. And that's how I like to take feedback from if a customer has had a bad experience or hasn't gotten the results that they want or whatever. That's how I take is how can I make sure that that doesn't happen again? Yeah. And any other way? I will lose, but that way? Yeah. And so with that being said, Do you have anything else to talk about as far as lifetime value? Customer?
Blake Beus 28:31 No, nope, that's it. As far as contacting me or whatever, just go to Blake beus.com/sm. Three, if you want to go directly to the SM three group, then that's where we do group coaching, coaching, consulting, surrounding social media marketing and digital marketing and all of that good stuff. If you want some one on one time with me, that's a good place to do it. And Greg, how about you,
Greg Marshall 28:53 Greg Marshall Dotco. If you could go ahead and book a free strategy session. And you know, outside of that, I think, until next time, we'll see you later. All right, bye.
We do this every time we talk about stuff, we just start nerding out before we even turn the camera on and start recording the podcast. And so today you were just talking about you've been testing eight or nine different accounts. Yes. With an old school strategy. Yes. It and it's not new. No, it's, it's, it needs to happen. Yeah, right. Off offline events, specifically for Facebook, Google does this a little bit different, but what we're gonna be talking about Facebook today, uploading offline events to tell, you know, tell everyone out there what that means.
Greg Marshall 0:33 Yeah, essentially what you're doing especially like if you have a Shopify store, but you can do it for WooCommerce, or whatever is any whenever you you have your your buyers on your website, you would download your buyer list or export your orders. And then you would upload that information back into the offline events manager, which can be found in the Events Manager, you just have to create a new offline events account, super easy, and then attach it to your ad account. But what you do is you upload that information, and you just map the data, which is a fancy way of saying, just make sure each column is named correctly. So that when you upload the CSV file, or the Excel sheet, or whatever, it can then understand what it is it should be looking for. Okay. And with this, this has helped tremendously on getting better information and data back into the ad accounts. Because on the ads manager, if you don't upload, it seems like it misses a lot of the purchases, right. And I have a specific account that essentially only does runs ads to sell their product. So this is how I'm using it to measure to make sure that it's accurate. Basically, it's like its own case study, right. And so far, so good. It seems like it does catch all the purchases, where as before he was the challenge that I would run into, we would run the ads. And we know this is the only source of traffic. And you would look into the ad account. But it would say like, you only got a few purchases off this ad, even though we may have had 10 or 15 of this exact product. And we're like, and we know it's not organic traffic, right? Because this is a brand new shirt, we haven't even promoted it anywhere yet. Right? So the only way they could have purchased it was through the
Blake Beus 2:20 app, right? So it's a brand new, this particular thing and brand new product, whatever, there's no SEO no zero for that, for that product, no email campaigns going after that product, no organic social media, whatever, for that product, it's a new product, you run ads for it. And in the back system, you're seeing, you know, 1020 purchases, but um, ads, you're seeing three for purchases, and you know, those purchases had to come from the ad because that's the only source of traffic for that page. Exactly. And so you start uploading off yeah, conversion, we start
Greg Marshall 2:51 uploading off offline conversions. And what happens is, all that data gets fed back into the account. And it starts to show and match up with the amount of sales we actually have. And it breaks down per ad, which ad was doing it. Now the challenge that we had before uploading this was you will look at the cost for purchases if you had 10 sales. But Facebook Ads Manager on the front end is only showing like three, right? Well, your cost of purchase seems like it's outrageous, right? Even though your ad spend to revenue match what you need, right. And the challenge with that is you become tempted to turn off the the campaigns just because the front end numbers are like oh, man, those I mean cost per purchase $48. That doesn't make any sense.
Blake Beus 3:36 So you're ending up turning off an ad that's actually working? Correct. Facebook's reporting? Yep. That is, is inaccurate. Exactly. Right. And it's tough to scale. Because
Greg Marshall 3:46 if no, even though your gut is telling you that this is happening, it's still like, you just don't feel as confident, right? Making the decision of scaling something when it's showing when the numbers themselves on the ads manager reporting are completely off. Well,
Blake Beus 4:03 it's hard. You gotta you gotta, you gotta trust your gut over trusting Bismack.
Greg Marshall 4:07 Yeah, exactly. That's good.
Blake Beus 4:11 But there's also an actual problem with that. Because if the ad account isn't tracking those sales, yeah, then algorithmically. They're going to, it's not going to keep performing, even though in the real world it is performing because the, those numbers do reflect what the ad account algorithm thinks it's happening. Yep. And so they know you're selling this product for $30. And if if they're only showing, you know, three purchases when you actually had 20. Yep, they're assuming that your cost per purchase is way more than your actual product. So then you lose, you think you're losing and so they're thinking, well, this is just a terrible product. Let's give it to the other things that are performing. So even though you know this ad is working, it's not going to scale well. Yep. Because you've got to fix the algorithm data problem. Yep. So you're uploading these offline conversions. And I know in the past, I've done this in the past in the past, we would either get duplicate duplicate conversions, it would over report revenue, or it would miss miss. It would tie it to the wrong campaign, or the wrong ad account and everything like that. But you were saying, that's, well, that's still an issue. Yes. But it seems to get resolved over time. Like check. Yeah, tell me more about what you're saying there.
Greg Marshall 5:30 So right now, and this has just been, you know, from just staring at this over and over and over again, to see if this is a way that I can utilize. So it seems like initially, there may be double reporting. Right. But I don't know of Facebook, because when you upload the events, especially when you first set up, it says, In the I don't know the captions, wherever the disclaimer, it says that the duplicate, right, you know, anything that was maybe tracked on the front end and the back end, and it takes it out, right. And so initially, when I tried it, it seemed like it was counting as two. But then I look back at it, and it seems like the values went down. Like they normalized, like somehow they went in and cleaned it up so that it's not over.
Blake Beus 6:20 Okay, so what I'm understanding what you say is, clarify, if I'm wrong, what I'm understanding is, when you initially make that upload, it takes, I don't know, 30 minutes to an hour to turn through the offline data and attribute things. And then you can hop into ads manager, and it will show you how it did. Yep. So at first, it's still showing over reporting revenue and over reporting purchases. But what you're saying then is maybe after a few days, or after a week, you go look at that same time period, it seems to be much closer to reality. Yeah. So it's like it's over reporting for a bit, and then it normalizes over here, I'm in the DT. It's almost like the deduplication happens over a 72 hour period or a five day period, whereas the revenue reporting is almost instantaneous. After it does,
Greg Marshall 7:12 yes, yes. So that's exactly what I'm saying. So that's what I've been really watching. To see if that is the case, if it actually is deduplicating. Over time, so that it is accurate. Because then if that's the case, then you would just if as long as you use the best practices that it says to use is as close to the purchase as possible, upload the data. So really, they say that, yeah, so I remember reading it somewhere, I think is when you first set it up, it says make sure to put the information as close to the purchase as possible, meaning, don't wait three weeks to upload your last three weeks of purchases and upload it because then your match rate will not be as good. We've been using daily. So every single morning, uploading the purchases from the day before, that seems to be working. And it seems to make it a little more accurate. And it's just given us better overall, like under at least understanding of what is working and what isn't because many times I've talked with clients, and they've, in fact, there's another client that I'm thinking of that said this, whatever ad you have running right now is working really well. And then when I looked in the ads manager, the purchase, the cost per purchase were like really high. But in their Shopify account, they were doing really well, like the ratio that I wanted from ad spend to revenue was 50% less than what I typically want, right? So like meaning, I typically want the ad cost to be especially for a product 30% or less of revenue. Okay, make sense? I don't want to ever spend more than 30%.
Blake Beus 8:51 Yeah, with a physical product or a physical digital, you got, you got a little more
Greg Marshall 8:55 flexible, but physical products, you have to, you know, take into account costs of product and shipping. And I never want to spend more than 30%. They were spending like it was a 15%. So it was 50% less than the maximum that I would even want to spend. Okay, which means it was like imperfect range. But the ads manager from what was being reported was way off, compared to what was in their Shopify. So that's why I was like, and there's got to be a way to figure out like, because it's you feel like you're almost blind making decisions that way, interest of your life. Yeah. So and the other thing we've talked about is if, if the ad account is only getting so little data, then it can't optimize as fast. So by uploading these offline conversions, and they imagine it essentially speeds up the optimization. That's where I found right that's my theory on why every single account that we're using this on, it has improved. Yeah, like their sales numbers have improved without massive increases and but
Blake Beus 9:57 yeah, so I mean, I've gotten so many questions about this because, again, this is not a new strategy. Yeah. But I feel like people, media buyers, whatever, kind of forget about some of these these it's a tedious strategy. It's it's not. It's not cool. It's not sexy. It's not like this. But my first question is, what what data are you uploading? Right? I know you're you're using this with a lot of Shopify stores, you can use this without any any, any checkout process whatsoever. You can even use this for lead conversions that are don't have $1 amount attached to it. But But what data are you uploading in this CSV file? And what do you think is the most like, what is the critical kind of data for sure,
Greg Marshall 10:43 so I think the most important date, alright, this is what we're upload, and then I'll tell you what I think is most important. So we're uploading first name, last name, order ID, time it was purchased, the value associated with that purchase. And then the city, state country and everything else that I can map, email address, email address, phone number, if you if you're gathering up if you have that, like literally everything as much as you can. And then I upload that, and then it goes as and matches based off. But the most important thing that I think that makes it more accurate, unless you're doing it every single day, the time purchase. That's what I think is the most valuable data set in their time is the time that makes a purchase. That makes sense, because there's lots of ways for
Blake Beus 11:32 the data ball to get dropped, and then the attribution data ball to get dropped. But a point in time only happens once. And unless you're doing 10s of 1000s of orders every hour. The odds are that the time of purchase is extremely unique to that one event that Facebook knows happened, but maybe doesn't know
Greg Marshall 11:53 who that was exactly, exact. Okay, so that's what I think is helping the matching of all this kind of in my mind, my thought process is these offline advances, whatever the pixel doesn't get on the front end, by uploading their first last name, email, and most importantly, the time of purchase, and what they purchased like the dollar amount, that's where I think they're able to go and backtrack and go this individual was on this time. This is the email associated with them. They did click on an ad they did see this. That's That's my theory on what they're doing. Yeah. Is that Is that what you think? You're more? You're more of the data guy that understands all this?
Blake Beus 12:34 Yeah, I would, I would definitely agree with you on that, like, I'm just thinking through how that would work from a data matching perspective has taking a big step back, let's just look at the flow. I'm scrolling through and I see one of the ads for for, you know, one of your clients, and I click on it inside of Facebook's app on my phone. Facebook knows exactly who I am. And the exact time that I click on that ad, yep, from there, the data starts to get kind of fuzzy, because we're going over to someone's website, if have iOS 14 14.5, or any of those others, data tracking starts to get kind of fuzzy and kind of mushy, but they know for a fact who I am. And when I clicked that ad, what ad I clicked on what campaign that came from, and what ad group that was from has its own platform. It's on platform and they know all of that data. But then once I move past that point, that data starts to get a little fuzzy, there may be only getting certain bits and pieces, there may be there may be getting anonymized some anonymized data or hashed data from the pixels sent back to their servers. But they know that I clicked on that. And they kind of know what time those other events are happening. So if I click on this, and 10 seconds later, there's an Add to Cart event with a couple of other identifiers, ie a browser that's similar to the browser on my phone, the operating system, homophone that's similar to that they, they start being able to piece those things back together, but maybe the ball gets dropped on the purchase event or something like that. So when you're uploading a purchase event time, with a name, and an email address, and $1 amount and all of those things. It's almost like they can connect the dots. If you think about those connected dot drawings you have do you have your kids do right now? Yeah, you know, they have dot one, two, and three, and then dot 24 and 25. The offline Conversions can say, Okay, here's dots, you know, 478 1250. And from there, you can definitely draw straight line to to that conversion and more accurately pinpoint that purchase event, to the AD, AD SET, campaign and person. Yep. And then from there, once they have a complete data picture, algorithm optimizing should be much cleaner on their side for predicting who to put the ad in from.
Greg Marshall 14:55 So next, based on how you're explaining it, this is my interpretation. And that that what you're essentially doing is you're taking Facebook's data on platform, which will never go away because it's their platform. Yep. Yep. And then you're taking your first party data, which is yours to own? Uh huh. And you're removing the middleman of iOS 14, or any other Google Chrome or anything else and get in the way, right? ad blockers, whatever, and you're just matching. So you're basically taking the middleman out, right? And putting more of the control in your own hands. Yeah. This is why I think this is a great strategy, because now you don't have to worry so much about can you get better data? If you take the middleman out, because what's the one variable that has ruined a lot of this? It's the middleman of iOS and ad blockers and other browser tools that have gotten in the way of event
Blake Beus 15:55 network problems, right. I don't think a lot of people realize this. I do. Because I'm a massive nerd. But at any point in time, when you're browsing your phone, and everything, there's a significant number of data packets sent from your phone between your phone and the server that get dropped the go to a dead end or whatever. And there's this error checking and everything built in so that you as the user, you don't notice, yeah, but it happens all the time. It's messy behind them, like network internet, it's all messy behind the scenes. And that little tracking event could just get just go off into nowhere yet or land. Right.
Greg Marshall 16:25 Which, which makes sense. So it's like, so this is almost a safer way to match your data to get it to be as accurate as you can. Yeah. With what you have, you know, around.
Blake Beus 16:38 Yeah, well, I'm glad you talked about first party data, because I know that reminded me and we've talked about first party data. And I've been I've made the perfect prediction, you made the prediction, I will continue to make this error addiction, that first party data will 100% be the most important asset your business owns, as in the future. And the only way to really have that good first party data is to own more of your own platform, like own more of your own server stack. All of these things. We've talked about server side, Google Tag Manager, that's, that's putting first party data into your hands. And I guess, to circle back that, it's not surprising that Facebook behind the scenes is probably massively improving their ability to match first party data from advertisers to their own first party data in platform and quietly behind the scenes probably dumping millions upon millions upon millions of dollars to improve that matching to make this work way. But I
Greg Marshall 17:46 think, you know, I think there's going to be just a shift. And they'll probably be by a new solution that comes out that makes this process more seamless with first party data and offline events and attaching it to ads. I personally don't know how to make that.
Blake Beus 18:08 Well, they already are working on it. That's essentially what the conversion API is. Yep. Right. And so in, that was the other thing I wanted to kind of circle back to really quick, there's kind of three ways you can get data into the ads manager, that's the pixel. That's the old school way that's been there. And that's the way that's been hammered lately, with privacy, whatever. You have this offline events, and that's been around for a long, long, long time, but seems to be getting massive improvement in optimizations. And the third way is the conversion API. And I know people have heard about that. But if you're listening to this, and you don't know what, what the conversion API is, Greg, what what, what is the conversion API?
Greg Marshall 18:51 Because I was gonna ask, Well,
Blake Beus 18:52 I actually what you think and then I'll, I'll answer a mine.
Greg Marshall 18:55 My understanding is that the API is connected within Facebook, that then gets more information that matches to what's happening on your website. That's like, My interpretation is more accurate than, like, browser pixel information. Yeah. Is that correct? Like, that's how I understand. Yes,
Blake Beus 19:17 so from from a tech nerd standpoint, you there's lots of layers to this. But I'm going to talk about two kind of main layers to how our technology and internet infrastructure is built. The the layer, the first layer I'm gonna talk about is the client side layer. So that is your browser. There's actually code that executes in your browser, right? And then there's another layer, which is called server side. And that is code that operates that executes on the server before anything gets sent to your browser. Okay. Okay. So the pixel is all executed in your browser. So that means me as the user, myself as the user I have a lot of control over what the client side does, because that's my browser, I own it, I can install a, an ad blocker, I can have a firewall, I can have an anti virus that I can have all of these things, I can have a virus on my computer that monitors my traffic and blokes, that kind of stuff. There's lots of things that could go wrong, intentionally or unintentionally, on my side, but I have a lot of control over them. The server side is is the owner or whoever runs that server has kind of control over how that operates. So the conversion API is essentially talking from the server side, directly to Facebook's server side. And we're cutting out the client side altogether better. So there's less data available. On the server side, I don't necessarily get access easily to say, mouse clicks and things like that on the server side, because those are client side events. Yep. But there are things on the server side, I do have access to a purchase event that has to go through my server, right? You know, or add to cart Events Add to Cart events, because that goes through my server, and that gets updated in my servers database, adding a lead, that's a server side event. And those are hard events that we know, not only when they happen, but we know the data that was submitted and sent to us. And so you're pushing that data. So it is more accurate. But there's kind of less data to go with gotta go, right? Because the pixel can capture a lot more client side events. So you're gonna get a lot more accurate. So this is what I have aggregated events. Yes, yeah. Because it kind of starts to merge all of that answer
Greg Marshall 21:43 together. That's why they limit how many events you can do. Yeah, because they only want so many. Because from what you just said, server side, it takes some of the, you know, the other pieces of data, you kind of lose that on the client side, right? Yes. So So server side, that's why you have aggregate events of give us eight events. And aggregate events are just events that you set up within Facebook. And once again, I use them and understand what they're doing. But I don't know how to explain that. Yeah, on the technical side, just know what they're doing. Right, right. But it's a way to essentially allow Facebook to be able to optimize for the events still. Versus if you do just browser, the warning that I see that they get is you won't be able to target people that have the iOS 14 setting. Right. Right. And so that pretty much will reduce your reach. Right? Absolutely. Right. And so with those three, we have offline events, we have conversion API. And then we have the pixel events, where when we give all three of those channels of data to the ads platform, are basically feeding the ads manager, fertilizer, like you're planting a field, you're just you're just giving it all of this good, good fertilizer for it to work with. And
Blake Beus 23:04 we've talked about sending positive signals back to the algorithm, we've talked about what types of signals we want to send. And even though you're sending the exact same signals in the conversion API, as you are your offline events,
Greg Marshall 23:17 and your pixel, especially those that are all very similar datasets, they can use those to make a statistically significant, you know, guess, much more accurately, because you're giving it a lot more data. Yep. So I think those So with all this kind of, we're talking heavy about data. The reason why we tend to talk about data so much, is because the date of data runs everything. Right? No matter I mean, right now, we're talking about advertising, but you can you can talk about weight loss, you're talking about data and school, data's data runs everything, and you can't make smart decisions. Unless you know, unless the data is correct, right? And then even more importantly, what to do with it. Right? So it does, you know, good to, like, have all this data, but then not know what decisions right you need to make. And so that's why we're talking about data's, you want to get that all figured out so that you can start to figure out what drives your business performance, which is everyone wants increased sales and profitability, right? This data will give you that, but you have to work hard to get it all in a way that you can make actual business decisions to you're maximizing the return on your dollar. Right. And that's, that's what all marketers are business owners really want the end of the day is, how do I make sure that if I spend the dollar that at least a second one comes back? Right, exactly. Well,
Blake Beus 24:46 in and out. I know I talked about data and we're both nerds in our own way and I'll fully admit that, but this doesn't have to be insanely complicated. Like if you're a business owner solo business owner Small Business sonar whatever. I would say this does not have to be super complicated because most of the work can be done for you if you pick the right platform to kind of run your business off of. And I know this is a big decision and a big, big question mark that a lot of people have. But it's one of the reasons say in the E commerce space, why Shopify is the gold standard. While they're not perfect, yep, they do put a lot of effort into making sure they have tight integration with ad platforms. And they spent years and years and years doing that. And I wouldn't be surprised if Shopify has an entire team dedicated to basically being a liaison with Facebook and making sure the ads and making sure that we're doing things the way Google wants it done. And we're doing things the way Facebook wants it done so that a person can sign up for Shopify store, they can literally click a button and turn on conversion API. Yep, which implementing that yourself behind the scenes is a lot of work with Shopify, you can click a button, there are other platforms that make this easy. I use a cart software called Pay kickstart for a lot of my subscriptions and things. They have that integrated, I can just click a button and handle the authorization and boom, it's done. But you need to make sure you pick a platform that allows you to do two things. Now that allows you to have the conversion API and allows you to export your order data with timestamp, and all of that stuff, so that you can then upload that if you have those two pieces in place, this is very easy to do. And it's very approachable. If you don't have those two pieces in place, it can get really complicated.
Greg Marshall 26:29 Well, and you know what, I'm happy you brought that up. Because one of the things, you know, just running a lot of different accounts, different clients use different software's. The software's that used to work really well before you needed aggregate events, and server side and API and all that. They don't work as well anymore at the moment, because there's no way to kind of update, right, the new way of doing it. Like for example, I'm not going to say the company's names. But an example would be what you used to be able to do is like just take your pixel ID, and plug it in to these platforms where people can use forms. Yeah. And the pixel itself would just figure out all the events. Yeah, that's all you needed to do, right? But now you have to verify your domain. Well, now you can't use that domain unless you verify and there's multiple ways you have to do that. And then if you have multiple websites, you have to figure that out. And then the other thing is the actual conversion events that you want it to track. Well, you have to be able to put code and now specific pages versus before that just that Id alone would fix that for you. Right? So there's multiple steps that are now and if they're purchasing through these platforms, a lot of them don't have the time that they purchase. Like they're not recording that or at least they're not giving it to me, right, yeah, they're not allowing you to export that. And so because of that, then you're off on events won't be as accurate, then it would if you're using platforms that are more up to date, like a shop, right? Well, and this is this is you talked about verifying your domain. And that's a really important piece that not a lot of people think about when they're picking a platform. So, five, six years ago, the
Blake Beus 28:16 standard was for a very easy kind of funnel situation was to sign up for a service, I would have my domain name, Blake beus.com, or whatever, I would be able to associate that with, you know, the funnel builder, but then when it came to making the payment or something, the domain name would be something like something that you know, something like, I don't know, payments, start payment, platform.com or whatever. And then that's how you would make the payment. Well, I can't verify that domain, because I don't own that exact payment platform owns that exactly. And so now Now, that's a problem, because I am required to verify that domain in order to capture purchase events through the pixel Exactly. So you have to, you have to own those domains name now. And so a lot of these companies are having to shift. They did that for a reason on purpose. And it wasn't a bad reason. It was a security reason there. That way, they could own the security certificates to make sure the payment was sent securely and encrypted. But now there's this layer of complexity. Yeah, it doesn't have to be crazy though. There's, there's some, there's some ways to make it happen. But if you pick the right kind of platform, they will handle creating the security certificates for your domain. That's easy. Now, it used to be hard. It's easy. Now, it's easy to do that in a secure way. But you have to get a platform that allows you to do that. So do a little bit of research on how they handle payments and things. Because some of the ones that used to be big a few years ago, are behind the times and don't allow you to do this now. And they need to play a little bit of catch up. And some advice that I actually would give is if you're on one of these platforms. In fact, I'm talking with a client after this podcast, see if we can do this but
Greg Marshall 30:00 If you're on one of those platforms, and you're wondering, is it worth the change, I would say yes, even if it's a headache, initially, I would switch over because whatever, you know, getting that data back into your ad accounts is more important than I think a lot of people understand. Because if your ad platform can't optimize, and you're using ADS to grow, then you're you're basically already starting at a disadvantage, right? And you're keeping yourself at a disadvantage. You will, I don't want to say never, but you will rarely outperform your competitor, who maybe has the right platform. And the same same everything, they will outperform you just because that data will get fed into their accounts faster and more efficiently than yours, and therefore they will win. So you can have a competitive advantage could be having a better cleaner platform being the data versus your competitors.
Blake Beus 30:56 Yeah, yeah. And we keep kind of circling back on onto this. As business owners, you're going to have to take more ownership over your platform, it's, it's where the future is, as agency owners, you're going to have to probably have some sort of tech, nerd contact or whatever, that can help sort out some of these complex platform issues. And make sure that the reporting and everything is, right, this guy is why you're gonna, you're gonna need more and more of that. And some people might be able to say, well, I can do both, and that's totally fine. But realistically, you know, media buying, and that tech side of things are quite different or appeal, set weight, and quite different expertise. And so I would recommend getting a good relationship and sending work if you're small agency sending work back and forth between one another from the media buying and, and just build that relationship. If you're a little bit larger agency, get a platform specialist in house that can help sort these issues out. Because if you're going to bring on a client and they have a platform that's not quite right, you either need to do a platform conversion, at least for the payment side of things, or you're going to need to build some sort of custom solution that can overcome the platform limitations. Exactly. Because it's, it's, it's the future, where having the wrong platform is going to completely kill your business is not that far down the road.
Greg Marshall 32:16 Yes. And it matters like back, you know, when I say back in the day, we're talking like just like a year and a half. But even you it matters so much, that I can just tell you from experience running ads with similar products, just on different platforms, the performance is night and day. And trust me, if you if you want to see a better performance, you want to take your data collection, and I'm putting all this together very seriously. Because if you do, trust me, you'll make better business decisions, you'll have better results. And you'll you'll gain an advantage over the competition who's not willing to invest in these types of strategies. So, Blake, I mean, I know we covered a lot today. Yeah. When I wouldn't
Blake Beus 33:03 say a data. Yeah, let me just wrap all this up into some sim because I like to simplify the apps because it's easy to go down this rabbit hole. The simple, simple, simple thing you should be doing right now is upload offline data daily. Yep, that's it. If you're doing everything else, even if you have the conversion API all set up, upload that offline data daily, do it every day, just if you do that every day, and it can you can get it down so that it's it's a few minute job, it doesn't have to be this crazy, difficult thing. Do that every day, I guarantee you, you're gonna start seeing more interesting results. And you'll be able to make better decisions on your ads. Oh, no, by doing that one simple thing everyday for you, your business or your clients.
Greg Marshall 33:47 So I think, you know, wrap this up, I think, take your data serious and build a system that can track and monitor and use like Blake got me on this. Make, you know, business intelligence, business intelligence to make the right decisions and to grow. So with that being said, Blake, how do people get a hold of
Blake Beus 34:10 Blake beus.com. And there's the SM3 group there that Greg and I are both involved with if you have any questions surrounding marketing, organic, social media, marketing, any of that stuff, we have a bunch of tools to help you do all of that stuff. It's a great place to be when
Greg Marshall 34:23 to reach me, you can go to Greg marshall.co, you can book strategy session if you have any questions and until next time, we'll see you later. Bye.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:00 All right, yeah. Okay. All right. Greg, you were telling me about this time you were working with a client. And you, you let them convince you to make changes, you knew we're not good changes. Yeah. And it didn't, then well. So yes, I wanted to ask you kind of about when you should put your foot down, when you're working with clients, when you should put your foot down and say, No, you're not making these changes, we are not making these changes, and like, how to how to handle that.
Greg Marshall 0:32 Yeah. So I think what I've learned over, you know, I don't know how many clients I've worked with at this point. But it's very similar to even personal training. Clients are, you know, they become influenced by things they're seeing and hearing and, or maybe a conviction that they suddenly have. And when, in the past, what would happen is, I'm thinking of it as one particular client. Yeah, where I'm like, man, you know, they really had huge momentum. And they, because I allowed them to convince me that they should do a different thing. They completely have, like, gone the wrong direction. And so I think the correct time is, immediately, when, when, like, when I look back at because, you know, you make mistakes, even even when it's like indirect, right? Like, it wasn't actually my advice to do what they were doing, but I did it to satisfy the client. There's, there's a slight danger in that. Yeah. Because sometimes you can actually not get the client the results that they actually are desiring by allowing them to dictate what's happening, right. And kind of the situation was, we were talking, we had the way I structured everything, actually not I think this happens twice. The way we structure everything was a way that they felt they personally just fell out of their comfort zone and out of control. Okay. And because of that they made decisions based on that versus the result.
Blake Beus 2:02 Okay, what was was, was this the business owner, like the founder, the founder, owner owner role times both times, okay, okay. Because I think that's relevant sometimes, because they're used to having control over everything. And as a business scales, this happens in more areas than just advertising and media buying. But they need to start letting go of control and delegating and dictating. And this is probably, you know, an instance of that as well. Right? Well, and they were both solopreneurs. Okay, right. And so they didn't even have a team. They don't have any other contractors other than you.
Greg Marshall 2:39 Maybe, but I don't think so. Okay, if they did, it was to two or three. Okay. And so one of the, one of the things that I learned, though, is because I can, in my mind, I can remember exactly what I would do differently, which is, I would have said, You should follow this system, regardless of how you feel. Just look at the numbers. Right? Right. And we were talking about how a lot of times we're making decisions off of emotion. And that's usually the times where you make the worst, right? Because your fears is taken into account, or stress, and then you just start making these these decisions that they don't really make any sense. Yeah, right. And the situation was the way that I had the campaign structured, I had a whole bunch of ad sets, a whole bunch of different targeting a whole bunch, just a lot of stuff visually, when they looked at it, they couldn't fully understand it. Right. And so because of that, they felt like, oh, I don't like I don't like how this looks okay. versus how much am I spent? How much time?
Blake Beus 3:49 Right? And was this? Was this recent, or years ago? Or what is
Unknown Speaker 3:53 two years
Blake Beus 3:54 ago? Two years ago? Okay.
Greg Marshall 3:55 So it's been two years, because I know,
Blake Beus 3:57 we've talked recently about a simpler campaign structure, but a few years ago, yes, that's what was working, that's having a lot of different campaigns and a lot of different targeting of peaks acid,
Greg Marshall 4:07 this is before iOS, right? changes where you can, you know, really, you could
Blake Beus 4:12 really get targeted and really get that data. Whereas now that's, that's not really available. So broader campaigns, especially in Facebook broadcasts tend to work better. Well, and
Greg Marshall 4:21 here's, here's the other thing. So this also applies to now. So people who are stuck and living in the old days of how things used to be, which is the big mistake you can make if you're running a business is to follow how things used to be and not adapt to what is now, right, you get, you know, with the whole iOS changes, now people can't see the tracking as well. And so that's sometimes drives them to want to test there's got to be some secret targeting out there, of being able to track this and that's just not the case. And so, this iOS change has actually helped me get better at leading the client and telling them no This is what we need to do, regardless of how we feel okay? Right. And I use those numbers that we're talking about, because there are actual, like benchmarks that I'm measuring everything. But in the past, I have never really like, educated the customer, okay, on these numbers. And it wasn't until last week when we had a conversation, where Blake actually, he structured a sentence that I think kind of like changed my whole mindset, because what's obvious to him was a blind spot for me. And he talked about business intelligence. And since I've used what he basically taught me last week, it is already helped my clients tremendously and feeling like we're on the right track, okay. And it's like a strategy, because this whole time I've been operating off this strategy, but never communicating. Okay, what that is, because normally, when I would bring it up, they would just kind of have a blank. Like, yeah, what does that mean? Exactly? Okay. And I would go through, so maybe I assumed, which is the wrong idea. I assume that maybe they're not interested in knowing any of this information. But it's actually incorrect. They are interested I, it's my job to break it down. For them to understand it in like the simplest terms.
Blake Beus 6:19 Okay, so what what are some of your tips and tricks to breaking down? Complex? You know, digital advertising and marketing numbers Sure, into what they actually want to know. Yep. Because a lot of times, they don't know what they want to know. Right? Because they're an expert in their area, whether it's ecommerce or, or something, they built it up to a point, and they're an expert in that area. But sometimes they don't know what to ask. So what's your tips on breaking down these complicated things? To give them the answers they want? So they can move on and feel good about where they're at?
Greg Marshall 6:53 Yeah, so number one, I basically measure against, like other people's accounts, and other numbers from my like history, right? So for example, knowing like, I don't want to exceed 30%, on marketing costs to revenue generation, right. And basically using that as like that as the top baseline of what we're going to use, and anything below that is good. All right. And then the next thing I explained is click through rates, and then offers. So with the click through rates, I just basically tell him what a click through rate means, okay, and what we're trying to achieve. So in the simplest term, I just say, the click through rate basically is telling you if we're either talking to the right person, or we're saying the wrong thing, okay, right. So if we're at 1% or higher, that means we're talking to the right person, we're saying the right thing. If we're below that, we need to change that. Okay. That's the that's the problem. Then, the next number I explained is if let's say we have a 2%, click through rate, I educate them on the mistake everyone makes is they have a high click through rate on the ad. And then people get to their page and no one buys. They think it's the ad. But it's not No, see, but most people don't know that. So before I wouldn't even explain that, I would just say, well, we have to, like fix the offer. And I would receive resistance from the business owner like no, there's got to be the ad is not doing right. And it's like, well, that's not really the case. So I use this as the analogy I use with all okay, I say, this is how it works. Let's pretend we're in a physical space. And we're at the mall. And you have a store at the mall, which is your Shopify store. And it's a very big mall, and you're trying to get your target customer into the store will find go outside and I have like the best sign ever. And I get them excited. And a whole bunch of people are coming to my billboard that a high sign that I'm spinning, and they go, Hey, where's this store where I can buy these unbelievable hoodies? It's right in here. And I send them in there. And then the hoodies are $10,000. And none of them can afford it. Or they go in there and we only have size large and everyone who went in as a size small, or they go in and we don't even have what we told them we had. What's the problem? Is it the advertisement? Or is it what's inside the store? Right? And they all understand that they grow. That makes sense. So I say when we have a high click through rate on our ad that means we did our job getting them there. Yeah, getting them excited. Now, we did not do our job once they got there. Right. And so that seemed that analogy right there seems to like simplify all the stuff that you can look in Facebook and Google and Tik Tok and all the ads he confused with. Yeah, to me, that's what simplifies it.
Blake Beus 9:54 Well, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. I think the only time that's not the case is if you're trying to intentionally deceive people with your ads And frankly, I just won't work with anybody. Well, that there are people out there that do that. So. So if they're getting there and they're landing on the page and they're not buying, then there's something wrong with the offer, or something broken on the page. That's the other thing to think about. And I think a lot of clients resist hearing that unless you explain it and break it down in a good way, because they're interpreting that as there's something wrong with me. Yes. Especially in a solo printer kind of business situation, because this is something they created. Yeah. And when you say, well, there's something wrong with the offer, they hear. I'm the screwed up one, because everybody kind of deals with impostor syndrome, especially at this stage in the business. And so breaking it down like that, I think removes helps them understand that you're not blaming them, you're just saying, Hey, here's the situation. So we need to pivot on the offer a little bit. Yep. And that's fine. Because you created these offers, you can also pivot on the offer, and you're super flexible. You don't have to like go to a board of directors and try to get approval for an offer change. If you're getting people into your, you know, mall store with your flippy sign and everything and people aren't buying, you can just ask them. Well, what did you expect this and this and this? Come back next week, and we'll have Hustings. We'll make that happen? Yep. And, and a lot of people don't think about how easy that can actually be. Yep. If you just, oh, they expect this close. Just give them that. We don't even need to change the ads, let's just change the page to give them exactly what they want. And now we're profitable. You just
Greg Marshall 11:31 made a point that I would have forgot to make. Okay, I didn't say. Okay, so I may or may have mentioned this maybe before, but I know I've told someone in person this. So one of my clients was getting zero sales. Okay, on their fitness product they're selling. Before the like, we started, right. So then we ran some tests. And for two weeks, we ran the we kept his ads the same. And all we do is change the landing page and the offer, and now he's getting sales all the time. Okay. But we never changed, the app never changed. The the ads never changed. The target never changed and nothing changed. Yeah, just what happened? What at the actual page. What's interesting is, if you look at the ads, the click through rates and everything have been the exact same, there has been no changes. Which would tell you that means the theory of they clicked on the ad. But when they were getting to the page initially, the offer was not good. Yeah, right. Right. But you change the offer, and now the same ad that you did nothing to converts. Right. And so that's, that's the point is to be flexible with what you're actually offering to test. Why aren't people buying? We don't have the, you know, the advantage of like in person, you can literally just ask the people, right, what it is online, you can't right? They're just, they don't reveal that to you. So you have to test things to see what it is. What are my favorite techniques to use for like, especially newer stores that are struggling with getting conversions a lot of times, because, like the point you made, the business owner believes they are the actual product, the art, they are the sweatshirts and the and the hats and the shoes, right? Which is incorrect. But I understand why they feel that way. Right. And I don't think it's wrong. I just think sometimes it can get in the way. So if it, one of my favorite techniques is when a company is struggling to get the conversions. What I typically like to do to see if it's people don't like the product, or if it's just like the price is I do a heavy discount for a short duration of time. And if we all of a sudden start seeing sales, then we know we're not communicating the value to justify the price. Right? Yeah, that's my favorite way to figure out a weave. Are we demonstrating enough value or do people think you are as a guest elite as you're saying you are right. Because if they all of a sudden are buying the product that means they liked the product right? Is they don't think the price is value to what you're giving them to?
Blake Beus 14:19 Yeah, I think I think that's a great strategy.
Greg Marshall 14:23 I usually have to twist the business owners heart Well, a lot of a lot of
Blake Beus 14:27 them don't want to discount and and I I fully understand I don't want to discount this I you know I should be able to sell it I put my heart and soul into this discounting cheapens the brand blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I heard Tony Robbins say I should be increasing my prices instead of decreasing my price. But here's the thing, you got to go through a chump troubleshooting phase. Yep. A temporary discount to try to identify a problem is not going to cheapen the brand. It could be a flash sale that you do for two weeks. And even though Tony Robbins tells you don't don't discount things because You'll cheapen your brand, the number of times I've seen a $7 offer from Tony Robbins is mind boggling. So that guy discounts his stuff all the time.
Greg Marshall 15:09 All the ones that say never discount, they do biggest perpetrators, they
Blake Beus 15:13 do it all the time. So you got to see, you got to look at what they're doing, not necessarily what they're saying. Because many times what they're saying is just marketing language to try to get you to buy whatever they're doing. So and then the other side of it is, you need to have an understanding, you need to explain this to your clients that people buy based on perceived value, not actual value. And the reason is, is because everybody's actual values a little bit different. Yep. And we don't know what the actual value is until we actually start using the thing or whatever. But when we're making a purchase decision, it's on perceived value. Now, that doesn't mean we should give everybody this perceived value, that's way overinflated and then try to sell that that's, that's manipulation. But if you're not explaining that value, so that they in their own head are thinking, this is a great deal. Yep. Even it doesn't matter if your product is $500, or $5. Yep, the perceived value is why people are buying. And so some time, if you get discount, if you discount and you're getting sales, then you got to think, Okay, we need to put some more explanation on the sales page or somewhere to explain the actual, you know, the value so that they can start adjusting their perceived value. And some great ways to do that are testimonials. Yep, it's a really good way to do that case studies to show results based on what your product is, or whatever. If it's something like a T shirt or whatever, because we talked about those a lot. Just some high quality lifestyle shots. Yep, can go a long way to increase the perceived value. There's lots of different ways to do it. But we need to have that understanding. Right? Well, and
Greg Marshall 16:57 that's, so if you're, if you're someone struggling with like, you're just starting and you can't, you're just not getting sales, be open minded to test that. Normally. When I said earlier, you got to twist their arm. It's because there is a fear. There's an assumption that everyone is watching. But it's false. Yeah, right. There's an assumption, like, I'm going on the news to announce to the entire world that I'm discounting my store. 50% Yeah. And now, you know, the whole world knows, cheap, you know, cheap and my brand. But really, that's an over, I guess, an over inflation. Oh, how much people are actually watching? Right. Right. So they're not going to remember you ran a sale to troubleshoot your brand, you know, two years ago?
Blake Beus 17:44 No, like, Absolutely not. So
Greg Marshall 17:46 don't only have to remember in two weeks, they might not even remember the mark. Yeah,
Blake Beus 17:50 there's so much going on. So I
Greg Marshall 17:53 think, you know, use that as an opportunity to figure out why. And I've done this multiple times with clients, and then they, they start to figure out, okay, because the fear uses if there's no conversions, it's no one likes my product. That's
Blake Beus 18:06 the fear. That's the fear. And that's someone who's created their own product. Yes, I felt that deeply. Yep. And it's normal. It is normal. I literally have been to therapy to help me with this problem. I think it's a very natural and normal thing. But it's something you kind of hit head on and worked through and work towards. And there's an entire industry of occupational therapists that help people deal with feeling that in their careers in one way or another, and it's totally valid, it's a valid feeling. And
Greg Marshall 18:42 so I think, usually, this is what I see. When, when, when a company is struggling to get conversions and people aren't buying it. They start that fear, it's triggering it more and more. So they're like, oh, no, no one likes my product. What happens? No, buy, you know, you go, you go through this negative mental cycle, right? But then when you run somebody this and then they see wow, I got a lot of sales when I did this discount. It's almost like it rejuvenates them, because then it proves them. Oh, people do like this. Right? Right. It's nice. I just need to figure out how can I sell it at a higher price, right? And so this is also a good way to build your confidence back up. Yeah, if you're struggling with like, Man, I spent all this time doing this and no one's buying it. This is this is a great way to do it. And don't be don't be afraid. Here's the other counterintuitive thing. So one of my clients we're running a retargeting campaign, which is gonna make total sense but to him, he felt like why why would we do that? So we, we, I think we're only knocking off like 15% or more, okay, like, they go on the page. Then they get retargeted I take 50% off right? Yeah, the funny thing because once again, this is the the tug of war with the client of like, just given Shot is there like, well, if I do that I'll be making less money. And once again, that's an emotional statement, because do you have something in front of you? Data that has showed that has proven that already? Yeah. Or have you tried it yet? Yeah. Well, we're running it and he's getting a 6x return about his retargeting. And I said, so interesting. We're lowering the costs.
Blake Beus 20:23 What's his what's his return on the cold traffic without the discount? 1.75 1.75. So this with people that don't buy, give him a 15% discount, and you're getting a 6x return? Yep. Even after accounting for the discount? Yep. So I'll do that all day long.
Greg Marshall 20:42 So to me, the cat. So this is where, you know, we talked about business intelligence, I have almost to ingrain in the head is look at how much we spent, how much was made. Yeah, look how much was spent. It's almost like as long as I keep that reminder, because the temptation is to act off a motion, right? And to say, I don't know if I feel like this is working, which, which is not the same as it is working.
Blake Beus 21:12 Right. I don't feel but but again, like the perceived value conversation, from a customer standpoint, as an agency owner to a client standpoint, they're making decisions based on that perceived value or emotion that I don't feel like this is a good idea. Yeah. Well, on paper, you're getting a 6x return. Yeah, you like to worry about how many times you just think about it, if I give this magical little machine over here, $1. And then they give me six back? I will keep doing that. Yep, I will keep doing that. I will do with 1.7. But I would rather do it with six, yep, you know, 6x. And so when people start wrapping their heads around that it's much easier in it, this makes me kind of take a big step back. And think the difference between really great media buyers and agency owners that work with clients, and those that are not really great, that tend to struggle is this ability to level up their own clients from an educational standpoint, to take the time to explain these concepts in a way that makes sense for them, so they stay on on board longer, they understand the value that they're getting, they understand and start to start to trust you more, but they've got to have that understanding.
Greg Marshall 22:32 Well, and I think you're 100%, right, which is, even as I you know, I've been doing this a long time, right. But there's always areas to improve. And that's an area of focus of mine, is to inject this philosophy of how if you think about it long term, and you're structuring off of these types of metrics, you'll get much better results than trying to do a hack or trying to just like, you know, skip steps, right, or not actually build a real machine. And because of that, I think, by educating them on this has been very helpful. Yeah, the business intelligence side, because with that, they're able to, it seems to drive down their anxiety. Yeah. Like, they just feel it. And once again, what is anxiety and emotion? It's not what's actually happening. Yeah. Right. And that's, that's the key. If anything, I would say, make sure to check your emotions as you're growing your business because you can make big mistakes in your business based off of feeling the wrong emotions for that day. And what I find there is a trend that I noticed when clients want to make changes. And it's normally they didn't sleep good. Maybe they got an argument with their significant other, okay, their children are driving crazy. Uh huh. And because of that, they want to make a change on their own.
Blake Beus 24:07 They want to feel some control in their life. I mean, really, I'm, I'm the champion, the champion, the champion of external factors wanting me to have some control in my business.
Greg Marshall 24:21 There's nothing wrong with that. I think that's I think that's a normal emotion. Yeah. So I don't want to sit here and say you should be a robot. Yeah, what I'm saying as you just take an extra step, and think, Okay, I feel very emotional right now, because of whatever. Uh huh. Let me take a rest for a minute. And just kind of decompress and then come back to this because I feel like it's kind of like, you know, you're married. If you're upset because of something at work. And then you go home and your wife says something to your likelihood of getting more set are some that means nothing is higher. And it has nothing to do with your wife.
Blake Beus 25:04 Nothing. Just because we're in an emotional state, right? And, and one trick I have for this particular thing, and maybe this is something that can help some clients or whatever is is to say, Okay, I want to make this change, decision made, which already makes me feel better because I made a decision. But then I say, I know I'm a little bit emotional, or I'm tired or whatever. So I'm not gonna actually implement it for 48 hours. And then 48 hours, most of the time, I'm like, Well, that sounds like a dumb idea. Sit on it for a minute and give it a minute. But if I do feel good about it by then I'll you know, I'll go ahead and make that change. And see, but I've at least, I've at least kind of felt like I did something by making the decision, but then waiting for 48 hours before actually implemented,
Greg Marshall 25:50 it's, it's a good, it's just a good way to do it. And it's something that I'm even trying to improve, how can I provide more value to my customers that could be as I'm doing more of this marketing, consulting and running ads, you also learn that some of the value that I believe, initially, I thought was not that valuable to the customer, is actually the big value of why people want to stay on like, remember, when we first got started, you refer to me as your marketing therapy. It was true, and it's more of not King Greg, click the buttons and get people, right. The value that you were really getting was, how do I not have so much anxiety that I'm crazy? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a big value to the customer is to be able to say, we got this. Yeah.
Blake Beus 26:46 And it was really nice for me to basically, to hand off that responsibility to you. Yep. So I could say, okay, Greg's got this, and he's gonna let me know how things are going. So I could focus on delivery or creating new products or whatever. And for you, it's less stress, because you didn't make the product and so you're not as emotionally detached in the product attached, you're detached, and so you can make better, more informed decisions. And, and it was it was, it's a great way to to delegate and handle and
Greg Marshall 27:21 it's almost you know, it's funny, it's almost now that you say that the perfect if you have if you have this question in your mind, should I hire an agency or a person to run my ads? It's not actually. Can they do the job? Yeah. It's, it's more about yourself? Do I have a tendency to feel anxious and concern about the ads when I run them? Yeah. If you do, you need to hire someone. And I'm being dead serious. Yeah, absolutely. If if you are someone that tends to stress out about, like, this isn't, you know, I got it, you know, and you just feel really emotional about it. You're the perfect candidate to actually hire someone else out, because you're the one that needs it the most. Because if you're if you can't just make decisions, like if you can't do this last night, you're with your family, you slept, no hours, you everything went wrong at home, and then you come you come into work, and you look at your numbers, and you can't separate the numbers from the business and home life. You really need to hire this. Because that just shows like everyone that if you run into that risk, you have to understand what your weaknesses are. Yeah. You just have like, we all have them. And that's
Blake Beus 28:50 and that's taking it way big step back and just talking about business growth in general. That's something you're going to have to step through if you want to scale. Yep. Right. And it happens so much with solo solo entrepreneur kind of situation, which, you know, I was in multiple times. You have to be able to let go of some of that control and delegate and train and one of my favorite books on this. It's an old book, it's called the E Myth. Have you ever read? Yeah, amen.
Greg Marshall 29:24 That's actually one of the first books I ever read. Yeah, it's,
Blake Beus 29:27 it's an excellent book. It's more about, you'd have to translate it over to like a digital, kind of kind of context, but still really helpful. But you have to wade through that. And if you don't wade through that, your business will always stay capped at a certain level. Now, some people are totally fine with that. Maybe it's like a second income type situation and that is completely fine. But if you're at a position where you're thinking, I'm doing everything and I can't seem to get this over the top, you have to find a way to let go of some of that control. and delegate pieces of your business and one area is with, you know, a media buyer marketing agency or whatever. And I don't want to talk about this right now, we should definitely do one on this. But how to find good media buyer or agency or something? Because that those are murky waters? Yeah, that is not an easy thing to do. And you can, I've worked with agencies that have a flashy website, so you have all the right words and language. And then when you start working with them, they don't really know. Anything. And and, and I've worked with others that their presence is small or whatever online, but they know they're stuck. Yep. And so maybe that's something we can cover. And we should
Greg Marshall 30:45 definitely talk about that. Because they're, you know, without, you know, saying any names or whatever. There's, there's a couple people that I'm working with right now that match that, yeah, now we're on this front end level, the public believes that they are running all these ads and all that, but then I'm in the background. And so they're hiring me like, Hey, I've actually been told this, we don't know how to market. Yeah. And I remember thinking, marketing, your marketing. And I couldn't believe hear that, right. But it just makes it makes you question all types of things. Who else is telling you they know how to do something? They have no clue. But yeah, I mean, and it's out there. And it's no, this isn't about shaming, or making people feel bad. This is just about knowing how to vet and do all that. And so we should, we should talk about this, because there's definitely some way just to protect yourself. And to make sure you get the maximum value Absolutely.
Blake Beus 31:45 In this in the same area. I feel like website development because I've I approach all of this from that was where I spent the first 10 years was in website development surrounding marketing technology. But the same thing is, is when someone wants to hire a website developer, yeah, the same problem happens i i worked with one company. At the by the time the project was done, the client had spent over $500,000, on this website, five, it was it was a very, very large product $500,000 on this website. And six months later, the whole project was scrapped because it was full of security holes. And this was this was in an industry where you just couldn't have a security problem. And the amount of effort it would be for for me and my team at the time to fix all of that would wouldn't have been worth it. And then
Greg Marshall 32:44 later, I wouldn't want to write a check big enough.
Blake Beus 32:48 I found out later that that agency had literally just found someone on Upwork to do all their development, because they didn't have any in house developers gonna have graphic designers and other things like that. They didn't have a developer, so they just hired someone on Upwork that said they had the skills. And that one person who they probably only paid maybe 50 grand, that one person did all of the stuff. Yep. And then they charged
Greg Marshall 33:13 $500,000. And that just shows you to to never, from a consumer standpoint, don't underestimate the expertise of cert like meaning, don't arrogantly believe that other industries are not as valuable as others because what that typically means is all well, anyone can do a developer. Anyone can make. Yeah, anyone can do email mark, right? You're making these assumptions. Like it's not that hard. Can't be that hard, right? And that's if you have that kind of mentality, you're most likely going to fall prey to that and end up hiring people that aren't actually good at what they say they're good. Yeah, or make a huge mess of things that don't need to be made. But anyways, we don't want to get too crazy. Yeah, we'll do a whole nother.
Blake Beus 34:04 I just was thinking of that just now. So we'll we'll make that happen. But let's let's wrap this up. If you were to kind of summarize this whole conversation, Greg, on how you've learned to better handle those anxieties, communicate with your clients better. Wrap it up, give us give us a good summary.
Greg Marshall 34:21 Yeah, I think the biggest thing is this, I need to directly tell them number wise, this is what we're going to do. And take the leadership of that and say we are doing this and being okay with if it fails Tommy and, and not kind of shying away from them. And I think with that kind of mentality and simplifying what really matters from don't even think about everything else. A couple of numbers. They just need to know how much we spend and how much are we making? What's the actual return? What's the click through rates?
Blake Beus 34:57 And then what's next and how I compare and how do I compare to others? Well, everybody worries about that. Yeah. How do I compare to others? How's
Greg Marshall 35:04 my progress good and good. That's actually what I'm getting better at is telling people this, you're either succeeding or we're not where we need to be yet.
Blake Beus 35:13 So we're going to make some adjustment. So this is where we're succeeding. We don't necessarily need to make those adjusts.
Greg Marshall 35:18 We make no adjustment. My job is to make sure you don't do anything. Yeah. Maybe,
Blake Beus 35:23 maybe test scaling up if you have that model supports that. Right. The business model supports that. So all right, cool. I like that. Greg, how can people reach out to you,
Greg Marshall 35:30 Greg marshall.co, and you can book a free strategy session.
Blake Beus 35:34 Blake beus.com. I have the SM3 group in there. It's a group kind of code coaching consulting surrounding social media marketing. So you can check that out.
Greg Marshall 35:43 Well, until next time, we'll see you guys later.
Blake Beus 35:45 Okay, catch you later. Bye. Bye.
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Transcript
Greg Marshall 0:00 All right. Well, I think we were talking a little bit about server side. Google Tag Manager tag. Yeah. All right. So because I don't know much about this, and you're more on the technical side, we're gonna run this more like an interview style. All right, let's do and, and I'm gonna ask questions that I think clients would actually asked. Yeah. And then you can respond to that, they at least have a deep understanding of what we're doing. So number one, what is
Blake Beus 0:25 let's talk about what Google Tag Manager is a lot. I mean, many, many, many of you out there are already maybe know what this is. But the problem that was built to solve was essentially, a lot of marketers and advertisers needed the ability to control a little bit of the marketing code on the website, without having to necessarily involve developers. So traditionally, you had to like copy and paste that code, to put it on the website. And if you're a larger organization, you needed to get a developer involves to make sure the code was was loading correctly on the page and everything like that. But that slowed down your ability to launch campaigns into trying to try to set up new funnels and things. So Google came out with this thing called Google Tag Manager, which allowed the developers to put the code on, put some code on the page at once in a little code container. And then marketers had a nice little interface that they could log into. And they could drop. Not even really code. I mean, you could put code, but you could drop data pieces that would fire marketing tags, or event tags and things. So you could control that as a marketer, and make adjustments as you needed it without having to wait for a developer team with all of their different responsibilities and everything. Yep. So you could you could put that so that's what was there for. Got it. So So now there is now we have a server side version of that, and what is server side me. So server side essentially means basically, where where the code is run, and where your where, where the ownership of the data kind of comes from. So traditionally, the the Google Tag Manager server was Google's server. And it was owned by Google. And it was on a google.com domain, it was like Google Tag, manager.com domain. And all of the data that Tag Manager collected, went to Google Tag Manager first, and then was forwarded on to whatever marketing tools you were using, whether it's your email marketing platform, or whatever. With server side, a company now has the ability to create their own server, they could still host it with Google, but it would be a server on your own domain name, okay. So it could be like Tag Manager, dot Blake beus.com, or like Tag Manager dot, Greg marshall.co, or whatever, yep. And then the Tag Manager, server software runs there. And then when you put the code container on your own website, it's not a Google Tag, manager.com. Domain Name, it's your domain name. And the data flows from there to a server that you own, and then out to your marketing platform. And
Greg Marshall 3:13 as far as like, why, why is that? I mean, I think I know the answer. But I think most clients would have this question. Why is that important?
Blake Beus 3:23 So it all has to do with first party and third party data. Right? So there's all these things in America, it's starting to impact us more in the in Europe, it's even bigger with their GDPR. They have different privacy rules and everything surrounding first party and third party data. So first party data is essentially you're interacting with my website, you know, you're interacting with my website. And I'm collecting data as the owner of that website and everything. So there's it's a lot clearer who owns that data, and just your click and browsing data. And and it's very clear to the user that, oh, Blake, or you know, Blake's business is probably collecting some data, third party data is much less transparent, and that I could have all these tracking codes on my website and everything. And someone could come to my website. And then who knows, I could have a data broker that selling their data off to a credit company or something like that, and they would have no idea that that was happening. So that's third party data, and we're getting more and more and more laws put in place, and tech restrictions put in place to prevent third party data from happening because there's these privacy concerns. So that was one of the big reasons. stated reasons with iOS 14 and iOS 14.5 of making the changes they had because they're like, We want to make sure that people are understanding and it's clear who's who's Only what they're doing what they're
Greg Marshall 5:00 using, why they're using it, right. Got it, right. So that's why this is important. Now from a business aspect, this is actually super beneficial, because this can help you improve your understanding of return on investment.
Blake Beus 5:16 Yeah, it helps, it helps in several ways. First, it improves your data collection process, right? So I don't know exactly how a lot of this is going to shake out. But as of right now, it's quite likely that if you set up Google Tag Manager server side under your own domain name, iOS 14, will likely not black block a lot of that stuff, which they currently are. And the reason is, is it's a technical reason, one of the ways iOS 14 blocks tracking data, is they block it based on domain name. So anything Google tag manager.com, just don't let that traffic go through. Well, if it's a workaround, if it's Greg Marshall, you know, if it's tracking, Greg marshall.co, Apple doesn't have a block list for Greg Marshall, they probably don't even I mean, they they take your money, but yeah, the Apple execs don't know. Right? They don't. And, and it may NFU,
Greg Marshall 6:15 and it would be harder for them to do this. Because you'd have to do this individually per domain, which would make this harder to block.
Blake Beus 6:24 Absolutely. And it it may you mean, you said it's like a workaround? And in effect it is. But it really has to do with who's owning the data and the transparency of of how that data is being used?
Greg Marshall 6:41 Do you think it's more some of my thoughts about the data and where it's going, do you think it has a lot to do more with we may get, like we you almost may get access to the data used to have as long as it's first party. And the reason why they're doing that is because they want to just make sure they can hold organizations or people accountable for specific actions.
Blake Beus 7:06 Yeah, I think so I think there's a lot of accountability there. There's a lot of of ownership there. I mean, back in the back in the day, 10 years ago, you know, eight to 10 years ago, throw whatever on there. And that data was just getting any elected all over the place. It's still getting collected a lot today. I mean, I don't know if if you watch John Oliver at all, every now and again, I'll pick some up because you know who he is. He's a he runs a comedy show. But it's all political based. And he's a little bit left leaning. But he he does tackle some interesting topics. And one of them he tackled was called data brokers. It's something we haven't even talked about a whole lot on here. But there's this whole other layer behind the scenes of these huge companies that all they do through through these ad networks. And I'm not talking Google ads, or Facebook ads, I'm talking the ad networks, on all the sites that you're not familiar with. Those are ads. They collect a ton of data about people and then they just sell sell it, sell it to everybody. And it's deonna D. It's anonymized. Okay, right. They have a word for it or whatever. But the thing is, it's anonymized data, but it's this person was at this place, and he stays the night there every night of the week. But we don't know who that person is. Yeah, it's very easy to D anonymize that for someone that and that's an issue that a lot of companies are trying to solve, and some of these laws are trying to solve. So if I own the data, Blake Beus owns that data, I have zero desire to sell that data off to a Data Broker, I have no, it's not something I do or whatever. But if I put if I had a blog or something, and I was trying to expand my ad networks, and I was using some, some ad network to drop some marketing code on there, and I have no control over what types of data they're collecting. But if now with Google Tag Manager being server side owned, I own all of that data that sits there in my own database, even though Google is providing the software, and then I get to choose who I'm sending that to. And it's, it's a lot less wild, wild west. Got
Greg Marshall 9:17 it. So, you know, what it sounds like his data is merging, or just, there's an evolution of cleaning it up. Making sure that it's taken care of. Yeah, just because maybe the the value wasn't seen years ago. Yeah. In the past, like, they say data is the most valuable thing. Right, right. And so because of that, you almost have to make sure there are some kind of regulations and things to keep things in order. Yeah, just because you don't want you know, wanting to go crazy as yours, how it can be used, and people just not knowing but I just think overall, organizing is probably the better way to do it. And Initially, I think there's maybe some pushback with, especially marketers, because you use us in the early stages, I think long term, it's probably going to actually make things better. I think so because then so who knows what you can do with your own data as far as what that value actually is? Because like, in the past, it was just customer list, right? And people who've purchased from me, and that's kind of your, your asset. But now, if you have first party, that could also be sold off probably, if your company was bought, right?
Blake Beus 10:33 Yeah. Like if you if you have an exit plan, and you want to, you know, you, you, you sell your company or whatever, that's a business asset that you spent a lot of money and time and time growing. And as someone who maybe has an expectation, the exit plan, or whatever, you could, you could probably write into the contract, here's what you are allowed to do with this data. And here's what you're not allowed to do with this data if we agree to these terms. And, again, for me, I have zero desire for any of the data that I collect on my website is sold to a Data Broker, it doesn't, it's not a thing that benefits me at all
Greg Marshall 11:08 right. And so I think, too, with first party data, it's a great way to package the value. I think this could be just an absolute, I could be completely wrong. But my guess would be in the future that could increase the value of a company is not only your customer list, but what is your your data? What are the all the data you have? Because if you can hand that off to someone that is buying your company? Yeah, that's, to me, that's one of the most valuable things is what are all these datasets that you have that we could use to keep growing the business? Yeah. And give us a head start?
Blake Beus 11:44 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I feel like and I know, I've said this before, in the future, my prediction, and I'm confident I'm 100%, right on this is that businesses are going to have to own their platform, meaning they're going to have to have ownership over the servers that their website runs on, they're going to have to have ownership over their marketing tools, they're going to have to have ownership over their how they're gathering visitor data. And that means there's going to be a higher technical barrier to getting to that, because now you have to know how servers work and at some of these things, and, but what that means is, because of that ownership, you're gonna get cleaner data, yeah, you're gonna get access to data that in maybe a year from now, you can ask a question. Hey, what about? Remember that one campaign that we ran? Or, hey, is there anything similar between the people that follow this step into into this purchase funnel? You can go back and answer those questions. Whereas right now, that's really hard to do. Yep. So owning that entire stack is going to be more and more and more important. And I think the negatives is you're going to start having places where they handle a lot of that stuff for you. It's going to be harder and harder and harder for them to scale. And I'm thinking of places like click funnels, right, yes, funnel builders or, or Kajabi that builds funnels, or, or Squarespace or maybe even Wix, or whatever. Shopify maybe kind of fits into that category. But Shopify does some unique stuff. And I feel like they stay on top of things pretty fast. And I'm, I would be pretty confident that they would basically make it easy for you to spin up your own server that you have ownership over, but then you your Shopify fee is basically a maintenance, right, but but it would be kind of like your own ownership or something like that. I feel like they would have a way to do that. But these other like click funnels, I don't know full up people know this, but their privacy agreement, they share data all over the place. They share it all over the place. And I'm gonna guess most of those, any of those funnel builders, builders probably do the same thing. Yep. And I think that's going to be a hinderance in the future more than it is going to be a benefit. So what I think those sites will turn into would be something like, Okay, I have a business idea. I've got this, this plan, and I need something quick and dirty to get started. But then once you hit a certain level, you'll you'll need to move off to a platform that you all
Greg Marshall 14:29 well, I think there's gonna probably all that really means is, you know, businesses a constant pivot, right. And what that means is there's going to be more offerings, new services provided of people, you know, helping you build this out. Yeah. And giving it to you. So I think, to me, it looks bright as far as what what's going to happen because if you think about it, you don't first party data you always want because you don't want to put your hands at the ear your business in the hands of someone House because you can't control that. Right? So the first party stuff I think is going to totally be beneficial. I think he's going to be a big asset to everyone who starts to build it. If you build early, you'll probably have an advantage just like anything. Yep. And I think it's really important to also understand like, at the moment, if someone wants to execute this, and they know nothing about code or whatever, should they just go to Upwork? Or what do they do to set this up? Or is this or this, Google has something already set up? Where a person maybe that similar to like myself, that knows some, but not all? Yeah. Are there instructions to follow? Or is it just hired out, like, just find someone just say, hey, just build this,
Blake Beus 15:49 both. First, I always think it's worthwhile to have an understanding, even if you're not a technical server administrator, or DevOps kind of person, to have a good understanding about just the project and how it works in general, maybe you're not the one writing the code or whatever. So that's the first thing, Google has some documentation on it. And it's, it's literally like two pages of documentation, I think you could read it in a few minutes. Second, you can definitely look at hiring it out to someone on Upwork. It's a relatively new thing.
Greg Marshall 16:23 I was just gonna ask you, how do you know if someone actually knows how to do? Well, you
Blake Beus 16:27 got to you got to interview them and ask them. And I mean, look, I've been doing this kind of stuff for a long time. But I haven't actually ever set up a server side. But I read through all of their instructions. And I understand every bit of the process. And I've done the exact same process just with something else, right. So I'm 100% confident that I could launch this, get it set up and everything, I've done all of the puzzle pieces, I just haven't done it with this software package. So that's one way to do it. The third thing is, is a lot of people don't know this. But companies like Google and Amazon, they have an entirely different side of their business. Okay. So with Amazon, it's called Amazon Web Services. Yes. And what it is, is it's for hosts, it's for hosting servers, web servers, databases, all of these things. And they own the physical infrastructure. But you own the server, which is basically a think of it like a virtual machines server running on their hardware, but it's your, you have to maintain it and everything. Google has the exact same thing. And it's called GCP, Google Cloud Platform. And it's for web servers, right, and you can, you can set up web servers, starting, I even have a free tier, okay, so as long as you don't hit a certain like traffic threshold or bandwidth threshold, you don't have to pay anything for your first server. And I think you can only use one of one of those at a time or whatever. So reading through the documentation on Google Cloud Platform, they said that 99.9% of use cases, the free tier for server side, Google Tag Manager is fine, it's fine. So you don't even have like an extra cost associated with this. Now, Google Cloud Platform, they may even have like a one click Provisioning Service as part of it for Google Tag Manager, what that means is you basically hop in there and say, Okay, I want a server on your free tier, I want a virtual server. And I want you to install all the software, I need to run Google Tag Manager server side, go. And then it has a bunch of scripts behind the scenes that and I'm gonna get nerdy here, behind the scenes, that's going to install Ubuntu, probably 2022 Server Edition, it's going to put the web server software on there, which is probably a software called nginx, they're going to they're going to put your file management software on there. And then they're going to put, you know, open open up the firewall port so that you have the secure traffic that can come into that. And then they will after all of that provisioning is done. They will then install the Google Tag Manager software and they'll say you're done. What domain Do you want this to point to? And then you pointed to that domain, and then they'll give you a login. Got it. But that is your server, even though it's on their whatever on their physical hardware cloud, that is your server to own and maintain. And that's your database of data. And that's your domain name, and that's yours
Greg Marshall 19:30 data. And how do you so you've used a word that I think is important to what type of maintenance does it require from a technical side? Do you need to be doing something to make sure that it's up today? That's working the way it's supposed? Yeah.
Blake Beus 19:48 So So typically, when you own your own server in a virtualized environment like this, you are responsible for server updates and a server operating system, and then code updates and things things a lot Along those lines, I went, whenever I spin up a server like this, I usually use a service called Digital Ocean. They're one of my favorites, that they they host the server and I can spin up a server as needed. But then I also use an external service that I pay 15 bucks a month for, that will install security updates, it will notify me of things going on behind the scenes or whatever. And that's for a specific, that's for a specific kind of technology stack, that service wouldn't work necessarily for Google Cloud Platform. That being said, Google Cloud Platform does have some services that can help auto install updates and things along those lines. And you
Greg Marshall 20:37 would pay for that you would say like to like, add, like, I want this or that? Or maybe it kind
Blake Beus 20:43 of depends, I wouldn't be surprised if for their free tier for this service for this offering. If Google has some sort of a way to just say, Yes, I want you to do automatic server updates, and not charge you for it. Because, frankly, it's in their best interest to do so like, they want people to continue to use Google Tag Manager, they want people to continue to use their platform and their service and everything. And so they're incentivized to make it as easy as possible for for that to happen. But it's definitely going to be more technical than just using the regular Google tablets people are used to Yeah, so but I think it's approachable. For anybody that has the ability to learn new things and learn a new skill, I think it's probably going to be quite approachable for someone like
Greg Marshall 21:28 them. Well, it sounds like to the next wave, you know, how social media marketing was a big wave early on. And, you know, really picked up. I think the next wave is going to be this the actual technical side of implementing, because of all these changes. Yeah. And I think there's some big opportunities for you know, for guys like you that already have corporate experience and, and entrepreneurial experience with how to code all this and how to make it safe. Yeah, and not break. Right. And all that I think, I think there's going to be a big shift in needing that, right? Because it sounds like most of the platforms are in fact, before we started recording that I asked you a question about like, Well, how do you even figure out like, Tik Tok their retargeting was asking for, and I can't remember something about like an advertiser ID. Yeah, suddenly advertiser ID and I said, Well, how does someone even figure that out? Yeah, you don't? I mean, and so I think that those are the types of questions that are gonna happen. And you're gonna start seeing maybe a higher. In fact, you're working with a couple of companies that hired you for these types of things, right, that they're actually hiring outside consultants, to make sure that they can come in and do a lot of does it stuff because they don't know. Yeah,
Blake Beus 22:52 well, exactly. I think if you're even a small, you know, media buyer agency or something like that, it'd be worth trying to build a relationship with someone that's more technical, because the these two sides of things, the technical side of things, the DevOps, the software engineering side, are and the the the marketing the media buying side, those two things are going to become more and more more intertwined, as we go down the road. And so having either a working relationship with someone who's doing that as Freelancer consulting, or bringing someone that's good in house to help with that is going to be very important.
Greg Marshall 23:31 You know, it's funny, you'll probably remember this. So remember, there was like a, I don't know, maybe a two year stint where growth hacking was like a, like a term that was being thrown around everywhere. And I remember there was an integration of where, like the Ubers, and Airbnb, they were pairing up with software engineers and marketers to like, make the ultimate Yeah, marketing machines, right. And then for some reason, it felt like that went away. And I'm not 100% Sure, maybe, you know, but it just felt like you should have stopped hearing about like growth hacking just kind of went away. But it sounds like it's gonna move back to that. But on a more, I guess, long term basis, meaning growth hacking is probably not sustainable. As far as like, there's no real hacks that you can do for the long term. No. But utilize it. But the philosophy I think, is a good one, which is pair up marketing and salespeople with, you know, engineers. Yeah. And then have the engineers how does that like, say, we need this and the engineer knows how to actually build it correctly? Yeah. I think that's gonna be a big one, two punch. Oh, and a lot of companies move forward.
Blake Beus 24:50 Absolutely. Absolutely. And, I mean, as far as growth hacking going away, a lot of the things they were doing back then was were very short sighted. I mean, you had Uber or Airbnb. rallies, they really just wanted to get their business to a point where they could either exit or go public. And they did that. And now they've got to sit down for the long haul. And they've both struggled in big ways in that, because they did a bunch of shortcuts to get to that exit. But I mean, back on topic, it is going to be a big one two punch to pair that together. And it's not a new strategy. I mean, I can't remember where I first heard this, but the intersection of, of, you know, creativity, and logic, logic and technical capabilities is where a lot of magic really happens. And if we, if we look in completely different industries, what was Pixar was one of the first where they had the story writers and the artboard creators in they forced them to be in the same room as the 3d modelers and the technical people. And that's why they kept creating just this insane stuff, because the intersection of a lot of those ideas was where the innovation actually started happening. Yep. And it's, it's going to be the same with, you know, media buying, marketing and everything. And this, and frankly, this is one of the reasons we kind of started this podcast was for this exact same thing. Because this is where a lot of the magic happens. I as a software guy, I mean, I've done my fair share of marketing, but as a software engineering guy and DevOps guy, there's a lot of times I don't think about certain aspects. And then you will say, hey, Blake, have you ever thought about this, and it gets me thinking about how I could get results or better results from a technical standpoint. But I would never have thought of that, had you not pointed it out, and then the same back via yours, right? When I start talking about technical things, you start thinking about, well, wait a minute, if we need to do this, and this, maybe if I structure my campaigns like this, we will then give the machine learning AI and the correct triggers it needs to do whatever it is, and then you go test it and confirm or disprove that. Right?
Greg Marshall 27:07 Here's something this is this is something that I think yours and I situation, I think is unique, where we automatically kind of, I think respect each other's opinion on our kind of expertise. But I says with giant butt because I think these two roles, probably industry wide, but heads up in a way right similar to like how I know like in a traditional like salespeople, and operators, or salespeople and accountants and stuff like that, they have two different views of the other profession. And normally, it's not a positive one, right? It's like, well, these salespeople, they're a bunch of idiots. They say anything just to get the sale and and operations as to clean it up. Yeah. And then vice versa, the operations they don't know how to sell. Right? And so what are some ways that before I even go into that, would you agree? Oh, lately, yeah, it's probably like technical and sales and vice versa. There's,
Blake Beus 28:08 there's always head butting between, like, all lump all it together. And then like creatives, marketing, or whatever. I've seen that I've experienced that when I've been working in corporate. Luckily, I've worked at a lot of places where there was very quickly built some mutual respect there. And I think that there needs to be some understanding, you're both experts in your own area. And instead of saying, that's a dumb idea why why would changing the button color? Why should I spend 20 minutes hopping in there changing the button color, putting a commit in there, and then pushing that out to the website? That's not gonna make any difference? But you're over here? Well, I want to measure if that makes a difference. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 28:49 You know, and kind of the funny thing is, because because I know just how I come a lot from the sales sides. I know how salespeople who do not understand technical, how almost ignorant, we can sound when you say, Hey, can't you just do this? Like, I should just take five minutes? Yeah, can you just code this really fascinate me the next Facebook and then we can test it? If it don't work? Just make Instagram next, right? It's like, there's a huge ask for things that you don't understand. Right? Yep. And you assume like, oh, they just don't want to do or vice versa? Well, why can't you give me a more structured idea of what I've made this mistake so many times on in front of not providing enough detail to even allow an engineer and engineer minded individual, the tools necessary to build something, right, because they can't just, they're not just gonna build it. They don't know what the idea is. Right? You know what I mean? Like, you can't just say, hey, build me something that gets me more sales. That could be who knows what? And the engineer themselves, I believe understands. That's gonna take a lot of time. Yeah. And so they want to lie. I for sure know what the plan is because they know it's going to take time to build it. Is that correct?
Blake Beus 30:06 Yeah, absolutely. And, and part of the reason is, is because when you're in the middle of engineering something, there's a bunch of tiny little, and no one talks about this. So I'm actually kind of glad we're talking about yeah, there's a bunch of tiny little micro decisions you have to make about how you structure something, because that's going to have long term impacts in six months, or whatever. And so not having enough context means, okay, I can build something that looks like that. But then in six months, I didn't quite fully understand what the larger vision was. So I made a couple of micro decisions early on, that now are making it way harder to do XY and Z. That was part of the plan all the time. Yep. And, and so now we've, we've, we've come at an impasse, and it's become hard to maintain and blah, blah, blah, but it does, it does exist the other way as well, because a lot of engineers will say, you'll, you can say something like, alright, we need a signup form. All right, I'll make a signup form. And it's ugly and hard to use. And the labels are off to the side instead of overtop, so on mobile, it doesn't quite look right. But they're like, but it works. Yeah. And, and that's where engineers need to say, but hold on, we're creating this to help like the customer, the visitor, whatever, which ultimately helps both of us. And so we need to lean on some expertise out there, to make sure that what's being built is not only just functional, yep. But it's it's easy to use, intuitive for the customer, and all of those things. And so that's where the mutual respect needs to come together.
Greg Marshall 31:42 Well, and it's funny, I've worked with many, you know, many people in the kind of the engineering, more development type, individual that builds the stuff that actually works. And the, what I've learned is you have to be I've learned to become more, what is the empathetic or what not to what I'm saying? And how is being interpreted? Right, right. Because one thing I know, there's, whenever you're a professional in your field, I think there's a level of kind of, what's the word like Terrot, territorialism, like, Hey, listen, you know, like this, this is my space here. You don't I mean, like, I know what I'm doing, right? Because you do. Yeah. And see, there's a level so sometimes when there are suggestions being made, it could feel like it's an attack you Oh, yeah. Right. But but it's actually not. And so, one thing I try to stay very conscious of is when I'm speaking to engineer, people, engineer minded, and I'm just kind of buckling everyone in their technical space in that, but to make sure that I'm communicating in no way, am I criticizing what you're doing? I'm just speaking out loud. So you have enough information, right, to digest it and build it. And I'm thinking if there's an individual out there right now, or our first conversation was very rough. And it's because I didn't think thoroughly enough, because I assumed I assumed he knew what I meant by what I was saying. Like he knew like, my intent was not that I didn't actually voice that first. And this is a brand new relationship. Yeah. So I made the critical mistake of assuming I have credibility automatically with someone who has no idea who I am,
Blake Beus 33:36 right? Well, and let's. And let's be clear on both sides of this fence here. There are jerks, they're idiots, right, like, and there are people that give both sides a bad name. And so that does happen. But I think as long as both sides are willing to even just spend 30 minutes reading up on what goes into media buying and what goes into attribution as an engineer, will put you in such a better place and for media buyers, or whatever, spending 30 minutes about what an engineer has to do to to whatever can can help and
Greg Marshall 34:19 a day in the life of you know what they say when they say walk in someone else's shoes? Oh, yeah, very easy to tell people what to do when you don't have to do it or have never experienced that. Yeah. But in every profession and role there are pressures. And there's different types of pressures and demands. Yeah, that come from these roles. And if you give your if you allow yourself to work in these roles in a day or two, you may only last a few hours. Because you'll learn really quickly. Oh, this is not as easy as it as this person is making it look yeah, because they're a professional that space.
Blake Beus 34:57 A long time. I mean, I've I've been doing time Next, the tech side of things for 20 years now,
Greg Marshall 35:02 so long, it's not gonna look like someone will watch you do something and go, Oh, that's got to be in five minutes. But taking 20 years and making five minutes,
Blake Beus 35:12 and you've been you've been doing sales and marketing for probably about the same amount of time, right, like a long time, a very long time. And, and so, yeah, it's worth sharing that mutual respect. But yeah, I mean, we're, we're a little bit long on this. So why don't why don't we wrap it up?
Greg Marshall 35:32 Respect your engineer? Yeah.
Blake Beus 35:35 Media Buyers there. But I would say just to wrap circle back to the initial conversation, where we're talking about server side, Google Tag Manager, yep, I'm confident we're going to see more and more and more of this stuff, where your your platform is going to need, you're going to need to have some ownership over that server. So that's first party data, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing this with analytics. In fact, we already are seeing this with analytics, there's some projects out there where, where you have to maintain your own server, but you get a lot better tracking, because you own it, it's first party data, we're going to start seeing, we might start seeing this with email marketing, that will be a really interesting one for me. So I'm going to be keeping my eye on that. But I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing it with that. We might might start seeing it with with all sorts of sorts of other things website hosting. And I mean, we already see that website hosting, we'll see more and more and more of it. So yeah,
Greg Marshall 36:38 well, I think you know, this this episode, we've kind of covered the importance of new technology, and essentially what to do and who to look for when you need these because it's important there, this is only going to get more and more critical for businesses, as the years go on, not less. Yep, absolutely. And so it's, it's, it'd be a good idea now to start thinking about what's your technology plan, moving forward with all of this data, because you just want to be prepared, you don't want to be the business that is not thinking about this, and your competitors are, and then they, you know, speed right past you, because you didn't take the time to learn how the markets actually move. Yeah,
Blake Beus 37:23 I think there's no harm in just setting up one of these servers yourself and going through their process. Because you can because they're a virtual server, you can create it, you can destroy it, you can create it again, you can destroy it again. It's, it's not like they're there. They're basically kind of disposable. So there's no harm in going to Google's documentation page and just saying, Alright, let's just go through these steps, we'll we'll sign up, we'll sign in, and then I'll install it on a website and see if we get data if it doesn't troubleshoot, or try to figure it out. Again, there's no harm in that there's only good that can come out of going through that process, even if you're not a super technical person. Because number one, you'll you'll have a good understanding about what the process takes number two, you'll you'll have a good understanding when you're interviewing someone to help you with that maybe at work or something, you'll you'll be able to know if they're full of shit,
Greg Marshall 38:13 or you don't want to get taken.
Blake Beus 38:17 And number three, you might realize, oh, this is something I can handle myself. And now it's a new service I can offer for my clients. And because it worked well for me, I can spin it up in 2030 minutes, but it's a huge value offer for my clients, even though I'm just maybe maybe a media buyer and I'm not a tech person. So
Greg Marshall 38:33 well I think if you need help with this, where do we go?
Blake Beus 38:38 Or you can just use go to Blake beus.com You can you can reach out to me on there and yeah, that'd be a good way they can reach out to you as
Greg Marshall 38:48 well. Yeah, you can go to a Greg Marshall Dotco you can book a strategy session call but when it comes to the technical side, I'm going to do it for you.
Blake Beus 38:58 And you can you can join SM three which is a group on social media marketing. Yeah, where we cover topics for from beginners to experts. Yep. And everything in between. So
Greg Marshall 39:13 well. I hope you guys enjoyed this. This episode. Make sure to subscribe to our channel anywhere you see it. Yeah. All right.
Blake Beus 39:20 We'll catch you guys later. Bye.
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Transcript
Greg Marshall 0:00 Well,
Blake Beus 0:01 you're gonna start off.
Greg Marshall 0:02 Let's do this three times get moving. So we were talking right before we started and we had a, we had a situation. What was this two years ago? Or is it three years? Yeah, I can't remember.
Blake Beus 0:14 I do remember it was January 2020. Because it like kicked off the year. From Hell yes. For me, my business and millions and billions of other people, but it's what started 2020 For me,
Greg Marshall 0:33 we shouldn't know.
Blake Beus 0:34 We shouldn't know. It was a bad. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 0:37 something was gonna throw
Blake Beus 0:38 in the towel move out in the middle of nowhere for two years, and then finally come back to it and start over.
Greg Marshall 0:44 Well, basically, what happened was, Blake and I have been running ads successfully for the whole year. 2019. Yeah,
Blake Beus 0:52 well, actually, we started in May of 2019. Yeah. And we started so this was only from May to December. That's right. And,
Greg Marshall 1:01 yeah, but we were having a good amount of success with our ads. They were pretty consistent. There were some times I'm up and down, of course, like, like, there always is with Facebook. But there was a particular time that we still refer to now. Yeah, that was like, I still remember. Because wasn't it? If it wasn't New Year's Eve, it was
Blake Beus 1:24 around that time, it was New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve was the biggest single revenue day. I remember the specific numbers because we texted each other right after New Year, like the date. Oh, no, it was might have been right after midnight. Because I think,
Greg Marshall 1:42 yeah, we I know for a fact we have both been drinking some champagne. Together. But at some point, because i That's why I think it wasn't a year, it was the
Blake Beus 1:51 first day we were we were $5 Short of hitting us $5,000 in a single day. But here's a kick in sales. This is the kick on one product, this one digital product that spend a fortune that no worries, what was our ad spend 1500 bucks, I'd have to go back it was.
Greg Marshall 2:11 I don't think we hit that for that day. I don't think we hit even maybe it came in higher than 1000.
Blake Beus 2:18 Yeah, it was I mean, it gets a gap was I remember one day, I was like, wow, this is it was a huge thing. The return
Greg Marshall 2:24 was was a mess. You know, we should go back and take a look. It might have been under $1,000. Because I remember the return on asthma was unbelievable, unreal, binary. I didn't actually believe it. I actually I remember reaching out to them saying like, Did you do a bunch of test purchases or something like because the revenue was really high. And then the infamous and I'm sure this half a lot of you guys out there especially ones that are getting great results. Yeah, our Ad Account got what banned, banned. And what?
Blake Beus 3:00 They gave us the biggest generic reason whatsoever. They said there was my not their words, it was basically fishy activity. Like we've noticed some unusual activity on your account and banned us and then wouldn't unbanned us never. We had the we had to launch a brand new ad account and everything. And, and they banned us that first week. So it was the week of the January the first week of January is, is when we got banned, I got banned and then like got put back in and then banned and then permanently banned. And they said there's nothing you can do. We are never going to put this on ban your accounts, you just need to start a new account. And it was absolutely insane.
Greg Marshall 3:47 I remember just kind of thinking, what kind of I guess response that was from Facebook saying, because I remember speaking with Blake and actually asking, like, did we put anything that's against Terms of Service in any shape or form because all we were doing was selling the calendar?
Blake Beus 4:07 It was yeah, it was the I called it the social media content plan. It was just a two year social media calendar ever had with holidays. Delivery was instant. Like it's not like we were selling it and then not giving it to people like on the thank you page. You had a download link and we emailed you a download link in case you put your email in wrong.
Greg Marshall 4:29 Like here's the odd thing about it, which we still to this day don't know actually what happened. No, we started a new ad account. That account has never been banned. Same product, same product and the product that they banned. We have been promoting for the previous at least together for six to eight months. Yeah. And we for that. You did it for another six months or so. Right?
Blake Beus 4:54 Well, it was it once I started selling it. It was pretty. It was scaled pretty fast. I remember I launched it the like may 2 of 2019. And I remember that day specifically just because at a call with a friend before, and he's like, why have you launched this yet? I think you're afraid to have success. Yeah, are afraid of failure. And I was like, Okay, fine, I'm gonna put it out there. And I started, I started making sales. And so I knew it was the first week of May. And then in January is when it had been, but in between that time, we had done over $300,000 in sales, which was kind of mind blowing to me. Yeah, on this one product. And it was literally just me. And then I hired Greg to help manage my anxieties, my advertising anxiety, but he would help run the ads. And I brought you in to help I think about a month and a half or two months after I started selling it, because I wasn't sleeping at night. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 5:51 well, it's because that's, that's a marketers world. You're constantly thinking and you know, you want to make sure everything works out well. And so you get concerned. But think of it we have sold this product without anything getting banned, with the exception of the time that it was absolutely crushing it for us. Yeah. And so we really, what are your thoughts on what really happened because I had this happen to one other client, where his ad account got banned. And it was absolutely crushing it. So what is the incentive you think, for an ad platform to shut you down? And then I'm going to share what I heard on a podcast that would make this make sense. Okay. So my,
Blake Beus 6:44 I mean, I thought about, like, it was so maddening, because I felt like, we did it, Greg, we cracked the code, all we need to do is like do scaling up keep scaling, I wouldn't even care if we just kept it at 5000 measly dollars. Yeah. Right? Because it was just me, I had a VA helped me with customer support. And you yep, that's great. We'll just keep kind of very profitable. Obviously, it's fantastic, right, like keep overhead low, no need to go nuts. And so I've thought a lot, a lot a lot about it. So one of the changes we made in December, I feel like was something that had triggered this impact. So one of the strategic decisions we made, decided to act on in about November was to basically launched the calendar worldwide got an include holidays from like, the most active top 20 or 30 countries that are active on Facebook, right. So we did some research, I put together holiday lists so that people could pick holidays relevant for their countries. And I didn't do any translations. But I did record a video on how people could translate the calendar very quickly using an add on in Google Sheets in two different languages, so they could adapt it quite easily. But we launched those changes to a worldwide audience. The middle of December, yep. And what we saw was that our cost per purchase dropped dramatically by the last week of December. So our average cost per purchase was around 20 to $30, depending on ad group, and depending on country, and we were targeting at this time we were targeting Australia, United States, Canada, and then a couple of English speaking Europe, European countries, right. So UK and whatever, just nothing too crazy. But when we launched it worldwide, our cost per purchase went down to like $3. And the average order value was like 55 $60. Yep. And our upsell, right. Yeah, we had we had some upsells afterwards or whatever. And my guess is that Facebook algorithm somewhere was like, There's no way they could have that big of an improvement. They must be cheating. We don't know how. But this is impossible. So they're cheating. Banham. Got it. That's the only thing I can come up with, because we didn't change anything else. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 9:12 I mean, the ACA was said even the ad we use the same ad was the same app
Blake Beus 9:16 we've been. We've been running that ad for like six months. Yeah. It had it had like 150,000 likes. Oh, yeah.
Greg Marshall 9:25 Yeah. Who knows how many shares? I mean, this thing was,
Blake Beus 9:30 how many millions? Yeah, freshmen. It's probably like three and we weren't making like outrageous claims, right? Sometimes you get banned for saying, you know, 10 10x, your investment FS or whatever. It wasn't that it wasn't
Greg Marshall 9:42 even a money return, like get a return on your investment. None of that. It was literally this is a content calendar. So we're gonna help us on social
Blake Beus 9:50 media. That's it and we did say in order to get followers you need to post consistently and this calendar helps you post consistently so we kind of connected the dots there. We didn't guarantee your promise followers or anything like that. But that's the only thing I can think of is that it triggered some sort of thing in their algorithm. And then they looked at and they're like, We don't know what these guys are doing, but they're definitely cheating because that's impossible. So and bandas
Greg Marshall 10:14 here's here's kind of, so I listened to a podcast. One of my favorite podcasts is shout out to the perpetual traffic. It's
Blake Beus 10:21 a good one. Is it? Is it Molly? Molly's no luck.
Greg Marshall 10:25 And so it's funny because she ran. She started it, though she did, but now she's the CEO of smart marketer when she still comes on though. Right. But Ralph, and Qassam, okay, so listen to them a whole lot. Here's a funny thing about what you just said. So Qassam is very sensitive to people bringing you up. Because someone left like a really bad review. Other ones like, Who is this hack? Volley was way better? Raise it up brutal. People can be but I really liked their content. I like both. Both the gentlemen Anna Casa brought up a point. And he was I can't remember if he was talking with his business partner or another data guy. But they had mentioned how there's cost of traffic restrictions. Okay, I'm gonna go and meet either. And they had mentioned like, that Google who? So he didn't mention Facebook, but I kind of thought of Facebook as well, that Google has some level of the traffic cannot be below XML. Really? Yes. And so it's, it's some level of cost control, like they wouldn't give give you like Penny clicks, and you know, like $1 conversions, because I would be like, to barely
Blake Beus 11:47 be losing money at that point, or whatever, you're basically saying that there's no cost control, I would say protecting our profits, right, we can't give, we can't give traffic away that cheap, because we built an infrastructure and to generate this traffic and
Greg Marshall 12:03 exact Okay, so that's basically saying is there some level, he didn't mention what it is, but that there's some level of a cost control that you can't go below. And that made me think of our scenario with the counters? Is it that the costs became so low that they banned the account, because we have basically figured out how to get traffic really low? Because that would make sense. The other ad account that I was referring to, we were getting free, I mean, for the average order value we're getting, we're getting really low cost at scale. So they're spending about $1,000 A day at our peak, and we were getting cost of purchase that. I want to say they're around 13 or $14 for like a $70 average order value, cold traffic. Really, yeah, call and consistent area at that cost. And then they finally just like shuts down. And so
Blake Beus 13:01 was that a physical product or digital product? Okay,
Greg Marshall 13:05 so the question I have, or maybe that's what we ran into? Maybe that's like the answer to what happened is maybe the cost control, maybe we got it to be too low. Yeah. And so that's what ended up getting us banned. And maybe there is some kind of internal, like, the traffic must cost this. Yeah, no matter what. Or we can't sell it.
Blake Beus 13:29 Yeah. I mean, looking back. We should have launched worldwide on a different ad account. Yeah. You know, deepest thoughts about that. Yeah. So here's, I ran into the same problem, probably because we, because it was such a huge, we had we had built all of this good data on the account and based on these countries, right, United States, Canada, Australia, UK, that those countries, even though there's a lot of differences, there's a lot of similarities. Probably in the social media world, between the country, those countries and the data you're getting from those countries, right? And when you go worldwide, it's it's so much more diverse. And it was I mean, literally, we were just saying anywhere in the world, like our ad ad targeting was anywhere in the world. For people that are interested in social media, like I think that was it, it was so broad. I mean, our audience size was like 50 million or something like that. I think it was even bigger. It was a bear that I was hundreds of millions, like it was huge. But our cost per traffic. I mean, one of the main reasons we dropped the cost per acquisition so low is our CPMs. Yeah, our CPMs went from I don't know the exact numbers, but it was probably like $20
Greg Marshall 14:48 in the US. It was we were averaging 26 CPM, okay, on a high day before,
Blake Beus 14:55 okay, but then we went worldwide, the CPMs went down to like a buck. Yeah. And so you're probably right, because that's I mean, that's the metric that they use to determine how much we need to pay Facebook. Right? That's, that's the key metric that they use to determine how much we pay. And so far CPMs go from 20 to 40, down to $1. I'm sure they're like, what's going on? What's going on here? And have we launched that on a separate ad account and built new data surrounding that? Right, because I would have been more stable and our our, our CPMs, probably wouldn't have been a buck. But they probably would have been two or three, which is still great. Yep.
Greg Marshall 15:43 So that's actually a great point. And maybe that's where we can receive some closure and peace of mind. To know that, because of that, big CPM drop, maybe that's the cause of and the other thing, so here's a higher level question. So my guess is that's probably what happened. So because I know de peche talks about having separating ad accounts, based on not just like, like tier one and tier two coaches. Right, right. He talks about that. I can't remember where but I know him saying that. This year, I remember thinking like, why would I do that? Why don't I just keep it all on account. But now that makes sense. Yeah. The other thing? What's the incentive for? Like, if, let's say, for example, you figure out how to get really low cost per purchases, and you'd like really getting great results. What's the incentive for an app platform to essentially penalize you for that? What's, why would they want to do that? I guess, is my question. Yeah, I'm like, like you're almost to success.
Blake Beus 16:54 So this is something that's mystifying to a lot of people until you really start to think think about it. So here's, here's how I view it. Let's talk about Facebook, specifically, because this was a Facebook issue, most of our ad spend was going into Facebook, we did have some traffic, some ads in Google, but most of it was going into Facebook. I'm if I'm getting traffic so cheap. I'm stealing eyeballs, from other advertisers that aren't able to get get it that cheap. Therefore, if I'm getting CPMs for a buck, but everybody else is paying two or three. Facebook is basically could could two or 3x, their return on their investment by banning my account and giving the traffic to other advertisers? Right. And so at the end of the day, even at $1,000 a day, from a Facebook standpoint, that's peanuts. Yeah. Like that's the crumbs on the floor. They don't even care about my ad spend. Yep. They care about well, we're giving this guy $1 CPMs. Everybody else is paying us three or four? Yeah, why wouldn't we just 3x that and then ban this account? And give them some vague reason? Because we don't care? Yep. And we take them out a lot. Yeah, make them realize, when we re launched, we never could replicate those results. Yep. Like, it was almost like they had tagged us saying, don't don't give these guys because even if you realize your ad account is tied to my Facebook account. So even if I have a new ad account, they're like, well, this guy's relaunching the same thing. It's the same ad, whatever, don't give him the same results, whatever. Right? And I don't know
Greg Marshall 18:30 what's interesting about what you're saying is this one other client that we like, really get down to, it's the same thing, it's almost like, our CPMs have not been able to even come close to even like, there's even other ad accounts that have the low, much lower CPMs. And this one, no matter what we do with it. So it's like, it's almost like you are tagged
Blake Beus 18:56 somehow. It's, it's gotta be and whether that's an intentional thing or an unintentional thing. Who knows? Who knows? But the fact of the matter is, is algorithmically, it's not too terribly hard to say, well, this person has had an ad account banned. Yep. So that's part of the algorithm on who I get the CCF. Yep. And, and we were never able to replicate that plus and then and then 2020 20 Hit like people's buying behaviors changed. Yep. Big time. Yep. Right. People started staying home. Initially, we saw a little bit of a bump. Yeah, back in February, March, we saw a bump in sales. Because a lot of people are working from home and we're thinking, well, I need a social media presence. They kind of realized a few things. And so we bought saw a bit of a bump, but by May June, like when things were really getting locked down and a lot of countries especially when we say worldwide control, right, like in America, things were still whatever but in other countries around the world, there was like hard lock downs, and people were were struggling financially and buying a social media calendar was not top They're lists. And if you remember, it was hard to get in many countries is hard to get food. Yep, in America here was hard to get toilet paper out, because that makes sense. I don't understand. Right, like, and it just wasn't on people's minds. And so. So that was, you know, the domino effect. And we ended up shifting the business model and kind of turning it into what we have now, which is SM three, which is a subscription where people can get help over time and be part of a community to help with things. But
Greg Marshall 20:29 but interesting, right? I mean, yeah, like, in fact, going through this story, I just realized, I have three clients like that, oh, really is another client, but we have gotten her to bounce back. But I think the reason is because we're implementing Facebook wants, you know, on on app purchases, because we're using that that's where I think we're getting on app purchases.
Blake Beus 20:55 So you're actually listing the product inside of Facebook, and you're selling it inside of Facebook. Is it a physical product? Again? Is it a physical product,
Greg Marshall 21:04 and they're the big push is Shopify stores, Facebook sends out $3,000 Free ads, man, with the caveat, it has to be on app purchase. So my guess is Facebook is in heavy development right now. How to bypass ever forever, any other platforms, Apple or some computer, whatever, banning them from being able to optimize for purchases. So right, my guess is Facebook has probably got this dialed in, and getting closer and closer that probably by next year, we'll see more like, Hey, you can get really low cost for purchases. Yeah, if you just do everything,
Blake Beus 21:43 I think they want to be a fully fledged e commerce platform, in addition to social media. Yep. And you can see that in Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and Instagram products. And that was only to a limited group of people for a long time. But in the last six to eight months, yep. Basically, anybody can can launch and make Instagram, your, your ecommerce platform. And it's interesting, they're going that way. Me personally, I really struggled with it, because we got banned. Yeah, if my whole store and my whole revenue model depends on Facebook, and then they ban you and give you well, you violated some terms and conditions, without any recourse on how to how to get that back. That's a pretty brittle business model.
Greg Marshall 22:27 And fully a business. No, it's channel, it's a channel channel.
Blake Beus 22:33 It's a channel and the same thing with like, Amazon's been doing this for a long time with E commerce. There's there's people that have, you've probably seen the courses too if you're if you're on Facebook, like hey, sorry, Amazon FBA says door right, like do this. You can, it's easy, they'll even hold the products for you. But that whole supply chain was basically owned by Amazon, you could hold the products in an Amazon warehouse, listed on Amazon, sell it on Amazon. But that whole model is pretty brittle, brittle. Because if Amazon ends up not liking you, yep, we'll see you later. Or Amazon chooses to take your product and say, well, that's a great product, we're gonna make an Amazon Basics version of that, and then sell it for
Greg Marshall 23:11 less he did, and that how pay us your money for their market research, their market
Blake Beus 23:16 research and everything. And so that's a brutal position. So if you do something like that, realize this is a house of cards. Yeah. And it's an OK way to get started to maybe get some capital to kind of expand into other channels. But one of the things I've started to see is that even though Facebook and Amazon are kind of trying to scoop up as much as the era commerce market, since we're talking about, you know, physical products, I've seen a lot more businesses say we need our own channel. Yeah, we need our own email list. And we need to own this whole process ourself. And I've seen consumers too, especially those consumers that are a little bit more progressive, a little bit more tech savvy or whatever, actively trying to buy from a company's store site instead of on Amazon, even if they're lifted listed in both places. I, my boy, he was telling me he turned 16 This week, and he's starting to get into airsoft. So he's been researching airsoft guns, and he saw some on Amazon. And we hopped over to the company's website. And they're like 30%, less on Amazon on their on their own websites than they are on Amazon. And that makes sense because Amazon takes like 30% of your sale. Yep. So
Greg Marshall 24:36 Well, I think you know, the the future is, you know, I think it's going to shift like always digital marketing is always going to shift but we just wanted to basically share the story. Yeah, I have to tell you that. If you do run into this, don't feel bad.
Blake Beus 24:50 Don't reach out. Reach out to Greg it happened. He's he's a good therapist. You can lay down on his couch,
Greg Marshall 24:57 lay down on the couch and we'll discuss how Facebook is deadly wrong. Again, Facebook's Like a bad relationship. Oh, it
Blake Beus 25:04 is a toxic relationship. But it is worth pointing out, like expanded a diff different channels find a way to make different channels. If we had not been leaning so heavily on just Facebook, if this wouldn't have had as big of an impact, it still would have sucked. But it wouldn't have been as big of an impact. And it's hard. It's hard to do that. Because you're, you're pulled in so many different directions. But start thinking about that start expanding start thinking of ways to, to do it. And yeah, that's well, hopefully
Greg Marshall 25:32 you guys enjoyed today's story. You know, we'd love to hear from you if you've experienced this yourself, because I know there's plenty of ad Facebook advertisers out there that run into this problem. Oh, absolutely. And we're not the only one. So. But yeah, so Blake, how can people get a hold of
Blake Beus 25:49 you just go to Blake beus.com. We already kind of mentioned the SM3 group that Greg's hopped on board with that. But that's the place where you get direct access to me in the community surrounding just social media marketing, including organic marketing tactics and advertising tactics. And there's some courses included and things like that, but keep an eye on that for sure.
Greg Marshall 26:07 Yeah. And if you want to get in touch with me, Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session. And we'll go from there. Until next time,
Blake Beus 26:14 I'll catch you guys later. We'll see it
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:00 We'll find the offer. All right.
Blake Beus 0:04 All right, let's do it. Here we go. So Well, I mean, we were talking again, we say this every time we were talking before we turned the camera on to record this. But you were saying a lot of you've had a lot of people reach out to you. In regards to lots of things, but one of the things you've bumped into is having a too complex of an offer. Yes. And like, what what do you mean by that?
Greg Marshall 0:31 So what we tend to do, is, we overthink probably coming from my sales background, it's like overselling, you think that you have to sound massively complicated for the person to take you serious, you're right, instead of just dumbing it down, okay, and having them understand what it is you're trying to communicate right away. And so I find this a lot where headlines are written, or things are written more so in a complex way where the person, the regular person you're trying to reach may not actually understand what you're trying to communicate. So they may be interested, okay, but then they don't know what it is that you're offering. And so I was talking to a client a few days ago, as we were, we were saying how, when someone lands on their page, does that first line, immediately tell me what, essentially what the promises? What am I going to get? Right? And when you know, and I had mentioned to to us before, before we start recording, and you're like, Yeah, I'm not really sure what that is. And I said, Exactly,
Blake Beus 1:42 right. Like, the headline was something and this is from my perspective, right? So the headline was something along the lines of buy this thing. So you can be in the top 15% of graduates from this technical school or something like that. Right? Like, and you said, What does that mean to you? And I was like, I mean, I don't know if the top 15% means anything yet to me, like, what? Why am I going to this school? Am I going to the school to be in the top 15%. And this was, like a school that trained people for a career, right? It wasn't like a university or whatever, whatever, where you needed to get a scholarship or something like that. And so it was like, I was like, do I even care, I probably just care about passing and getting certified. Exactly. And not having to, like, lose money in the process or lose a bunch of time in the process or something like, that's more important to me than being in the top 15%? Well, right,
Greg Marshall 2:45 you got to think that's probably most people. Right? Right. So it's similar to if I go to college? Well, do I want to be the valedictorian? Or do I just want to be able to get a high paying job? Yeah, graduate. And I would say,
Blake Beus 2:56 most people, most of your customers, like if you're running a business, most of your customers, they don't care about being the valedictorian. There's only one of those Yeah, right. And that's a very small audience.
Greg Marshall 3:08 And it's usually actually not the students, their parents, right. And, and it's
Blake Beus 3:13 a hard promise to deliver. Like, if if I have a product or something that's like, I'm gonna make you literally the number one lawyer in the United States. Like, that's a tough delivery, but most lawyers don't care if they're number one, they just want to have a good income they want to see and succeed or, and help people in their targeted area or whatever, like, depending on on that industry. You've got to put the time and effort in there. And we've talked about putting the time and effort into your copywriting. But we haven't talked specifically about confusing offers.
Greg Marshall 3:45 Yes, yeah. And what here's, here's like a little formula that you could use to simplify it simple, though, is best. Right? So your first line should should answer the question that's in the customer's head. For example, one of my clients sells fitness and it says, Are you struggling with losing weight and getting into shape? As soon as you read that, you know, what this is about to be? Right.
Blake Beus 4:14 And you You're, you're making the reader self select? Yep. Meaning in their head, you're making them raise their hand and say, Ooh, this page is talking to me, or this page isn't for me, I'm gonna go somewhere else. And that's fine. You want people to be able to very quickly make that mental decision and qualify themselves, yeah, qualify themselves. And then once they've done that, the correct people will keep reading and those that aren't correct. We'll leave we'll leave which is what helps you like hone the algorithm, all these other things, like depending on how you set up all of that, but we don't want dive into technical bits too much. But yeah,
Greg Marshall 4:50 I think the biggest thing you can do to make a better impact with your offers is ask a question that A customer is most likely asking themselves, okay, right, yeah, and then deliver some level of a promise and some timeframe. So if you could say, because you're essentially you have to send an or sell an end result. Yeah, you can't just sell like, you know, kind of a vague, you know, a vague deal. So, for example, if you say, Are you struggling with losing weight and getting into shape, etc, etc, this program that I'm about to share with you will be able to get you 60 pounds, right? So it's a concrete, you know, number, and then a timeframe and the next 90 days, right, so now people can go, yes, they can answer the question, yes, I'm struggling to, you know, losing weight, then the next question they are, the answer they can see is, I will lose 60 pounds. And in that timeframe, it's going to be 90 days, so they can actually go Alright, so I'm actually buying 60 pound weight loss and 90 day. Yeah, right. And then under that a sub headline you would then go into is, how are you going to deliver that that's when you get into the more logistics of the program has this program is that you know, set cetera, and then you go into the emotional triggers, right? So then you would then talk about the 60 pounds and how it's negatively impacting your life, and why you need to lose 60 pounds, right? But that's how you make an offer. It doesn't need to be crazy. It just needs to be simple to understand. And the consumer needs to know what I will get the end result. and in what timeframe, right? If you can ask a question, give what end result they'll get and then a timeframe. That's a form of yeah, that's, that's because it's easy to understand. And if you look at what we all purchase, when you go to a website, or wherever we buy, we tend to go through those, like checklists. Yep. Right? What am I actually buying? Right? And it all starts with that main, the main headline, right? Like, it all starts there. And that headline needs to be simple to understand. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be short. Yep. Right.
Blake Beus 7:12 I've seen some long headlines that work really well. But it needs to be a simple concept. Because if there's, if there's confusion, the default response is no. Yeah, right. And we want the default response to be yes. Or a maybe yes. And they can continue further to see what that yes is. But if the default response is no, ie, if it's confusion, then then then you're not going to you're just not going to get those conversions. Right, exactly. And it's, it's not to go down a completely different path. But this is something that sits very much in the realm of behavioral economics. I don't know if you've studied that a whole lot, or looked into that a whole lot. But I'm a huge fan of the subject. And it's massively interesting. But if we can just make these offers simple, so the default is an easier Yes, than the default being confusion, right then and there, you're going to get, you're just going to get better results, better customers, better clients, whatever. Now, we talked about weight loss, because that's a very easy to kind of layout layout that works. And so you might be thinking, okay, so I do I do titles for mortgages, right? Like, how do I how do I do that? With something like titles? And it's actually the same thing? Who is your client? And customer? I don't know. It's not about titles. I just picked up an industry I thought was boring. But like, is it? Is it real estate agents? Is that loan officers, whichever those issues are, and he talks about, what are their biggest issues that they might have with existing title companies that they've worked with before? And then you say, Okay, are you struggling with this? Yep, we can do this in this amount of time, right? And then you go down there, and you have the book that call and chat with you or whatever, right? Well, let's
Greg Marshall 8:57 even break down what you're saying. No matter what industry you're in, all you have to do to simplify is think, what is what does the consumer want? What's the end result? Right? And then you can say, How fast do they want? Right? Like, do they want it? We pretty much know the answer. Yes. Yeah. But how fast they want it which, which means you can compare it to the rest of the industry you're competing with, and can you get that accomplished in a shorter? It's all about shortening how long someone needs to wait for. Right? And then what is the main like problem that they're they're struggling with? Right? So if you really think about the number one pain point, so let's let's take a title company, right? So a title company, the consumer is probably overwhelmed with, you got to talk to a loan officer and a title company or escrow officer and you got to talk to a real estate agent. And there's all these moving parts, right? Well, what they don't want to do is have it consumed their entire life on it because They also have a family kids work all that, right. So that's what they don't want. So if you can communicate, this is a bit, you know, are you feeling overwhelmed with having to deal with 10 people and your real estate purchase? There's a question, then you would say, we offer a simple solution that can get you to only talk to one individual so that you don't have to do all the backend work, right? And we can close on your house, and 90 days, because that's what most of our clients are closing. So you follow the same formula, right? Are you feeling overwhelmed?
Blake Beus 10:36 Then you tell him, You know what the problem we're gonna solve? And the timeframe? Yep, you do that for any industry, that will work. And of course, you have to make sure you can deliver what it is you say, just say, hey, in two days, we'll close your home. And you'll never talk to anyone, and it takes time. Yeah, and it doesn't always have to be like a question, right? The question is the easiest one. So if you're sitting, if you're sitting down to brainstorm some ways to simplify your offer message, it's usually easiest to start with a question. But it's very easy then to convert a question over into a statement, right? And that, so if you're like saying, Are you feeling overwhelmed with not being able to close on your home faster? You could be, you could just have something simpler, like, close on your home faster than industry standard? Yep. So you took that question, you turn it into a statement. And then you can add one of one of my favorite tricks is to add something like, which means in your head, at least, which means you'll get in your home faster, and you'll be able to enjoy the new home that you've been trying to purchase, right? So you can add these kind of little tricks and things in it, like I said, doesn't have to be a short message. But it just needs to be clear on what they're getting. And to be honest, I've struggled with this in the past, I'm not just saying, Hey, do this, because I've got it all down, and I'm a guru, and everything's perfect. Everybody struggles with it, like everybody does. Because it's so much easier to overthink. Yes, the offer message and everything. But if you can simplify all of that sit down, spend some dedicated time to just thinking about your headline. Yep. And you'll be good from there. And I think a bonus tip would be to take sit very similar headlines, or maybe rework that headline and use it in your ads. Yes. So they're seeing something very similar in your ad, and then on your landing page. And they might even just be a rewrite of the same sentence. Exactly. It doesn't have to be something super crazy. It could literally just be a rewrite of the exact same headline, just maybe switching some of the words around or making it a little more concise or something.
Greg Marshall 12:33 Exactly. And I think the key thing is to what key words, ask yourself the question, what key words does the client need to hear? To identify with the statement? So it could be a question, it can be a statement can be a one liner can be a paragraph, but the key and you'll notice this in copywriting, they always highlight in the writing that key word that means the most to the consumer. So if you write a statement, you know close your house faster than industry standards or whatever it usually says like the highlight of words and close faster. Those would be the two Boldin, or words in italics or whatever
Blake Beus 13:15 bolded, highlighted, italicized, they underline something, you can call those out different color. I've seen that I do that on my site and different color. Yeah, my headline is all in kind of like a black except for my key words are in a blue that stands out, right.
Greg Marshall 13:28 And so that's, that's really all you're trying to do is hit the key, what key words? Does the client need to see or hear in order for them to self identify, right? And if you can do that, then you have a stronger offer. So simplifying, what you're putting on your landing pages to give those kinds of, you know, promises, and end results and timeframes. They're game changes, because what you do not want to do is make it complex where someone has to do what Blake did before this recording when I told him a statement, and the fact that he even had to wait. That's the even that's too long, right? Well, yeah. Well, you've already lost most customers, if they
Blake Beus 14:14 have to say and put their you know, because they're thinking that like you've already lost lost. You've lost them. No, it was the other thing I would talk about is I want to talk about some like hard numbers, I've seen a good headline change and increase the conversion rate 20 Sometimes 30% Right. If you think about that, that means by changing a headline your ad spend is 130% more more efficient, right? Like like it's it's more efficient. You're getting leads for less money because they're converting better on your page. Even though you haven't even touched your ads or changed your targeting or done anything with your budget. You just change the headline. Yep. And it makes it makes your your cost per lead. You'd go down, it makes your profitability, your row as go up, it makes it make can make everything easier. And so it's, it's a good place to start to spend an hour to try and figure that out.
Greg Marshall 15:12 Well, I think to something, especially early on, I used to believe the mistake I used to make was I used to believe the headline and the hooks and the ad copy was overrated, in a sense, like, can you really see a difference? Like I don't know about you, but early on that that was always something like really just like changing a one sentence thing could bump it up 20 30%. But then once I saw it in action, and notice, like, wow, this, this does make a huge difference, then I started to take it a lot more seriously. And that's where I want to encourage you guys to really think through what you're going to say, once you get in front of that perfect person. People spend so much time in researching the perfect person to get in front of right the target and we obsess about all that. But then it's like, but what do you actually, you haven't put any investment into? What are you going to say to him? Right? When you like if you're looking for Mr. Perfect or Mrs. Perfect, your future husband or wife, and you have this all dialed in. And then that person stands right in front of you. And then you're like, Oh, I haven't even thought like, what do I ask him? Do I even say hello to him? Right? Do go on a date. Like, if you don't think of any of those, you'll miss even if you have the perfect person in front of you. It's not gonna
Blake Beus 16:34 work. Right? I would say it's more important to have a headline that works for someone who's not exactly perfect. Yep. than it is to find the perfect person and market to those people without putting a whole lot of effort in the headline. And the reason why is the not quite perfect person audience is much, much, much bigger, and they can still benefit from your product offering or service. But maybe, you know, maybe the perfect client or customer could see maybe a 200% increase in whatever results looking at, but the not quite so perfect person only gets 170% increase in whatever results you're helping with or whatever. That's still a win for them. Yep. Right. And that audience is much, much, much bigger. So if you can figure if you can put time into making that offer, simple to understand and easy to take action on, it's going to actually have a much bigger impact on on your bottom line than trying to identify the perfect person. Yep. And going through that exercise. Now, have you have you seen people go through this brings up an interesting point. We've seen people go try to tell people to go through this, you know, ideal customer avatars or worksheet where they try to figure out all of these things. What are your thoughts on this? I have I have my own thoughts. But what are your thoughts? Yeah, I have exercise as a practice.
Greg Marshall 17:51 I think as a practice, it's good to clarify who you're trying to talk to. But it can also limit you to how how your marketing, right? Because it's almost causes the paralysis by analysis. Yeah, where you can be like, yes, well, I'm talking to Joe, who's 39 years old. You know, $82,000 a year and it goes golfing on Saturday. It's like,
Blake Beus 18:16 I mean, we could get probably a little bit too in depth on that. I think the better way to approach that would be a customer avatar mindset. What is the mindset of the person that you're trying to go after, for example, I like to use hip hop, right? So if you think about hip hop, and targeting people that are interested in that hip hop, traditionally, people may think of African American, right, but that's not the whole market, right? Biggest buyers of hip hop music are actually Caucasian. Oh, really? And most of you will know that. And so when you think about it's like, well, then if you only spoke to African Americans, you're literally missing out on the largest port. Right? And so if that was your customer, yeah, if that was your customer Avatar was was that, you know, you're you're talking about maybe city location, ethnicity, things like that. And that's your avatar, you're writing ads directly to that one person instead of considering what are what did you call not the behavior, the mindset? Yeah, the customer avatar mindset. A customer avatar mindset is much more important than maybe their demographics are. Yep. And I think it's, it's, you can get caught up and what you'll actually shortchange though, so you could make an ad that's perfect for, you know, for Joe fits that match that you want. The problem is that market may only be so big, right? So you might there might only be a couple 1000. Joe's out there in totality. So unless you want your market to be capped at that, or maybe your price of your product is really high, which that's okay if you have a really high priced product, and you're really just saying like I want 1015 Like super high paying customers. The customer avatar thing could be a Good idea. But if you're someone that's, you know, really trying to make hundreds of 1000s and millions of dollars, your price point is, you know, 5060 cents. You have to expand that massively. Yeah. And so that's my thought on that, what's your main thought, honestly, I'm a lot in the same line like I, I have gone down the road of creating the avatar, even putting like a picture of that I found on like a stock photography website. So I could visualize the person and write copy to this to this person and gone through the whole exercise of writing to a specific person, which I don't think any of that is bad. But it can cause you to overanalyze and overthink all the things and think too narrowly. But I never could put my finger on what a better methodology would be literally until you just said, it's more important to do to understand an avatar mindset and do a mindset, you know, exercise of saying, okay, my ideal customer, maybe I don't know, their name, maybe I don't know, their demographics, age, income, whatever. But I do know that, here's what they're struggling with. And here's how much relief they would feel if that thing was was solved for them. And here's what they would be doing with their time or money if they don't have to waste it on this thing that they're struggling with. That the mindset of the Avatar not only gives you broader, larger audiences, but it also helps you maybe avoid some of your unintentional exclusions, exclusions, yeah, you're unintentionally excluding people, that would be a great fit for you, because you've got all of these demographics that, at the end of the day, don't really matter quite so much the hard demographics that are easy to think of like, gender, age, income level, ethnicity, location, those things aren't as important as they used to be. 2030 years ago, from an advertising and marketing standpoint, you used to have clothes that were specifically for one gender or the other. And now those lines are blurring. So if you make a clothing line that is specific to just one thing or another, you might be losing out on some customers that would love your product. Yep.
Greg Marshall 22:19 And I think to mindset, also helps you write better copy landing pages offers, because when you think of someone's mindset, you think of like, for example, you can go someone you know, like, in my business, a business, that's just starting out their mindsets a lot different than when scaling, someone going from 100,000 to a million a month is going their mindset is totally different. They're not trying to survive, right? Their mindset is, we're trying to maybe grow so large that we can get bought out and have an exit, right? That mindset, if you make an ad that says Do you need help with your marketing advertising, to be able to become a little bit more profitable, that may not hit with someone trying to sell their company and go from 100,000 to a million, but that will actually hit on someone that's in the beginning stages? Yeah, just starting out, right. And so you really have to think about the mindset of the customer, because you will attract whatever that mindset is. And if you think about demographics, here's here's, here's the problem with, you know, Joe, who makes, you know, $400,000 a year and you're targeting, right, Joe, if if he's trying to scale one of his businesses up to a million a month yet 100,000, that mindset is different than the Joe it makes more $1,000 a year that's trying to get out of his current career and start a business, right. And you notice that's the same guy, right? Like, it's like demographic wise. So graphic one is the same guy. But his mindset is in two different places based on what his end goal is,
Blake Beus 23:58 and your offer is going to be completely different to each of those people. That's a good thought. You're getting some of
Greg Marshall 24:04 the thing about it. That's why mindset is so important. Because you could talk to the same person, same age, same income, same city, same everything, except they're in different mindsets. They might be starting a side hustle, or they might be scaling their business to a million a month. Those are two different mindsets, although the the age and income and all that to
Blake Beus 24:25 say and what they want and what they fear or what they struggle with are completely different than
Greg Marshall 24:29 exactly and So, Mark, it's a mindset, not just to you know, I always forget the terminology, not just like demo, demographic, psychographic, market more to mindset. It's a mindset.
Blake Beus 24:40 I like that. I like that. That's gonna be the title of this episode. Yeah. I like that. So there's one other aspect I want to talk about before we, you know, wrap up here. Sometimes the actual delivered offer itself is too confusing.
Greg Marshall 24:58 Right? I'm actually working on a client where Right now, yes, simplify that.
Blake Beus 25:01 Right. So and so if you actually have an offer the deliverable if you know if it's a physical product, like what you're giving to them, or if it's a digital private is probably more common in coaching and digital products than others. If whatever you're giving them is too complicated, it's going to be very hard for you to write a simple, straightforward headline and copy on the page, because you've overthought the deliverable Yep. Like, what what do you recommend? You know, you said you've got a client right now, right?
Greg Marshall 25:31 So this is very, very common in the fitness space. Okay. Because there's, you know, there's so many diets, so many heavy lift, like, keto II cars, there's, there's so many everything's right. And what ends up happening is, the business owner creates like this powerhouse of a package, which to the business owner, it makes sense. Because they would want that, right. The problem is, you forget, you're talking to people in different stages, maybe they're in the beginning stages, they don't understand all the ins and outs of your business like we do, right. And so what happens is, we all we give them too much, and then they feel like they can't do anything, right. So what we're currently working with this particular client that I'm talking about, is simplifying it. So saying, like, this program, you're getting a drop off of people, because they have the same consistent complaint, they're either getting injured, or it's too much. What that means that is, this program is actually built for a different segment of that fitness community. So either get rid of some of these aspects to lighten the load, and simplify, don't have exact calorie mouse just generalize advice, and a little bit more generalized workouts, or simplify, cut out the program that is not for the beginner and then change what you're saying in your marketing to match the more intermediate. Right. Right. Right. And that's, that's how we're doing so essentially, cut out things that are unnecessary based on the mindset, your
Blake Beus 27:09 thought, yeah. And I think I think this happens more with businesses that are starting out or trying to hit a certain income level. And I say that because everyone kind of hits this panic threshold, where they start feeling impostor syndrome or whatever, where they're thinking, Okay, I've had some success, but I need to scale it, or I had a really great month, and then I had a terrible month. And I'm in panic mode. So I need to chase all of these different audiences. And then you make my audience bigger and bigger and bigger. So I need to have an advanced program and an intermediate program and a beginner program and a pre beginner program. And, and all of these are pretty free beginner program, and then a high ticket offer that's after all of this, because that's what I've seen Russell Brunson do, right? So a lot of those guys, a lot of those guys, but what what you've got to realize is when you're kind of modeling someone like Brunson are all of those. Like, that's how they're scaling from 100 million in business value to like 150 million in business value, and they have hundreds of employees, and all this stuff. That's not your scaling strategy. If you're just starting out, and you have a small, smaller business, and you're not even spending up to $1,000 a day on ads, that's the strategy that you don't need. Because the reality is, is even if I'm only targeting same only targeting people in America, America has what 330 million people in it. So that means at any given point in time on Facebook or on Google, there's probably 100,000 100 million people on those platforms right now. Yeah. And so when you're running your ads, the reality is, is you if you sell a product for $100, if you want to have $100,000 month, you only need to sell 1000 of those 2000 people, right? Yep, like that. And $100,000 month to business at this stage is huge. Yep, that is a huge thing for them. And you only need 1000. So so that you don't need to chase all of these different demographics, you really need to lean into whichever one is easiest for you to sell and deliver on and then scale into that. And then when you hit the point where you're skint, you've scaled into that, and you're super profitable, and everything's working great there, you can then start building out business systems or processes or teams to lean into these other areas. But but keep it simple. You're gonna drive yourself nuts. Well, and I've done that too.
Greg Marshall 29:34 Well, yeah, I think we all have and because we've all started at zero. Yeah, right. So we've all done that. And I think the what I found and I'm happy brought this up because I've never like actually articulated okay, but you should focus if you're not spending over $1,000 A day in ADS. You should focus on mastering one to two offers. That's it. Do not get confused with doing a billion different things, one to two offers. And that is it. And I'll tell you why I had a client that they sold, I was like two years ago, they literally sold one t shirt. And so 500 Some $1,000 a year, right one. And it was, we just sold as many of those teasers the only possible, and the delivery became very easy, because it's literally one t shirt, and you know exactly how many shirts you need to get exactly what print you need to have, and how much it's gonna cost to get out the door. And we also do our acquisition. Once you master that, then you move into a second and a third or, and the great thing about that we only we were spending, I want to say with him $400 A day or something of that. And we grew it to that. And we just probably still could have went even further. So it's kind of like, you want to think about mastering one offer maximum two in the early stages and do not get caught up in too many channels and too many delivery platforms and too many tools. And tumor, it's very easy to do too many, right? Just focus on one and master. You'll be shocked how far you can take a single offer, it knows a lot further thing.
Blake Beus 31:12 Oh, yeah, abs Absolutely. And here's the thing. The other thing that I've seen people do, and I don't think is bad strategies, maybe something to think about, I see this a little bit more in professional services or whatever. But publicly marketing wise, you have one offer. Yeah. And then when you get those customers in the door, you can talk to them about the other offers. But up front, you just have the one offer that gets people in the door that's very easy to market to it's profitable with your ads, or it gives you cheap leads, or whatever. And then behind the scenes, when you actually talk with someone, you can say, Okay, you actually would really benefit from these things. But it gives you the time to have that more complicated conversation. And that's why I say it works a little bit better with professional services, think about, think about a lawyer, right? Like there's so many things a lawyer getting clients has to explain to the clients. And if he tries to explain he or she tries to explain all of that in their advertising materials and on their landing page is not going to work, it's totally not going to work. And so what you need to do is you need to have a very simple offer up front, get them in the door, and then have that more in depth conversation that you frankly need to have in order to to have them fully benefit from your services. You just can't do that publicly, because it's too much. It's too confusing. It's like drinking from a fire. Yes,
Greg Marshall 32:29 don't make the mistake that I've run into what I found a common error. And the very beginning of some of the business I've worked with, they're starting literally from zero is having too many things. Like too many offers too many products, too many, and constantly focus on building new products over and over and over again, versus trying to master just a few. Because what that does is I believe by focusing on too many things, you create your own overwhelm, right, like, and when you become overwhelmed, and you don't and you have limited resources. Like if you're starting a business, you really probably started with like less than 500. All right. I mean, nowadays, like back in the day, you had spent a lot more but nowadays, you get a side hustle going, but most people's budgets are like, in the very beginning, they got 500 bucks, they got $300. Now, that's that's it, right? So you need to be focused, one or two things, not 500 things because the the people that you're following are seeing which inspiration sometimes can can actually be negative. And the beginning stages, because if you look at some things where you see a company A they just did 10 million, I just did five minutes, it's 100 million, it's easy to try to mimic what they're doing. Even though you're, you're at a way different stage, right? And what that does is it'll it'll make you feel bad about yourself. Because you'll be like, well, how come they've got 48 products, and they've exited that 100 million. And I can't even figure out how to get one. Because I'm trying to do all these things, right? You're trying
Blake Beus 34:11 to do too many things that you've added. And if you think about it, especially when you're tight, maybe a solo business or a small team, every product you offer comes with a customer support overhead comes with customer question overhead comes with just like emotional and mental overhead. Whereas if you have just the one, you know, it's very simple. And you might be thinking to yourself, Okay, but what if it's the wrong product, and I can't sell it? That's like, there's so many people out there, the product probably is not the problem. Yeah. But it's easy to think that usually the marketing message or getting in front of the right people is the problem correct? It's oftentimes not the product. Plus, you can hone and tweak your product over time as you go based on feedback from actual customers and make it a little bit better. I do that with my digital products.
Greg Marshall 34:57 Yep. And I think too, you know, we Use Russell Brunson as an example because he is a successful guy. And a lot of what he's doing is the way to grow really large businesses. I think one thing though, to keep in mind is think about how all these guys have become successful not just internet marketing, guys, but this is overall right. You got Russell Brunson. Clickfunnels. He, I mean, he was pushing that super hard for I want to say two years where it was like, every single time I looked up, I saw he had challenges, but it was all said about one problem, you will get Coca Cola is Coca Cola soda, right? They didn't have Diet Coke back then. And Coke Zero and all these other branches of it. When they first began, they just saw how many Coca Cola was, can we sell the same product over and over again, and just look at a lot, you know, the Apple iPhone, right? That's basically what drives the sales of everything else, iTunes and the computers and all that they have one product where they really focused hard on and sold as many of them as possible. So find a product that you have that the market wants, that's a good product that you know how to sell. And only focus on selling as much of that as possible and become an absolute Be your own guru on your own product, you know, inside and out how to find the customer how to communicate what they get, and master it before you add more and more and more. That's that's crazy what I would recommend. Absolutely.
Blake Beus 36:32 All right, let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people chat with you? Greg
Greg Marshall 36:35 marshall.co. You can book a free strategy call. What about
Blake Beus 36:39 Blake beus.com and check out the SM three group in there.
Greg Marshall 36:43 All right. Okay. I'll see you guys later. Bye.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:00 Okay, and then we'll just make sure we look up there. I did pretty good at looking up there during the I only good. Yeah. All right.
Greg Marshall 0:08 Well, we are live
Blake Beus 0:10 live ish. You're gonna see a recorded recording. But you you have some questions for ya. So cousin was like, let's do it. Let's do this.
Greg Marshall 0:20 We've had this conversation before off recording I think it'd be valuable now to do a recording but also to kind of go through strategy live since Yeah, yeah. So So yeah, so one of the things that I have seen the I want to challenge this is, so there's different bidding strategies, right? Yeah, cost per click CPA Max conversion all in each one of these ad platforms. And that's assuming that the algorithm is going to match up the result that you want. Right, right. Here's my question. So I ran a test the other day, and you know, me, I'm always testing, essentially my job as marketers. Yes. Yeah. 24/7. I ran a test the other day. And I bid for video views, but this is on Facebook, okay. And I measured it against a traffic campaign, where one objective you say, I'm looking for video views. Okay. The other one, you say I'm looking for traffic
Blake Beus 1:25 traffic. And to clarify traffic is pageviews. Right? Like someone clicks on a link? The page loads? That's the event that we're optimizing for? Correct?
Greg Marshall 1:34 And what I actually found was the video views campaign. were slightly better. Oh, really? Then the traffic, okay. And the here's the kicker, same ad copy, same audiences. So interesting as it was, so nothing changed the other
Blake Beus 1:51 variables with the same worked better in what way? Like what was your end goal,
Greg Marshall 1:55 the end goal was to see like the test was, which one would be better to run video views or traffic, vert to get to the page, right? One of them you're looking for a higher watching rate. Right? Because if technically, if you bid for video views, you're getting higher washers versus traffic. I, in my base off this test, I saw deeper washy rates and better click through rates to the website versus the traffic.
Blake Beus 2:28 And so when you say better your your definition of better is more more people going to the landing page. You're not like adding to cart purchasing. Correct? Correct. Because this is a blog post. And then it also says two blog posts. Yeah. So you set so your objective was to get people to hit that blog post? Yes. But then you told Facebook, on one campaign, I want the objective of video views. But that video has a link in it to go to the blog page. And then the second campaign was you told Facebook, I want people to go to the blog page. Right. So and then you measured which one actually got more people to the blog page. Correct. And the video views got more people to the blog page.
Greg Marshall 3:10 Yes. And so I don't know if that was just and I believe both ads were a video ad. This literally the same little Okay, identical, like no difference and no change in work, because there were existing posts. Okay, she's existing posts, okay. And so it made me think because then I did a dive into, well, what if you go to YouTube, YouTube ads, that's you can do video, essentially, video views or web, right? Traffic leads wherever. And I looked at a couple of clients that are running, and we were starting with video views. And their cost per clicks. Were basically the same as if you were bidding for like web traffic. Oh, really, or CPA, but the CPMs cost per 1000 impressions. Were lower on the video view of video in YouTube and YouTube. Okay. This is where I was really trying to think, Okay, the next test I'm running currently to see if there really is any difference is targeting the same audience, changing the bidding strategies and see where the ads show up. Okay? And the reason why I'm testing where the ads show up is my what is it? The hypothesis, okay, is if your if your targeting is what you want it to be, and you change bidding styles. Is it really different to bid on one versus the other algorithm wise? Okay, that's the question, okay. Meaning, if I'm going after the same audience, I keep getting the same cost per clicks or maybe not cheaper. Okay, on video view versus web tracking or CPA. Then what is the difference of between one versus the other. Okay, and why would you read The why would it matter? Yeah. If you're bidding one versus the other? Yeah.
Blake Beus 5:03 Okay. That's the hypothesis. Okay, here we go. So I, I have some thoughts. So a lot of people talk about algorithms, and we talk about algorithms a lot on here as well. And many of the people that talk about algorithms, I have never written an algorithm before. Which is fine. Like, that's totally fine. But if you've, if you've written some code and sat down and thought, Okay, I need to write, I need to bang out some code that's going to take a few things into account, and then provide a result. How do I do that? You've had to approach the problem a little bit different. And you have, you have to have a better understanding of how algorithms can work. Now, I've never written an algorithm algorithm as complicated. As well, Facebook and Google ad platforms have I mean, they're literally taking 1000s, maybe even 10s of 1000s of data points, and running it through their machine learning. To to to pop out, okay, here's the people that need to see this at whatever, right. But I have written algorithms before, for some, some basic use cases, which I feel like gives me some unique perspective on how algorithms work. Because a lot of people, they're just like, well, I'm testing this and this and this. And then they say, this is how the algorithm works. And they're like, Well, maybe, yeah, maybe. But we've got to think about the decisions that the coders were making and how, how they can detect data, right? So the very first thing and we say this over and over and over again, is you've got to make it easy for the algorithm to to make a decision. Yep. Okay. Because, again, there's there's 10s of 1000s of data points, is one of the reasons why if you have so you have a purchase conversion and fires at the end of a big long funnel, right? You're you're doing the Russell Brunson Click Funnels thing where, where they buy this thing, then there's a bump sale, and then there's an upsell offer, and another upsell offer. And then like, if they turn down this one, there's like a, another offer that's maybe a discount of one of the first offer has and, and all of this thing, and then they go through six or seven steps, and then they purchase. And that's where the event fires. That's very difficult for any algorithm to determine what the hell happened here. Yeah, like like, because it's so far removed from the ad, click, or from a measurable ad event, that there's so many places for the ball to get dropped. Right.
Blake Beus 7:39 And so one of the things, I think the very clearly the easiest thing right now to say is, it's so much easier for Facebook, Google, whatever platform to measure events that happen inside their system, as opposed to something that happens off their site. So like a page load that happens off YouTube, you go to a different platform, even if you're on your phone, and you're inside the YouTube app, you're going to a separate webpage. But if you're measuring a result that happens inside their platform, it you they have access full access to that data, even with iOS 14. Yeah, right? Like, iOS 14 is not going to block Facebook's ability to know how much of a video you watched inside of Facebook's app. Because when you install the app, you give that app permission to track these things. And iOS 14 can block them doesn't block that right. And so whenever you have like a video view objective, it's so much easier for the algorithm to determine objective has been met. Yeah. Which is why in my opinion, you're gonna see always see lower CPMs got it. Now, we've talked about this before. And if you're thinking about this, you the listener CPMs, are essentially how you're charged. Yeah, that that is is an A very important metric. And the the lower the CPM, it's a stands for cost per 1000 views or impressions, right? The lower that CPM mean means you get more people to look at your ads for a lower cost. Yep. Therefore, you have more of an opportunity for clicks, more of an opportunity to determine in you know, that that person's intention, all of those things. So I think the difference in CPMs is probably why you're getting cheaper cost per clicks, and why you're getting more pageviews because more people are actually seeing that. And I think that's probably most relevant inside Facebook because they were really destroyed with iOS. And now iOS 15. Google was like, and we've been through this before we got this not a problem, but Facebook was absolutely right. They'll completely blindsided right So I think that's probably why you're seeing the best results, and probably why you'll very likely continue to see better results.
Greg Marshall 10:07 Well, in that, here's, here's my question then. And maybe I have always looked at it incorrectly, okay? Do you get a less lesser quality audience bidding on different strategies? So, for example, let's say I'm going after the same audience. Do you believe that the algorithms would show like by, say, video views versus purchase? Does that just completely show it to a different audience, almost like my mind in the past would think, well, if I do video views, it's essentially never going to show it to a buyer. Right? And if it is only going to show people who bought Yeah,
Blake Beus 10:51 so this is how this is how I look at when you set up targeting in any any ad platform, it will give you an estimated audience size, right? Yeah. So let's say you you set up targeting, targeting several different interests. And Facebook says you have an audience size of a million people based on your parameters, right. And then you run two ads to the exact same thing with different objectives. One is a purchase objective, and one is saying, video views objective? Yeah, your budget is probably most people's budget probably isn't big enough to blow through a million people have that audience in 24 hours. Now. It's just like, that's not gonna happen. So So part of what the algorithm does is decides, Okay, we've identified this audience based on the parameters you've set, but which people in that audience do we actually show it to? They don't just randomly pick people they're trying to optimize, like, they really do want to get you good results, because they want you to keep spending money with them. Right. And so I would guess that it's quite possible that they will show purchase objective campaigns to a different subset of that audience than a video view objective. And the reason is, is because one of the data points in there is is that they're using as an algorithm is, how likely is this person to to make a purchase? How likely is this person to watch a video, and we all have slightly different behaviors on Facebook, and some people are more likely to watch 1015 20 seconds, five minutes of a video, and some people are more likely to click on a button and add something to the cart and make a purchase. And so Facebook's going to say well, this person feels like they're ready to make a purchase. So let's put it in front of them. And, and they're also like, well, this person is the kind of person that tends to like to watch videos, so let's put it in front of them. But I think where I think there's a disconnect there. Yeah. Because I think it's much harder for an algorithm to say this person seems like they're likely to make a purchase. Yeah, I don't think that's an easy call for an algorithm.
Greg Marshall 13:01 Here's my argument. Yeah. Okay. Are my agreeance on what you're saying, but an argument to the general marketing population? Wouldn't you say that if there's less data, because of the privacy issues being fed back in? What did that mean that the algorithm has lost a significant amount of those n data points? Yeah.
Blake Beus 13:24 Right. Absolutely. Especially on Facebook.
Greg Marshall 13:27 So with that being said, Wouldn't it be you have you should change your thought process with the changes that have happened? Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of my thing is I'm curious to actually, that just kind of sparked my curiosity, because I was like, Well, if you notice, like, if the algorithm or the datasets or whatever, are just not as intelligent and what is it 80% has been taken away? Don't they say? Like automatically 80% of that out? Yeah, maybe even more? Yeah,
Blake Beus 13:59 because iOS by default is opting out of ad tracking. So so it like, what is it? It's like, on my website, it's almost 90% of all traffic is mobile traffic these days? And the difference between iPhone and Android? It's probably 60%. iPhone 40%. Android, depending on industry, some industries are, are more, right, like Realtors way higher up on iPhone than Android. But developers may be higher on Android. But so it kind of kind of depends. Yep. But yeah, because by default, iOS 14 opted everyone out of ad tracking.
Greg Marshall 14:38 So what does that make sense that if they've lost 80, because I'm making the assumption that we were all optimizing for these events in the past, because of how powerful the data was, right? Yeah. But if you strip all that data away, would you be shortchanging yourself by optimizing for something that It only has 20 or 10%. Of Yeah, versus maybe something a little higher.
Blake Beus 15:04 Yeah, I, I would I definitely agree with that. But here's, here's the thing. Like, if you have a campaign with a purchase objective, and it's working, and it's profitable, don't turn that off based on what we're seeing here like that can work for you. A lot of this has to depend on aggregated data that you've that you've obtained inside your ad account. That historical data can it is used to make decisions, per ad account or whatever. But if if purchase events don't seem to be working Yep, then you need to start reimagining how you're doing and start optimizing for events inside the Facebook app. Got it. And then, and then find some sort of a way to follow up with some sort of direct offer or whatever, right? So you might have to think of things in two stages. And this isn't a new concept like this concepts have been around for a long time. But it's probably more relevant now than it has been is because a lot of those purchase events aren't getting reported back into into Facebook.
Greg Marshall 16:10 So here's, here's a question. So like, I've seen with a lot of my clients that have, I guess, you know, seasoned pixels, or you know, they've got a lot of data, the end goal of purchase or lead works perfectly. Yeah. And that's because they have 1000s and 1000s of those events that have happened previously. And even happened now. My question would be, what if someone has a brand new ad account? Yeah, I have heard opposing positions on this over and over again. And I'm curious on what your thought is, because my thought is, logically, if I have no data, and AD account, I should be starting at the highest level, and then work your way down. Yeah. But then you do I hear at least I don't know about you. But I hear from people that just say, always optimize for the bottom of the funnel, even on a brand new account. Yeah. And I don't know if I always agree with that. And I've heard this from like, legitimate people that I would consider good marketers. Yeah, I'm not saying they're completely wrong. Yeah. But it's an it's an idea that I don't know if I 100% am on board right with that.
Blake Beus 17:27 So here's what I would say. I would say there's a lot of seasoned marketers out there media buyers that are talented and really good at what they do. But they can still not have a great understanding of kind of inner workings. The reality is, is Facebook and Google, they don't publish. They don't publish the details about how everything specifically works. They will publish some best practices and give you some concepts, that data and information tends to always be skewed towards making them money. So keep that in mind. So sometimes their best practices. Their best, right? are best practices for them. And sidenote, how many times have you talked with like a Facebook? Like, they'll reach out to you if you spend enough money, they'll reach out, Hey, have a free consultation call. I do it every time. And every time I've had a call with them. I'm like, I'm pretty sure the information you're giving me is lining Facebook's pockets and not mine.
Greg Marshall 18:20 Well, I don't Okay. To go. I don't know how many times I actually instruct my clients. If you get reached out by a REP. RON. I remember thinking of this one client, where she was her Azur apps. I mean, I'm talking absolutely crushing. Yeah, cold trial. Spending. I want to say she was around $400 a day. Okay, three or 400. So not huge amounts. But also that's, that's a significant amount for a lot of businesses. Yeah. And so she was spending that and of course, Facebook calls, right? They reach out to her, they get on the phone call, and they tell her to change all of her bidding. And so she changed that. And the the conversions just like stopped, because of how she changed, you know, they made they're optimized for different things. And that was a big eye opener for me. This happened a few years ago, where I was like, This is not good. Because several times when I talk to him, some of the advice that they give you doesn't feel like they know they're talking it feels like they're just randomly telling you anything. I whatever the sales sales manager told him to say when you call
Blake Beus 19:35 everyone well, I think I think the reality is, is if you're not spinning serious money with Facebook, and when I say serious money, I'm talking like $10,000 A DAY PLUS, you're not getting someone who's on the phone with Facebook, you're not getting someone who's actually run serious as you're getting someone that's been through a six weeks training and they're regurgitating what they've heard and That's fine. Yeah, but in a test Yeah. And it's okay. Usually I take those calls, because I want to pick their brain about something and see what they say. And I just have this morbid curiosity, like every time, but we kind of got off topic that what were we talking about? So optimizing? Well use you said you have you've seen serious advertisers say you always optimize for the end result. Yeah. So their line of thinking is essentially, it's like, you always want to tell Facebook or Google exactly what you want. And that makes sense at a high level saying, I actually want purchases, like, I really do want that. So I want you to use your algorithm magic to find purchases. And I don't think that's entirely wrong. But if it's not working, it's not working. Yeah. The when, when the rubber meets the road, and you launch that campaign, and you're spending $100 a day and you're getting $20 in sales, that's not working. You can't keep up with that. And a lot of them, and I've talked not, not a lot of them. I've heard some say, Well, you just got to spend more spent, you got to lean in and that spending and I've tried that. And and sometimes that works, but not always. And then you're and then you you lose several $1,000. And you're thinking okay, this, this is not working. So it's all about testing what's going to work for you, your ad creative, your audience, all of these things are completely unique. Yep. Even if you have a brand new account, your picture that you're using is probably unique. The ad copy you're using is unique. The landing page or on your cart software that you're using. All of those things are unique, and means that your situation is unique. And so if you want to try testing something bottom of the funnel right here on a brand new account, go for it. And if it works run with that. But if it doesn't work, you need to turn that off. Don't spend more money. And then and then work on kind of building engagement audiences and then retargeting retargeting those engagement audiences? Well,
Greg Marshall 22:03 here's, and this is where the stats from? So you hear well, ad accounts are unique to your business. And I believe that because it does learn who your customers are. So what did you say if if I'm going into a new ad account, and it has nothing? And I tell it to get me a customer, but it literally has never had a purchase? Right, then? Are we shooting blind? Because the the flip side of that was I hear? They say Yeah, well, the algorithms have so much data on everyone else's ad account that they know how to put in front of someone. Yeah. But my question is, but do they really like so let's say I sell an $800 washer and dryer? How many $800 washer and dryer purchase Do you think Facebook is really getting throughout the world on ads can't be can't be that many,
Blake Beus 23:06 that's a pretty unique offer. And so I would say I would say that, if your offer is in line with a lot of other people doing the same thing. So let's pick on Realtors for a second. Like a lot of there's a lot of realtors out there. A lot of them use Facebook ads to get leads, it's a very short funnel, right? Like you can say, here's this house, check it out, give me a call, you know, enter email in so you could even use the on the on, you know, in paid Facebook lead little tool or whatever. And that works for realtors, partly because whenever they make a sale, their Commission's are so big compared to their ad spend that it totally works. And if you have an offer like that, that's very similar to lots of other things out there. But unique because it's you and you're in this geographical area, I can see putting a purchase or putting that lead at that event. That objective. At the end of the funnel, I can see that totally working on a brand new account right off the bat and because of historical data from from everybody, like that's a very easy thing for the algorithm to say to figure out like, it's easy for them to for me, it's easy for the algorithm to see that I've been looking at every house, someone posts on Facebook, and I'm definitely in the market for a house like that is an easy thing for them to determine. And it's an easy funnel, and it's an easy event for them to track. And there's lots of people doing that kind of strategy that could totally work. But if you're selling something unique, like a course that covers something or a membership, like the SM3 membership that we do. Those are those are definitely more unique things and there's not there's probably no historical data on other ad accounts relevant to that. So when I think
Greg Marshall 24:54 and here's here's a thought that I'm curious about, which is cool. Did you almost customize your ad account? Meaning? What if? Okay, let me go backwards. When you talk about ad accounts, right? Does an ad account, even if they don't get to your website, learn from video views and engagement? And all of that? Does that store somewhere? Yeah,
Blake Beus 25:23 yeah. Yeah. So Facebook, I know for a fact that I've actually read this, they can track if you just stop scrolling and look at a post, even if it's not a video or whatever, they don't give marketers access to that data, they do give marketers access to video view data, like, you know, 10 seconds or 25% figures that they give they give access to that they don't give access to the data have always stopped and read this post, right, they do give access to the data, have someone hit the like button, or they made a comment or engaged in some way, shape, or form, or on Instagram, if they viewed my my profile page, they give us access to that data. Oftentimes, it's high level access, but that they let us target those people. But they know if I stop scrolling and read something they know, if I opened the comment section and read some comments. They know if I know those people, and they use all of those data points to put something together. So they do learn a lot on your ad account. Even if some people aren't clicking on the ads and going to some
Greg Marshall 26:26 and they and they do they store this information for their own learning? Like, see, what I'm saying is do they tie the info? Kind of like if you had 1000 purchases last month? You know, it's like kind of in the ad account? Does that ad account also store that information? Or does it only store the events? Like you tell it to based off of view content Add to Cart purchase? Yeah, so
Blake Beus 26:50 they don't publish this? But I I'm very confident saying that? Yes, they do store Okay, all of that stuff. I mean, if you think about it, Facebook's specifically Google to their they are data brokers, like their data collectors, data warehouse platforms. And they definitely store that they may
Greg Marshall 27:17 aggregate that data a little bit. So they're not still storing every single little data point. But they may kind of aggregate that into some collective internal data they can use for decisions, but they do they do store it. Again, they don't publish this. Yeah. But I would be very surprised if they didn't store that and relate that to your ad account. Got it. Okay, because because in my head, I'm structuring a strategy of like, so you could take an ad account, and almost customize that ad account early on, like a brand new one, you could train it up, like an employee, and show it and start with here some, you know, engagement, video views, clicks, blah, blah, blah, then landing page, and then view content all the way to the purchase? And if you're patient enough, would it? In my opinion, wouldn't that be the most cost effective and more customized approach than because here's what I've seen before with new ad accounts. I'm thinking of this one particular ad account, I remember when I first launched, we were going after purchases, and I was almost getting no clicks on the ad saying, Okay, same ad. So remember, anytime I testing, it's with the same exact thing, same audience, you will always get no clicks, no engagements, no anything. I took the same ad post, Id moved it into a view content, suddenly started getting a lot more clicks, engagements, and people even moved down closer to purchase, versus starting out the purchase. That was like one of the first times I was like, that's interesting. It's the same audience same ad, nothing's changed. But when I told it to get a purchase, nothing happened.
Blake Beus 29:04 And I'm, I'm gonna guess you didn't say this. But I'm guessing the CPMs were way lower on the view contents, way, way, way, way, way, way lower. And that's the other thing, right? Like, a lot of companies out there with very, with a lot of data in their ad account, are optimizing for purchase because it's working for them. And they've put that time in. But those are more expensive eyeballs. Yeah, because it's harder for Facebook to determine who clearly fits in that group number one, and number two, there are more valuable set of eyeballs. Yes. Right. And so you're going to be bidding against people with bigger budgets when you optimize for purchase, which again, if you're optimizing for purchase, and you're getting a 2x or 3x Return On cold traffic, like keep doing that, yep. But if you're optimizing for purchase and you're not Yeah, then we got to read. We got to rethink that. The eyeballs for view content or whatever, those are going to be cheaper eyeballs to get to take action. And some people interpret that as a lower intent audience, which you'll hear, you'll hear a lot of advertisers talk about their lower intent intent audiences. But the reality is, is oftentimes, they're lower intent, simply because Facebook can't determine what their attempt intent is. They haven't done the things to give Facebook a clearer idea of what their intent is. And with the right message, the right the right hook, all these things we've talked about, we're still talking to people, even though we're using algorithm with the right hook and the right message and everything you can make that make that work and determine that intent for yourself. Through actual version.
Greg Marshall 30:55 Remember, over the summer, I share with you how I had a client that I think it was over last summer where I said, Yeah, we're actually optimizing. Well, we had multiple objectives that we're going after, right? But I had shared with you that one of the campaign's was the objective was view content. And it was actually getting purchases for the same cost as my purchase, right? Which that threw another like, like, that's interesting, because the view content, which is considered and the CPMs are way lower, is always, not always but mentioned many times from other marketers saying, Yeah, you don't ever really want to optimize for that, because they're not. They're lower quality eyeballs, right? That's essentially what they're implying. But the data in this account was showing otherwise. And so I was like, I don't know, in my mind, I've always interpreted Well, if an account was maybe early on, or whatever, it's better to go after that anyways. Because it's going to be cheaper. Because the other thing that you want, I think, for you, is you want to keep in mind, of what stage is the person giving you that advice? And definitely don't bring up that too. Yeah, because one thing that I have started to challenge a little bit is the people that give a lot of the advice, there are by no means purposely trying to misdirect you. There are only speaking from their current spent, right. Some of these companies are spending 1000 2000 3000 10,000 The horse a day, you're gonna do things a lot differently. It's kind of like, if the CEO of Coca Cola gave you advice on how to grow a business. It's almost like not applicable to you if you're started yesterday.
Blake Beus 32:50 Right? Yeah. CEO of Coca Cola could come in and be like, Okay, we've got this. I don't know craft store yet where you can buy like rubber stamps and things. And we're going to take this multinational, yeah, they're probably not going to do a very good job at data like, and that's the same thing. So you get a lot of these, these gurus and many of them have good information, right, like, and good intent, like they're not trying to screw you over. But many, many of them are will say things like, you know, this is what I did, and spending over $2 million in ads, yes. But if you're only spending 10 hours a day, that your strategies are totally different data different. Let me ask you this, though, I want to circle back to what you're saying you had the purchase event over the summer, and the view content event, and they were getting you similar purchase results, cost per purchase cost per purchase results. Let me ask you, in your opinion, which of those campaigns would would be more valuable in long run? And your Yeah,
Greg Marshall 33:50 and my opinion, it's just gonna go against everyone's opinion, I believe the view content on to me? Yeah, because it's gonna be a bigger audience. It's gonna be a bigger audience. I could feed it more data faster. Yep. It can optimize quicker. That's just my opinion, though.
Blake Beus 34:07 No, I would agree with you on that. And that's why I brought that up. Because a lot of people say cool, well, these are both working. So we'll shut off the view content, cuz we're gonna go just the purchase, because that's what these guys are saying. And it's working. But I would say the view content is probably going to get you more consistent results, like you. And I've run into this with purchase conversions. Sometimes it's all over the place. Whereas if you're optimizing for something else, sometimes it's way, way, way more consistent. Because you're using bigger, your CPMs are lower, so you're in front of way more people. So statistically, it should smooth a lot of these things out. And you're creating retargeting audiences that are much larger, that you can then retarget and you and I both know this, oftentimes, your initial cold traffic audiences, you'll get maybe maybe a 1x return on your row and sometimes a little less, whatever. Sometimes to x like if you've got a cool offer whatever, but then your retargeting ads will get 567 10x return on your row as row as. And that's where that's where all the magic happens. So if you can create that retargeting audience for cheaper, yes, and you're getting sales, I think that audience is bigger. And then you just launched a retargeting
Greg Marshall 35:18 campaign. Funny, funny follow up to that, that client forced me to turn off the view content. Like maybe back in September or whatever, okay, because they heard some other gurus say should only do purchases, right? And so we turned it off, and their sales tanked. Now we have to rebuild it back up. And the database is the data right there. We were getting that cost per purchase. It was working fine having the view content was in there. But once again, maybe a well in tenant guru pension for that to only optimized person get rid of the view content. They basically strong army to turn it off, even though I did. And then they saw an immediate drop and say,
Blake Beus 36:04 oh, so let me ask you this. You have the you were used to running both our purchase and the view contest, you show off the view content. And you saw a drop in so did you see a decrease in performance on the purchases? So so it's almost like the purchase campaign was being propped up? Yes. By the view content campaign because Facebook was basically stealing data from the view content campaign to determine who had the proper purchase intent. Correct. So it was essentially an an unintentional maybe retargeting. Yep, campaign is what might have been added. We
Greg Marshall 36:39 talked about this, where we run side by side campaigns with different objectives, and that they seem to give more signals and feed off each other. Yeah. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's a good thing. Because you're simultaneously growing those retargeting audiences while giving the machine enough data consistently, to actually optimize versus when you do the purchase. And you don't run into this as much as into lead generation, lead generations easier. It's a pretty easy conversion, when you're asking people to pay money right away, you know, you get a lot more fluctuations and your results with the cost versus where one day it will be $15 A purchase for three or four days. And then another day, it's 68. And then another day, it's 30 minutes
Blake Beus 37:31 before and I've been there before. And that is frustrating, right? That's the stuff. That's the stuff that keeps you up at night. Yep. And that's the software. As soon as you wake up in the morning, you're checking your ad accounts, see where you're at that day. And that like that is that is frustrating
Greg Marshall 37:47 goes up and down. And I think one of the one of the thoughts when I set up that side by side campaign was what would happen if I feed enough data constantly to stabilize the account? And that's one of my theories on why, while those were running side by side, we almost never had a jump. And I think it's because of what you're saying it's stealing from the other campaign. And it's able to maintain that level of performance, right. And every day
Blake Beus 38:18 will end in traditional advertising wisdom, with with Facebook specifically was you don't want overlapping audiences. And every Facebook ad rep will tell you that and they'll say, Oh, you're
Greg Marshall 38:32 you're stealing from currently running? Yeah. Overlap. Right now. It's working very well.
Blake Beus 38:38 I personally do. Yeah, I think the only time that matters, is when you're using big budgets, right? Like, if you're spending maybe $1,000 a day, $2,000 a day. You you might run into where you need to stop overlapping audiences, especially if your audience isn't super big. But you can actually a lot of people don't know this, you can actually hop into Facebook, I can't remember where it's at. But you can see how much you're overlapping on those audiences and make that determination. The reality is on smaller, much smaller spends a few $100 a day or whatever. Your audience size is so big. Yeah, that that even if it's like a million, you know, million person audience, oftentimes we're targeting 2 million 3 million person audience. You're you're not you're not gonna overlap in a way that's going to make you a make it make an impact or waste your money, right.
Greg Marshall 39:31 It's overly I think it's like, what is it like an over exaggeration, right of the overlap? Because I have found even with clients spending just two or $300 a day I don't think overlap becomes a problem until you even hit 1000. Right? Right. So that doesn't apply to most average
Blake Beus 39:53 law. A lot of businesses will never never go past $1,000 a day because they simply just don't need to Like, you think about, I saw some ads for a roofing company, right? We've talked about roofing companies before, I had my roof redone a few years ago, because it was damaged in a hailstorm. And the bill was $25,000, or something like that, right? They don't need to spend $2,000 a day to get roofing clients, right? They can spend $200 a day and be profitable all day long, all day long, every day, at $200 a day and no need to spend more than that, because they can get more work than their crews can accomplish in any given amount of
Greg Marshall 40:35 time. And you bring up a good point to strategy because what I do think when we make these podcasts, my intent, and we've actually never really had this conversation gold, nice. The intent is to help more of the early stage to mid stage advertise. Right, right. So I want to speak almost on those terminologies to help that person either start and get going, or if they're getting going where to go. I don't necessarily intend to try to reach the $10,000 day spent.
Blake Beus 41:12 Right. You don't expect McDonald's to reach out to you and say, Hey, Greg, Greg, I was listening to your podcasts about we're spending $100,000 a day, how can we optimize that?
Greg Marshall 41:22 Exactly. I'm not intending for for that particular audience. Because at that point, they're typically not the audience that needs help. Right? The person who needs help, is the person to starch events here, and how to grow that to be a profitable
Blake Beus 41:39 business, right. And I wouldn't even say at that point. They kind of maybe don't even care about results, like exact, there's so big, and they're so big. And it's like that we have a marketing degree, have a marketing department and we have a marketing budget, let's spend it on ads. And we'll write we'll run some reports to show that we've done some stuff. But the reality is, they're making money regardless. And so they kind of they they don't need to know the nitty gritty details, because they're all getting their paycheck and going home at the end of the day anyway.
Greg Marshall 42:09 Yeah, that's a great point. Because they have an ad budget. They just need to spend it. Yep. So they're not really worried about
Blake Beus 42:14 now their job is to spend that much budget and make it look like they're doing something I've worked in corporate. That's really what that's really what most corporate jobs are, is to make it seem like to whoever it matters above you, that you're doing your job.
Greg Marshall 42:25 Yep. So I think that's what our podcast is all about is helping that person that's from the start to mid level tier that, you know, I would, we could almost put a number two, as far as running paid traffic. We could almost say the person that wants to get up to 1000 hours a day. profitably, yeah, yeah, up to 1000 hours a day profitably making that work. Pass that I think that's a different audience. That, you know, they're obviously they know, these standards, they wouldn't get to that.
Blake Beus 42:57 And that's something we could speak to pass to that Absolutely. A bit. Right. But you know, a lot of the principles, you if you're spending $1,000 A day profitably, you've already kind of worked out what's working for your ad account.
Greg Marshall 43:09 So that's kind of the target person. Yeah, that we really want to serve?
Blake Beus 43:14 Well, Greg, we got to wrap this up. This is one of our longer episodes, I'm just looking at the timer right here. And but I think this has been a really interesting one to go over. And it's something I feel like a lot of media buyers need to have a better understanding of, because it's very easy to just kind of throw stuff out there and see what sticks without having an understanding of sending the right signals to the ad platform, how to what the differences are and the nuances for a brand new account versus one that has conversions. We didn't talk about this a whole lot, but versus one that has like messy data. Yes. Right. They've run all these different offers that are not related at all. And now we've got some messy data, right? Yeah, definitely. Since we didn't really talk about that, I would kind of treat that like a new ad account. Yep. Is what I would do. And I would kind of start from the beginning and go from there. And then try to keep all the offers in line. And go from there. But yeah, so let's let's wrap this up. Greg.
Greg Marshall 44:12 Well, if you want to reach out to me book a free strategy session, go to Greg marshall.co. And Blake, Blake beus.com.
Blake Beus 44:19 There's the SM three group in there on social media marketing, organic and paid. Hop in there. Check that out.
Greg Marshall 44:27 Thanks for joining us. Talk to you later.
Blake Beus 44:30 All right, bye. That was that was a good one.
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:00 I don't know, where do we where do we start? Where to? Well, you know, yesterday, we're sending our text messages talking about tracking, right, and the importance of tracking. And you know, how tracking causes a lot of issues? Yeah, with knowing what's working and what's not. And you actually discover something as you were implementing, and you're a seasoned veteran, which, which tells me if a seasoned veteran runs into this, the rest of us people, yeah, are definitely not doing this. So why don't you share a little bit about what you read?
Blake Beus 0:31 Oh, absolutely. So I had this question for a long, long, long time as to what's the best way to actually track conversions. From like a technical standpoint, whenever you set up a new campaign, or a new conversion pixel pixel, specifically with Google, it says, Hey, here's three different ways you can set up this conversion, it could be an imported goal from Google Analytics, you can set it up with Google Tag Manager, or the third option is you can set it to your developer and they will add the code directly on the page with what's called a global site tag. But they don't tell you which one of those is best. Now, I've noticed over the years, that specifically the Google Analytics, importing of the goals, never gave me as many conversions as the other ways of doing it. And it always seemed like the conversions got dropped there. And you were saying you've noticed the same? I did, right? I've actually
Greg Marshall 1:28 tried all three of those. Yes. And the one without a doubt, global site tag works. Yeah. And I just, luckily, or accidentally plugged this in a website correctly. And notice that there was there was more conversions recording. Yeah, then the other two options. And so I just thought, and to give you full disclosure, I also had the other two versions uploaded as well. So I can't compare. Okay, so those numbers are completely different. Yeah. So as I spoke with the client, they would look into the, into the ads manager, and they would notice, how come these they're all tracking the same thing purchases, but how come there's three or four numbers? Yeah. And my thought was, well, this is the Google, you know, pixel on the page. This is the uploaded analytics. And then this is the Google time. And the problem is, it seems like there's some level of drop off right? Where, yeah, and so that actually helped my case to show you can always trust Yeah, the attribution 100% Yes, I'd be 100%. Accurate? Well,
Blake Beus 2:34 absolutely. And the thing is, is like every Google Ads tutorial out there, I've ever seen paid or free on YouTube, or even like provided and made by Google never talks about which one of these is most accurate, they oftentimes will talk about implementing whichever one is easiest for you, based on your setup, whatever. But there's clearly some accuracy differences. So I was diving into some of the Google documentation for something completely different. And I was reading one of their documentation pages on setting up conversion events going through and there's this small little section that says outright, the Google site, global, the Global Site tag with conversion event, is the most accurate way to track any of your events, whether that's a lead conversion, or say a sale or anything like that. And it's only on this one page kind of buried in the documentation, whatever. But it there it is, like, there's there's the evidence, that's the proof. And that's even more accurate than Google Tag Manager, which a lot of people will say, well, it's it's easier when
Greg Marshall 3:49 it's Yeah, tracks as well. I have found just from experience, that the global site is the most Yeah, accurate. And the other thing that I've noticed is, I don't know the documentation that said this, but the Google, did you see anything about enhanced conversions? didn't show anything about that?
Blake Beus 4:10 I have seen some stuff, but I didn't see it in relation to this. Specifically.
Greg Marshall 4:14 It wasn't in a doc. I was curious. I wasn't looking for it. Yeah. And all the ad accounts are that I manage only some of them have that option, and others don't really. So I don't know if it's a new thing. Maybe not rolling out. Yeah.
Blake Beus 4:26 Yeah, um, I'm not entirely sure that'll that'll be interesting. We'll have to dive into that. Yeah. But I do want to take a quick minute to just talk about maybe why. And this is one of the things we've talked about before, if we want to take a big step back about, you know, why is this and we've mentioned over and over and over again, the easier you make it for the algorithm to know what's going on, the easier it is for them to for the algorithm to deliver the right kind of the ads in front of the right kind of people and we've we've talked about that this is true with Facebook ads is true with any algorithm based Yep, adds platform, you want to make it easy. And I think that's exactly why the global site tag is the most accurate. Because from a tech perspective, it's very easy for the algorithm to consume that information, it loads on page load. It's one script tag plus fires one event, one conversion event that's either like a, you know, a lead or a purchase or whatever. If you use something like Google Analytics, your analytics has to grab that information, it gets processed as part of the goal algorithm, and then it gets sent over into Google ads. And that's a lot of steps or something could go just a tiny bit off, and then the conversion doesn't get counted. It's kind
Unknown Speaker 5:40 of like playing the telephone game, exactly what it is yes, it gets diluted, the more time it has to go through another source. And then
Blake Beus 5:49 you you even have with that particular setup, you even have this option where usually inside of analytics, you have multiple people in there building reports doing all these things. And if someone makes a change that breaks that goal funnel, now you have human error on your team side, causing no conversions to get reported into your Google ads, and no way to be notified that that's what happened. There's no like change management system inside of Google Analytics or anything. So there's so many places where the ball can get dropped, their information won't get communicated back. The second one was Google Tag Manager, how that works is it loads some scripts, and then Tag Manager injects other events or other scripts or things in there for you. This is set up for marketers to be able to basically change advertising events and conversion events without having to involve a developer team. So it does make sense. But then again, you're loading one library script, and then you're injecting some other library scripts. And you're hoping that all of that happens in the correct kind of timing, and then things get get converted and sent back. It's
Greg Marshall 6:57 a recipe for failure, especially at this moment where a lot of tracking is being taken away. Yeah. Now you're adding an extra step for it to not be able to track as,
Blake Beus 7:08 right and then one thing I've noticed is every time you set up inside of Google Tag Manager, a Google Ads conversion event, it always to ask you do you want to add the conversion linker as well. And a lot of people don't know what that is, you can you can Google it and search on it. And it just basically says, this is something that helps link up your initial ad page view with the URL parameter that says GCL ID, and then there's that long string of numbers. It helps connect that with, you know, a conversion event that happens now in your funnel. And you're thinking, okay, cool, great. That makes tons of sense. But how that works is it has to set a specific cookie for the conversion linker with the Google Click ID, which is that long string of things when people click on it, and then it has to track that cookie through all of these steps. And then, and then finally, at the very last thing, it has to send that back. And the reality is, is that there's also a lot of places for it to get lost to, for it to get lost. So really, the absolute best setup is to have the global site tag on your page. And that is on every single page of your site. Yep. And then there's a different global site tag for analytics. And for ads. Yes. So that's, that's one thing you got to think about, you can actually combine those together into one tag, but you have to set a little variable that says This one's for analytics, and this one's for ads, that goes on every page. And then and then you just load the conversion event on your, on your thank you page, whether it's a lead, thank you, or like a purchase, thank you page or whatever. And that's it. It's very simple for a developer to do, or even a non developer to just copy and paste those those codes on there. But
Greg Marshall 8:54 the moral of the story is simple. Just pay a developer make this simple communication. Yeah. So that the information doesn't get lost.
Blake Beus 9:03 Yeah, in any literally, if it's something that you don't know how to do, that's fine. Any competent developer could literally do this in five to 10 minutes. Like it's not, it's really super simple. And so it's not a complicated thing for a developer to do. Just find someone that knows your, your platform, whatever your website's built on. And then any developer can make that happen in five to 10 minutes.
Unknown Speaker 9:25 Well, here's the next question, then that leads us to what we were texting back and forth about yesterday, which was
Greg Marshall 9:32 okay, so if we have to, let's see if we have the tracking on there. But what about our page site? Experience?
Unknown Speaker 9:39 So you had mentioned that? Oh, yeah. Ah, yeah. Had a certain score. Yeah. For the mobile. Why don't we go and
Blake Beus 9:45 yeah, and we can just dive right. We can dive right into that. So we were talking about the actual SM three group that I talked about on here, kind of at the end. We're running we're testing out a few new ads and things like that and, and the page has been out there for a while. Now And I was looking at the numbers. And not surprisingly, almost 90% of all the views, all the clicks. For our it's a YouTube ad and all the all the page views were from mobile devices. Yep. And that's not surprising because everybody has a mobile device these days. Yep. But the problem is a lot of people build for desktop, because you're writing code on desktop, or whatever. And I do the same thing. So I just quickly went over to Google has a couple of tools. And there's some other tools PageSpeed Insights is one where you can basically calculate what your quality score is for the page from a mobile experience standpoint. And Google does clearly say from ads, that they do take that quality score into account for for who your who's gonna see your ads, and it can actually lower your costs. Anyway, the quality score was not as good as I thought it was. And I'm a developer that pays attention to this stuff. So it's very easy to just kind of let these things go. Yep, go away. So. So anyway, there's gonna be a few things that will make few changes will make to that page to make it load faster. Make sure that it's responsive and a little bit better way. Make sure it's got a good hierarchy of data. And what I mean by that is, section headings are bigger fonts. Sub titles are slightly smaller, maybe different way, it just, it has to do with readability and easy to kind of like quickly scan through. And then the other thing I was thinking about too is on the mobile experience, some of our key language on the landing page doesn't show on page load, you have to scroll down a little bit to see some of the key phrases that that that we put in there to help get people to take action. So we're gonna kind of scrunch some of that up, maybe, maybe rearrange some things on mobile. So the, the key language we want people to see is right at the top right at the top, and they can see here's
Greg Marshall 11:57 a question I have. What about, you know how they have accelerated mobile pages? Is there any value to that? Is there any pros or cons? Yeah. Oh,
Blake Beus 12:09 yeah, absolutely. So Accelerated Mobile Pages or amp, you've probably come across these, everybody probably has. It's a it's a thing where basically, Google takes they basically, they basically scrape your website, cache that, put it on their servers. And then and then when someone clicks on that, from Google search results, it will load that fast version of the page. Can Can you directly send someone to an app page or No, you? Because I noticed you can say it was search. So only if they search? Yeah. Can that patient? Yeah. So how, how that would work. So by search, if you choose to opt into Google amp, then anybody that clicks on your links from search will get the AMP page. If you grab the amp URL, you can send that amp URL to someone and have them load that page directly. But it's usually the URL is usually something like google.com/amp/from. My website, it would be like use.com/sm3. It would it would be a different looking URL. But you could potentially send people send people directly to that. What I don't know is I don't know if you can send ads directly to that page. I have no idea. It's actually never thought about that. And
Greg Marshall 13:26 I was wondering, could we send traffic to an AMP page? And if an AMP page, because it's, I'm assuming Google owns that kind of platform? Right? AMP is Google? Oh, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 13:40 So then I would think, if you're using Google Adsense or Google property, would that impact it? Yeah. Like, would
Greg Marshall 13:48 they basically favor a little bit more, as I'm saying, Yeah,
Blake Beus 13:50 I don't know your, your quality scores would be much higher. Because the, they're putting it on a really fast server. They're caching everything, but they're also scraping out some of the JavaScript you might be running behind the scenes. So oftentimes, you might not get some of the tracking data that you would expect to get, especially if you're tracking on a non Google platform. So if you're using something like I don't know, ad roll, or Facebook pixel, or some of these things, by default, those things are not going to track, you have to do some extra work to get an AMP page to track that stuff.
Greg Marshall 14:28 And so there would be the con basically, if you used an AMP page, you maybe you're tracking for pixel reasons wouldn't be as as effective. Right,
Blake Beus 14:37 right. But and sometimes pages, because they're guessing, sometimes pages don't load correctly, if it's if it's a page that requires JavaScript to render certain things. And I've seen this happen before. I'll click on a page and I'm thinking this something's not right with this page. And you can actually go up to the top and click a couple of links and get to the non amp version of the page and then it starts working correctly. So there is some trade offs.
Greg Marshall 15:02 So yeah, good now. So we've we've talked about tracking, right, and the importance of making sure your, your tracking codes are on as clean as possible samples Mazal, a direct communication to the ad platform, that's going to be the most effective. One thing to kind of transition from that is I was sharing with you someone that is currently running ads, yes, I love this. It has zero tracking pixels, like none, literally zero, that's amazing. Nothing, no analytics, no Facebook pixel, no, Google Pixel, and he's running ads on these platforms really. And he had mentioned to me that he had, he's been making sales at a decent clip, by the way, purely with no tracking, right, which goes against a lot of what these platforms will tell you to do. So that actually teaches a very important lesson, which the lesson is the messaging is the most important than absolutely, because without the right message, he wouldn't get any of these responses. Now, you can make the argument that if he's making great sales with no tracking, that his messaging might be as tight as you possibly can make it. Which means if you implement the tracking, and help optimize these pixels, he may be able to see great results. Because if it's working with no tracking, and a straight old school, just put this ad in front of people and use your message to get them to buy, then that means your your message is probably on point. So I would focus, no matter how much tracking we do. Never forget that you have to make sure you're actually talking to the right person. And that you have a strong marketing message. Yeah. And that's, that's everything.
Blake Beus 16:53 Yeah, it's absolutely everything. And when when people start talking about split testing audiences and stuff, that's a great place to start. And we've talked about that. But you really should look at split testing your messaging, yes. And not and that's not just your messaging in your ad. That's the messaging on the landing page. And, and if you if you're using video, the messaging on your video and and seeing what's working, and then when you find out what's working, work to align all of those. So they're all in line with one another. So the messaging in the ad directs people to the landing page, which has the basically the next logical step of that messaging and the content on that page is the next logical step of the messaging, because that's super important. Yes.
Greg Marshall 17:38 And one thing that, you know, when I first started running ads, there, I don't think there was actually pixels that shows you kind of Yeah, how, how many years ago that was? I don't think there was actually any conversion pixel. Actually, there wasn't I remember, because at the time, it came out maybe a few months later, okay, I remember thinking it being a big deal. Like, wow, there's this there's that Facebook, is that were you saying? Yes. And so with, with Facebook with these, I remember focusing heavy on the messaging. And I was actually using engagement campaigns, at the time, because there was only traffic engagement, you know, there was no conversion. And so I was using engagement campaigns. And I remember spending so much time on the messaging and split testing the messaging. And by the way, this is before I actually knew what split testing was, okay, I just from a sales background, I just knew certain things work better than others in face to face sales when I just took the same logic, yeah, to the advertising. And I remember, kind of fine tuning a couple of messages that were geared towards personal trainers. And there were different hooks and angles that worked better than others. And when you put them all together with the right picture, the right words, the right call to action, and then the right at the time, their funnel was they respond, then you get them into a Facebook Messenger, then you get them to a phone call to get them into person that was actually the funnel but has no tools to support that. So we just did it all manually. But we optimized each part of that funnel. But it all started with the messaging, right? Because we noticed, when I tested a certain message versus another, it would attract a totally different person. And that's, I think, when you first hear testing your messages, I think, at least I know on my end, it's easy to dismiss. Yeah, like does the message really make that much of a difference, especially on who responds to the targeting says it's targeted to this person. So like, maybe you shouldn't have to work on that as much. But I don't think that's the case. I actually think the message is split testing the message is more important than I think a lot of us give credit to because it just seems like how could a set of words or a picture make that much of a difference?
Blake Beus 20:07 Yeah. And if you if you think about, you know, the olden days, yes, you know, I always go back to direct mail marketing marketing back in Canada. Dang, seriously, you guys got to lightest of all, you got to look at Dan Kennedy. And you got to read some of the material from from people that did direct direct mail marketing back in the 50s. And 60s Because they didn't have fancy pixels to send data back in, in near real time as to what was working. And so they put a lot of effort into the messaging. And just because we have all of these fancy tools now doesn't mean that the messaging is has gone away, we're, we humans haven't evolved that much like we still we still want the messaging. And it's easy to get a little lazy with testing your messaging by saying, well, let's say free download on this one, versus instant download on that one like, that can make a difference. But that's not me that we're not that's not what we're talking about. When we're talking about the messaging, we're talking about, really diving in deep to, to who you're targeting, you know, what their hopes and dreams are, what their fears are, like, get that stick and carrot going? Like, how can we help them run away from what they don't want? And how do we help them run towards what they do want, and connect the dots very clearly between what the offer is and how they can get what they want. Whatever that is with it with fitness. That doesn't necessarily mean I want to shed 50 pounds, sometimes that's the correct message. But other times, the message is actually different. Maybe it's maybe it's I'm a little bit worried about my health, because I have family members that have X, Y and Z health problems. And so I don't, I don't necessarily want to shed weight, but I want to get in a good routine now. Yeah, that kind of an understanding, they need to take that understanding and turn that into a marketing message that you got to have dive in, you got to dive in a little deeper on things.
Greg Marshall 22:01 I think we and we've talked about this before, but I think we've gotten so spoiled. And I I will be a part of this group. So I'm not saying I have never been spoiled, is yeah, I'm actually a part when I say we included Yeah, we've been spoiled. I've noticed a direct. This has been the iOS change. And less tracking has actually been refreshing for me. And I'll tell you why. Because for a good stretch of maybe two to three years, the pixels were so accurate, that you can just throw up anything, and it will convert, right, like literally anything because the target did all the work for you. Right? And what that I noticed that during that timeframe, there was less and less talk about ad copy and the importance of what you're writing and all that stuff. And it was more about the technology. Right, right. And what that actually train everyone to do was to get not as effective with their messaging. And what that means I look at it like this. We all know well, not we all but many people know how to ride a bike or drive a car or run or do whatever, play basketball. But what you find out is if you take two years off three years off of anything, I don't care how high level you were. When you were at your peak. You are rusty. Yeah. And you're not as good as you are until you get back to that. Yeah. And I've noticed that over time, I think the entire market has gotten to that point where they're relying so much on technology, that they stopped practicing their marketing skills. And now, it might just be a perception that things are harder now. But really, it's kind of like if you haven't played baseball in two years, that 95 mile an hour fastball hasn't changed. It just feels harder, because you haven't been seen. Yeah. Right. And so I think that's kind of what's happened with, well, there's all this tracking gone, it feels like maybe it's more difficult, but I would actually argue it's probably everything's the same. It's just that your skill set, you've let it kind of dwindle during these good times of
Blake Beus 24:19 pixel tracking, or you hopped in when the good times were happening. And this This feels like the end of the world because you're only used to you know what, what things were, which is a little bit where I was I kind of hopped in to advertising again from like the software engineering side of things. And so tracking and all that stuff was exactly what I focused on. And I hopped in kind of at the good time before before everything kind of shifted. Yeah, before everything kind of shifted. Right. But I would say the one thing I did early on is I realized that that the message was super important. So I dove in deep on reading a lot of books. I haven't gotten a copy of it. You know what that what, what is that there's this one ad book that's not real. The imprint anymore instead of $450, written by this guy I know you're talking about, I can see the cover, but I need to, I can see the cover too. But we'll we'll figure out what it is until he goes next time, but I even have a copy of that, that I've read through and has some gold in it. But, but yeah, marketing messages is extremely important. And if you think
Greg Marshall 25:19 about it, you know, I always go to Dan Kennedy, Dan Kennedy warned us about, I don't know, five, six years ago, where he was mentioning, you do not want to rely on these algorithms and this type of targeting because they're going to take away who you can target. Yeah. And he mentioned because of that, you're going to be susceptible, unless you get the direct response marketing techniques down. And once again, he was right. 100%. And, you know, what I found is, from people who've done it a longer time, you know, because he's older. They always know because this all works in cycles. Yeah, right. It's very similar to fitness. carbs are bad for you one day, they're great for you the next day, fat is good for you, then it's fats battery. It's just
Blake Beus 26:10 It's a never ending cycle. But what never changes is the marketing message exact like is the psychology of people, right? Like maybe there's a different angle, because there's because the offer is something new that didn't exist a while ago. But we but that psychology and focusing on the message is always going to be a constant. So the good marketers are those that focus on understanding that understanding the customer persona, and it's honestly, it's hard work it is it's it's really hard work, especially when you have limited characters, you could put in an ad. So you've got to find a way to get that message in there. In a certain space or whatever, we only
Greg Marshall 26:44 have so much time, that's the other thing with ads is you only have a couple seconds to hook them in. So you've got to be effective quick. And if you're not, the, your mark is just not gonna work as well. And we no longer have these mega advanced. I mean, we the pixels are still there. Yeah. And they're way smarter than we were 789 10 years ago, but they're not what they were the last two or three. Yep. So train yourself back up to, you know, working on your marketing messaging and thinking about from start to finish versus I'll just throw it out there. Let the targeting do the work and right.
Blake Beus 27:20 Watch the money come in. Yeah. And so to kind of wrap things up, because people I mean, you might be thinking, if you're listening to this right now, you guys started off talking nothing about just about tracking everything. Now we focused into this. But they're, they're extremely, extremely related, right? Like, you definitely want to make sure your tracking is is as good as you can make it. And if there's a couple of simple tweaks you can do to make that really, really good. Great. And that's what we want to do. But then you got to spend time focusing on the messaging and getting that messaging, right. Because as you have shown, some people out there not knowing what they're doing, crush the messaging and still make sales. Yep. Which many marketers would think that's crazy, that would never happen.
Greg Marshall 28:03 But it's definitely possible. And so you need both you need both the and the key to these tracking mechanisms is to help drive your decisions on what's working. But don't overly rely on them to do all the work. Right. So that's why you need
Blake Beus 28:18 both. Yep. All right. So we'll wrap this up here, Greg, people.
Greg Marshall 28:22 So if you want to go ahead and reach out to me, Greg marshall.co, you can go ahead and book a free strategy session. I'm Blake
Blake Beus 28:27 how to do get a hold, just like beast.com. And there's a SM3 group that Greg's actually yes involved in now and helping with now where you can communicate with us, kind of directly with weekly Q and A's and all of that stuff.
Greg Marshall 28:40 So join the SM3 group. You'll get more information like this podcast. Yeah, absolutely. Kate will talk to you later. Bye.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:10 All right is pretty centered, right? Okay, I think we're good. Yeah, we're good. All right. All right. So we're going to talk about,
Greg Marshall 0:23 we're gonna do unique, unique bundles. Okay.
Blake Beus 0:26 All right. Okay. Okay. So we were talking about different ways to bundle things. And I was telling you about some something unique that I saw and I wanted to like, dive in deep. So everybody's probably heard have heard of NF T's right now. Yeah, but not a ton of people, like know a whole lot about them. In fact, I'm one of them. Yeah. So if you were to guess, like, what would you say?
Greg Marshall 0:49 To be honest? All I think of NF T's is some Gary Vaynerchuk. itself. That's, that's honestly what I think. And I think I've seen Tai Lopez talk about it. Yeah. And the the standard guys that are out there that are using up on the trends. Yeah. So that's, that's my extent. And I haven't looked, I think I've seen one called board eight. Yeah, that's a Tai Lopez one. I don't know if it's
Blake Beus 1:13 one like that. That's those, the board eight collection is the most expensive NFT collection out there.
Greg Marshall 1:19 So yeah, but outside of that, Oh, no.
Blake Beus 1:22 So here's, here's what I here's what I saw. Interesting. So recently, one of my friends was telling me they saw they saw this and I dove into it looked into it a little bit. But Russell Brunson offered an NFT kind of bundle for anybody that purchased tickets to to live in called funnel, hacking live or whatever that that that is, he also offered an NF T to people to watch like a free webinar, basically getting people to do that. And then, and then one person that claimed the NFT was going to get essentially, well, everyone's gonna get entered into a drawing. And one person with an NFT with with that particular collection of NF T would win, basically free access to all of his recorded courses for life got because of the NFT. Yeah. And, and what what I found interesting about this was, this was essentially, he used a trending topic, that not a lot of people know what they actually are, but they've heard of them, offered one of these things, which is a digital thing to people for free, attached to real world value to it. And along the way, basically taught people how, how to create how to sign up for and receive and kind of manage NF T's all along the way. And he did all of that to people that don't know what NF T's are. Yeah, it's almost like they're going after people similar, like me,
Greg Marshall 2:52 have heard, you know, NF t, it must be of some value. Yeah. Because people keep talking about Yeah. And so my assumption is, well, this NFT must have some value. So maybe I would want that. Yeah. Right. So it's almost like it's marketed perfectly to someone like me, who has enough knowledge to know that it exists, but not enough to actually know like, once I have it, what do I do?
Blake Beus 3:16 Right? Well, and that's what I found most interesting about, and I can explain exactly what an NF t is, in a minute. But before doing that, what I found most interesting about this was he was able to use a trending topic, to incentivize people by bundling this unique thing, and offering a chance to win something. And it probably boosted sales by a large margin. Yes. And it got me thinking about just unique bundles, which you've talked about bundles before. Yeah. But I feel like the greater principle here is not necessarily the NF T's. Yeah, it's, it's that you need to be thinking about how to create a an offer that is a bundle offer that's interesting and harder, hard to you know, turn your back on. And it's it's unique, and it creates urgency and value. That is what was more interesting to me. And I feel like more businesses need to really think about this,
Greg Marshall 4:17 I think, excuse me, I think what we can learn from it is how to make your offer more sexy to the audience right? Sometimes we have offers that maybe you know, they go stamp right so hey, you know, come sign up for this come sign up for that only works for so long before people are like, Oh, I'm no longer interested in that because we all have the attention span of like 10 seconds, right? And we want the new shiny object syndrome. And what I think a lot of these guys do very well, especially Russell Brunson is they know how to they understand that people have shiny objects? Yeah. So they know how to use that to their advantage. Right, right. And there's nothing wrong with that. No, that's literally what marketing is, is be to finish the conversation or continue the conversation has gone on in the customer's mind. And that's what they do is they are able to figure out how do I make the offer that maybe is has not changed at all? And how do I kind of reinvigorate it by go ahead and putting something new and fresh and to write the offering? Right,
Blake Beus 5:21 new and fresh? And, like, in a way that doesn't increase your overhead? Correct? Right? Because Because like NFT was something that it may be cost. Russell Brunson. 50 bucks to mint to mint some NFT. And then he gave them to I don't know, 1000s of people probably. And then some time, right? Because there's some technical knowledge and he's happened to create your own NFT. But, you know, it just gets me thinking. If you pay attention, you see this. In in gyms, you see this with, with, with lots of different businesses, horses and horses. And it's but it's easy to forget when you're creating your own stuff, because it's almost like you're too close to your own business. You're too close to it or whatever. Right. It's
Greg Marshall 6:10 too. Yeah. So that's a that's a great point. Because that's a challenge that I believe everyone has. I've had this before, we all believe that just our offer alone, because we did it is special enough. Yeah. But we don't if we take like an honest look and say, Is this intriguing enough to get someone actually want to do this? Right? Usually the answer's no. Right? I mean, usually you do have to work on really kind of making it something that people want to, that they become attracted to. And one rule of thumb that I have found, is whatever, it's almost like whatever you dislike out there, as far as how things are being sold, is how you're gonna have to sell. Right, right. So we all hate or I hate ads. I hate this. I hate when one more special offer. That's not all. But that all works. Right? Right? And so it's almost like you have to make a deal with yourself to say, you know, I don't necessarily love to sound that way. But it obviously worth it. Because yeah, that's how these guys are making millions and millions. Yeah, absolutely.
Blake Beus 7:16 And, like one of the things I think about a lot is, it's almost like you need it's almost like you need multiple multiple offers one to get people in the door. And then one to keep keep them there. Especially when you have a business that's maybe a service based business with recurring revenue, or or people come back or you have returning customers or, or some sort of subscription or membership plan, like a gym or whatever, whatever. Right. So like, we talked about gyms a lot, because you have a background, it's kind of an easy thing to visualize. But when you were selling gym memberships, I'm guessing you had something to get people in the door. And then once they were in the door, you did some things to keep them coming through the door.
Greg Marshall 7:58 Yeah. Right. You always had, you know, people, these are this is the example of stay offers now, you know, the seven day trial pass free personal training session. So you know, free nutrition plan, you know, you had to find a way to make the same thing sounds different. Right. Right. And so that's exactly it. You always had like some kind of heard some kind of, you know, we've talked ethical clickbait in this in this instance, it's ethical walk through the door Bay. And it's, you know, you basically want people to try something out, and you have to do something that makes them say, I'm willing to exchange my time for whatever it is.
Blake Beus 8:37 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you can you can even see this in real estate, we were talking about real estate a little bit earlier, right? Like, there's 1000 real real estate agents in the local area here that I could reach out to any one of them. But why would I go with this person over this person? And oftentimes, it has to do with more than just the fact that they can show me some houses?
Greg Marshall 9:01 Yeah, that's the most I guess. It's a very competitive space, because a real estate agent can't change homes to make their home better. Right? They're literally selling the same exact thing. So they have to figure out unique ways to stand out that has nothing to do with the actual product. And that's, that's how you win is because most of the stuff that we're all making is not new. None of none. Everyone has done what we most likely are offering. Yeah, it's how can we spin it to see different new, exciting, intriguing, and that's that's the name of the game. Yeah, right. Real estate agents are no different fact. They probably have one of the hardest jobs because you have to literally figure out how do I stand out from the 1000s and 1000s of people selling literally the same product in the same exact area and the consumer knows, no different,
Blake Beus 9:58 right? And you can just mark everything off 20% Yeah, he
Greg Marshall 10:01 can't give it this guy. Can I mean, I guess you could probably figure out ways to do that. But there's only so much you can do. Yeah, yeah. And
Blake Beus 10:09 so you have ways to kind of like a realtor their way of bundling, is you're bundling basically, your service and your personality. And that's what comes with the purchase and whatever. And that's kind of a probably a harder place to think about bundling. But the bundling does work. It's almost like, the more common your product is, the harder and longer you need to think about how to separate, right, because they have seen your room, literally, yep, for 1015 20 years, the same sale offer, but the same exact sale offer so you have to change it up. You sell these tactics that a Russell Brunson uses where you take the same offer. And you make it sound like it's new by adding something that's trending. Yeah. Maybe give them an NF T for every house.
Greg Marshall 11:02 Fine Art painting, you know, but one of the other challenges, I think in real estate and you know, financial markets is there's limits to what you can do as far as legal. Yeah, yeah. Right. Like there are regulations. You can't just do anything like can't say, buy this house. And I'll give you I literally will give you $5,000 back. Yeah, new cars. I mean, at least to my knowledge, I don't think do that. Yeah, absolutely.
Blake Beus 11:27 Absolutely. Speaking of bundles, I know we talked about this one, and I want to keep bringing it back. Because in my mind, this was one of the more interesting bundles I've ever seen. But it was Gary Vee when he said when he launched his book back in August, I think is what it was. And the book had something to number 12 Like, marketing principles of stuff. I don't know. I didn't I didn't read it didn't work for me, I guess but. But he basically said if you buy 12 of these books and send my team that receipt will give you a free NFT Yeah, is what it was. And he sold like a million books at first 24 hours with that offer. And again, the NFT didn't cost him any money. Yeah, but what he did is he essentially convinced people to buy 12 have something Yeah, normally only by one. Yep. He 12x Yep. The average order number just by doing just by bundling with this, like free NFT or whatever. So but yeah, I don't know. We talked about NF t's a lot. Do you think it would be worth diving into a little bit of what NF T's are like you want me to spend a couple of years
Greg Marshall 12:26 I don't even know to be honest. I am not I know it's like some digital and there's something that's a value I but I to be honest, I'm lost. I'm what entities actually.
Blake Beus 12:37 Yeah. So I mean, NF T stands for non non fungible token, which really doesn't mean a whole lot. So it is non fungible means it's irreplaceable, right? So fungible means is replaceable. So the easiest way to think about this is in terms of $1. Bill. Yeah, if I give you $1 bill, it doesn't matter which dollar bill I give you. It's worth $1. Right? Now that that means it's fungible, doesn't matter which one it is, every time I give you $1 Worth It is worth $1. Now, something that's non fungible, would be something like a collector's edition dollar from the early 1800s that had a misprint and there was only like 10 of them. And nine of them were burned in the Chicago Fire and you have this only one one at $1. Bill, that $1 bill. It's It's irreplaceable. Yeah, that that is the the only one of those it's non fungible.
Greg Marshall 13:32 So So NF T's are basically just collectibles, like Limited Edition type stuff. Yeah. If you think about him, like a limited edition of Michael Jordan, autograph card that I have. That's, that can be somewhat of an NFT. Right. Not. I mean, I practice some process to make this Yeah. And
Blake Beus 13:49 it wouldn't be it would be non fungible, but it wouldn't be a token, it would be a non fungible thing, right. Like it's this collector's thing. So if you start thinking about NF T's like a, like a collector's thing, then they start making a little bit more sense on why this this board ape sold for 1.2. Guys. Baseball cards. Yeah, digitally. Yeah, yeah. Now the other the other aspect of that is if you have Michael Jordan card that signed or baseball card that's signed by Sandy, So sir, whatever. Typically, you need some sort of authentication certificate, certificate of authentication, right? Well, with non fungible tokens, it's a digital thing. So the certificate of authentication is on the blockchain, okay? Right. And blockchain, all blockchain is at a high level is a ledger of, of transactions essentially. So you think of it like a ledger book in accounting, you have your debits and credits, that's all it is at a high level. And so essentially, the transaction would be I created this NFT and then I transacted by giving it to you for however much you paid for it. And now everybody can look at the blockchain and say Greg's wallet Greg's wallet address, which no one else can face up. Greg owns that NFT. And you could sell that
Greg Marshall 15:08 I can see now now that you explained that right now, okay, so it makes sense on why the younger demo is so excited about this. Because the instantly putting myself back into when I'm 1314 years old, how interested I was in baseball cards, and the value and trade I used to trade baseball all the time, I was a kid. And this basically just sounds like this is a new form, but real money involved in collecting baseball cards. I have this unique, you know, rookie card, or, you know, Michael Jordan, and no one else has it. And I got it and Don Ross's, you know, bag, one once upon a time. And so I was like hitting the lottery in a way you're like, I've
Blake Beus 15:54 got this really valuable thing that Yep, people want? Uh huh. And, and there's only so many of them, right? And so because you have it, the value is super high. And you could actually transfer that and get money for it. Yeah, that's basically NF T's are is like, basically baseball cards. Yep. Now we can take it to one level higher, though. Now imagine that there was a special event that only people that had this limited edition signed baseball card could go to, okay, so now there's this real world, like, value for having it not just value that owning it, and I could sell it, but you're getting value out of, you're getting actual value right now by by being the owner because it's your ticket to get in the door out to this elite thing is the I see. So basically, it has like dual value, because now I can you sell it. But you can use it as a way to be part of
Greg Marshall 16:50 a VIP group or
Blake Beus 16:52 part of a club, right you can, you can attach some real world value. Now that has less to do with like the technology itself and more to do with basically saying, as the creator of this NFT. If you own this NFT, then I will provide this real world value to you. So there's no like, technical, you've got to scan your NFT to get in the door. It's just like, we're only going to send invites out to people. And you can verify that on the website before we give you the ticket that you're the owner of that NFT. And then you get into that or you get with Russell Bronson's case you get entered into a drawing, yep, right. With Gary Vee, he offered, he basically said there's going to be some events and things that you'll be able to come to, or you could offer people discounts if they're NFT, owner or whatever, right? So and that's where we're starting to see a little bit of a transition, where because, again, as a creator, I can create an NFT. And it cost me maybe $50, in what's called gas fees to mint those. But then I can give them out to whoever because they're there to create, I created them. And when I created them, I could say there's only going to be 100 of these. And once that's done, it's locked in, I'd have to create a new collection in order for me to
Greg Marshall 18:04 can there be so something that I have a question about is could there be an oversaturation of entities? Oh, yes, it is. Yeah. So is this a hurry up and get in early now? Before it's too late type deal? Or is this? Like, it's still the value is still be based on who created the entity? And that doesn't matter. Yeah.
Blake Beus 18:25 Right. More of the latter, because what we're seeing is a shift, right? The whole get in early kind of happened like 18 months ago. And that's where all of these that's more than a cent, all the others. The frenzy happened and everything and, and in order to play that game, you got to drop some serious money. Like, I think the cheapest board ape is maybe $50,000 or something like that idea. I
Greg Marshall 18:51 do know that the board. That's why I remembered it because I I heard that it was extremely expensive. Yeah, sounds like wow, what is that? I don't even know what it is. But after this explanation, I don't know why people would pay that
Blake Beus 19:04 right. And I think boarded gets you into some events and some other either some of the real world benefits for being an owner. But what we're starting to see now in my eyes is is a shift, where you're starting to see NF T's being given away. Because we want to provide some additional value or whatever, or that value can be bought and traded and sold and traded and sold in whatever
Greg Marshall 19:31 country club. Yeah, so yeah, it's like having a membership at a concert. Yeah, you could,
Blake Beus 19:35 you could do that. Or you could, you could launch a commemorative NFT for anybody that did this Krump commemorative event, or all of you the VIP members are the founding members of a particular group. Everyone gets an NF T and there was only 50 of those because there's only 50 members and now you're the owner of that and it's not really worth selling. But basically it's like a badge or a metal that you can wear or a ribbon that says that that was me. I'm the authentic you know, if the authenticate, you know what I'm thinking now that I understand NF T's now that you've explained it to me. And this manner, Guru marketing might take a whole nother level. Because the smart ones out there, the ones that are always on the newest trends, they're going to be able to utilize this as a way to make their guru status even more cemented. Yeah. Right? Because you can use this as hey, you know, you're at my country club now. Yeah. And if you want to be closer affiliated to, you know, buy this, or get this and you can create value just from being affiliated with you. Through these NFT. Yes, because you're the only one Yeah, yeah, I think we're gonna see a lot of creative use cases for this, where they're not necessarily being sold and traded as collector's items, but they're being used in ways that we probably can't imagine. But they're being used to basically say, Yeah, I was there, or Yeah, I did that, or, yeah, I'm part of this group. And I'm
Greg Marshall 21:02 not saying that's a bad thing. No, I don't think that's so I'm actually saying the guru marketing. And I know guru sometimes negative connotation, but I guess an influencer or someone that is creating stuff or like you're using the creators, they could use it to build a more loyal following, and really create some cool stuff. I mean, if you think about it, if you've got a specific, let's say, an actor, right? Like, I love the rock, or the rock created one of these, and he saw an NFT. That was like, if you buy this, you have access, you could literally meet the rock. Yeah, at his next movie, Sean. But you know, it costs you $10,000 on this, and every time he rolls out in the movie, you can be there. Yeah. You know, now, that's interesting.
Blake Beus 21:48 That's interesting, like, and that's something that could be sold down the road to someone else. And
Greg Marshall 21:53 I can see that value. Because there's two types of value. One could be, you know, an acquiring and selling value, like a house, right? I buy a house and I sell it I'm making money off or it can be something that caseloads you. Similar to like, if an actor gives you this, it's almost like a cache on a way where it's like, I have unique access to this person. Anytime when they brigade something, and that's a value, I value that more than the transaction value selling. Right.
Blake Beus 22:25 Exactly. Exactly. And I think I think it's ultimately good because of this is very approachable, because because a lot of a lot of tactics and strategies, and all of these things can sometimes feel like they're, they're not approachable, unless you're you've already made it. Yeah, right. But something like this is, is approachable, there is a technical learning curve. But it's something that your typical internet savvy person could probably figure out in a few days, how to mint, their own NF T's. And how to use those to provide value to again, their group, their club, their, their, their business is at a customer, thank you, whatever. And some of your customers will be like, Yeah, whatever. But some of them will think it's really interesting and amazing. You know, it's funny, I think, and I have a client now that I have a better understanding of who would absolutely dominate this. I'm not gonna say who it is. But I'm gonna bring it up to them tomorrow. Yeah. And mentioned, they really should think about this, this technology, because the nature of their business is actually in the collectibles space are real, and they sell very unique stuff. And so with that being said, and I don't think they're looking at this, the CEO, he's always on top of things. Yeah. But he's very, he's operations. He's constantly thinking of innovative operational ways to do things. I don't know if he's seen this particular trend, like, it's actually spent much time on this, and I'm gonna present it to him and say, you know, you really should consider since the nature of your business fits perfectly with this. Yeah, that's I mean, that's a I think that's a great use case. Another use case that kind of came to mind here would be you know, Russell Brunson has his two comma club for anybody that uses Click Funnels to, to sell over a million dollars of something you get to comment, you could do something similar like when, I don't know if you're, if you're in health and fitness, or maybe you're helping with weight loss or whatever. When someone hits their goal, they get an NFT, right, or when someone hits some sort of milestone stat, like, there's like an NFT that they will get out of that that they can again present as like this badge of honor. You can even create, like little like a landing page on some of these sites that will basically say, Hey, this is my page. It's cryptic, lat graphically verified to be mine. And here's all of the badges of honors as aka NF T's that I have, and you can display those off. Yeah. So I think NF T's you know, so So, if we round it back to how you can apply this to mark, and number one is, I mean, NFT sounds like it hits all the boxes as far as solid marketing, which is, you know, create some kind of community with your customer, create something unique, create something that's intriguing and exciting, new, innovative. I mean, it's checking off all the boxes, it's a different offer, right? Not everyone can get it, you can have some exclusivity. So that's basically the moral of the story of NF T's and anything that you do your marketing is, how do we make the offer, hit these check these these boxes, how they check off the boxes, so that people respond. So people are excited about what you have. Because at the end of the day, when people are looking to market their products and services, with the route when they say I want to market my stuff, what they're saying is I want to get sales today. Yeah, right. That's what they mean. And, or faster. If it's not today, it's if it takes me 90 days gives me how do I get it and 45. Right. And so this is how you do it, right? You create offers that are unique and different, exciting, creates urgency creates, you know, Country Club feel,
Greg Marshall 26:17 maybe you can't get in so if I buy this, so there's different angles to use. So I could see how NFT is applied. Basically. Standard fundamental market.
Blake Beus 26:29 Yeah. And if you're out there listening, and you're like, NF T's, I don't want to go down this tech rabbit hole or, or maybe you're not a technical person. There is a way you can apply the same principles in any sort of way. Like I guess it Russell Brunson is two comma club. Yeah, it's a plaque. Right. plaques are not new. Yeah. But it was a very sought after thing, because of how hyped up it was, and everything along those lines. And there's a lot of there's a lot of different ways to to please.
Greg Marshall 26:57 Russell Brunson is a
Blake Beus 26:58 marketing genius. And I have no problem saying that he's very, very skilled at what he does. And a lot of things that he does, is cutting edge. It's new, exciting. It checks all the boxes that we just talked about. And I think you can learn a lot from what he's doing, versus what people are saying, right? If you watch what he's doing, and try to mimic that in your own way.
Greg Marshall 27:23 You know, you could you can win. Yeah.
Blake Beus 27:25 You know what I'm most jealous of him about? It doesn't seem like he overthinks everything over things. So he's well, he's always like doing something when he throws a video out there. He just he just gets it out there. Yeah. And and I talked to people about this in my membership all the time. And I'm Yeah, I overthink a lot.
Greg Marshall 27:42 Well, I think thinking of overthinking. Right, I think it's just because your skill set is a different skill set that he probably can never touch. Right. And so we all have a different way of how we think. And so what I mean for him, you know, he's he's like, he appears I don't know, but he appears to be creative, impulsive. So he could just sit here and think alone, believe idea and get it out to market within seconds. Right. Whereas some people may be someone that has a mindset of yours that knows how to build things. You're thinking, Well, how does that enter? Why would I launch that now? I just started like, two seconds ago, I can't just launch. I gotta think this because you're thinking of how will it you know, apply? And
Blake Beus 28:30 that's everything. That's That's how like software engineers think. And again, that's my background. Yes. I love that. I came from software engineering over into marketing, because I feel like it gives me a super unique perspective and a lot of a lot of areas. But yes, that's a very much a software engineering like way to think about solving a problem.
Greg Marshall 28:46 Well, and that's it's necessary, right? Because you can't just build something with no, absolutely no regard to everything else. Because they'll break. So yeah, I think that's, you know, that everyone kind of has a different skill set. And that's what I think he has that's really good is he's probably on the high level of creativity and impulses. So he probably, I'm assuming, you know, because he's from Idaho, I think he's LDS. So he doesn't have any of these bad habits. He should never get into gambling in Las Vegas. Exactly. We're proud for that search
Blake Beus 29:23 to make to make you feel better and Russell's actually shared this video but he's got a video of him out there at his very first like sales conference trying to sell something. Yeah. And he's like fumbling with WordPress. It's terrible. It's terrible. It's awful. And and so if you're out there and you're thinking I could never be like charismatic. I definitely find that it's out there on YouTube. Some find that and you'll you'll think, oh, everyone starts somewhere. Everyone starts somewhere and but yeah, so hey, let's wrap this up. Everyone. Go go get it Greg.
Greg Marshall 29:56 Yeah, you can book a strategy session called me if you need some help with tomorrow. think Greg Marshall Dotco What about you, Blake?
Blake Beus 30:02 Like, like you stock calm and I have a membership on there where I help people with social media marketing. So well, great,
Greg Marshall 30:09 I think hopefully enjoyed this session. I know I learned a lot about NF T's and I can see what's so attractive about it. Yeah. So thank you, Blake for educating me on that. And until next time,
Blake Beus 30:20 we'll catch you guys later. Bye. Later.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:01 Okay, yeah. All right, record. We are. We are recording. Okay, Greg, you're telling me that you've seen a lot of small, like small solo business owners people that were running their ads and things on their own. Getting more and more frustrated and stressed about ads. Yep. Now like running their own ads now and everything, like tell me tell me what you're seeing there. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 0:32 what? So the overall vibe that it seems like that's going on as ever since iOS has changed. The tracking algorithms, all of the things I think you could kind of get away with is not working anymore. And I've seen a couple of people actually say that to a tee like things that used to work, no longer work anymore. Hmm. Right. Okay. That seems to be a theme that I'm hearing. And typically, one of the one of the other things I've seen with this is, there's a level of like, okay, what do we what do we do now? Like, so? If this isn't working? Now, what do we do? So it's kind of like, you mentally it's a mental game, right? So plays, it plays some head games with you? And you're like, alright, so if this old trick isn't working, where do we go now? And they're starting to feel, I think, a little bit pressured with the changes. Sorry about that guys. Just had some foul off the wall. But that's, that's the overall vibe that I'm getting. Are you hearing or seeing that and your space? And what are your thoughts on it?
Blake Beus 1:40 Yeah, I'm definitely seeing. I mean, I'm definitely seeing that. The reality is, is like, even when I got back into running ads, four or five years ago, I've always been in marketing, but I never did the actual media buying. This has been a constant theme. Like everybody's like, the stuff that used to work is no longer working. And and so I feel like for some reason, we're always surprised that stuff that works two years ago is no longer working. But I think that's going to be the the constant is that we're constantly going to have, oh, what what worked last year, your your before is not going to work. But people keep getting surprised. I think where a lot of people where I'm seeing people get really hung up with this particular one is, is the iOS 14 really started a big shift. Yeah, that really impacted the capability of ad platforms, specifically Facebook, and their ability to actually track performance. And I feel like that is to bring us back full circle. We're seeing an impact the smaller businesses that that maybe are a little bit less established, or maybe don't have a full marketing team, or like a holistic we use the summer for a holistic marketing strategy that includes multiple channels, where they used to be able to rely just on like Facebook ads, yep. They are seeing their costs go up, they're no longer being profitable on those ads, the cost per leads are going up. And then people start panicking. Yes. And then they start just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Yep. And and that's a really great strategy to waste a lot of money.
Greg Marshall 3:27 Well, and here's, you know, here's something to kind of build on that, too. So the other thing that I'm finding, and I think this is what's causing the panic, or the feeling of like, I like to call out the walls are closing in is, not only is the tracking not as good, but the typical response. You know, we all have knee jerk responses, right? Yes. And we're going to do this. And what happens is the typical knee jerk response in the past would be well, I'll just go the organic route. Okay. But here's the challenge we're running into, are these platforms giving us more free organic reach? or less? Well, less, right. And it's and it's only gonna get smaller and smaller. Right? Yeah. And, and that's not necessarily because the platforms are like, Screw you
Blake Beus 4:20 guys.
Greg Marshall 4:21 They're purposely trying to hurt the business. It's it's mostly
Blake Beus 4:24 because there's there's just more competition right there. Right. Like there's the the amount of people putting posts out there grows faster than the amount of eyeballs watching posts. Yes, typically. And so it gets harder and harder to kind of stand out and have have organic content that you know, makes sense. Now. Now, that being said, part of the holistic marketing strategy is the organic side effect. Right. But you and I have both seen that there's a lot of magic that happens when you're combining organic with pay. Yes. Right. And so you get those people that want to do just organic and that can work for a hand Full of PDL, that can work for the you get the people to want to do just, you know, just the other, you know, or gay just paid. And that can work as well. But when we take a step back, the businesses that are able to plow through the ups and downs of whatever is going to going to come? Are the the businesses that have this holistic approach that includes, you know, email or organic or paid ads on multiple platforms and everything, but the small business owner or the solo business owner, like they don't have time, sure to do all of those things. Yes. And so we're starting to see, in my opinion, we're starting to see a gap. Yes, right, a gap where established businesses can can take off and make a bunch of stuff happen. But it's, it's harder to start off as a solo business, or whatever, and bridge that gap to the point where you can, I don't know, have a team or have those systems in place or get those things figured out. It's like, I want to talk about some realistic theists, those people that are trying to jump from, from doing it themselves, or even just barely starting to the point where they can have a more holistic approach, or maybe even a team in place, like how can people bridge that gap?
Greg Marshall 6:15 So here's something that I want to touch on real quick is the extreme on one or the other? Whether it be organic or paid. I always use the health analogies, that would be the equivalent of only eating fruit and nothing else, are only eating me and nothing else. Like it's there's no extreme way to do this. The best long term approach, yeah, is a blended approach. Right? So do both, right.
Blake Beus 6:43 And that's a great analogy. Because even like even things like, you know, people can go on super strict diets to cut weight or whatever it goes super strict on keto, yep, whatever. But from a long term, perspective, five years, 10 years, whatever not gonna do that, it's, it's not feasible to stick with something like that. And it's probably not even healthy to stick with something like exactly more variety, or whatever.
Greg Marshall 7:04 And so one of the things I want to mention is I've been doing in my past, I've been, I believe in whatever you have to do to generate the sales. And so I like to personally implement content marketing, paid, influencer marketing, email marketing, as many channels as you know, public speaking, as many channels as podcasting that you can use in order to generate business. Because, you know, I've been doing this for a while, and I've been in business on my own for a while. And I understand at one point, Twitter was the hottest thing ever. And now it's gone. I have seen that the ebbs and flows of how things change, right. And so change is part of the game. Yeah. And so this is why you want to focus on having multiple ways to do it. But I also understand the challenge when it's just you or a small group of people having to constantly maneuver things. Yeah. And so some practical advice I like to give is the following. So number one, go ahead and start utilizing, like, email marketing is something that we've talked about extensively. And yes, iOS changes will impact the reporting of open rates, on email marketing, but that doesn't mean that doesn't work. It just means you can't see as much detail as you used to write. And so I would definitely implement email marketing. And keep it simple. Write an email, it's, it's more about consistency, than thinking of some huge, elaborate thing that you have to do for email, like you're writing a school term paper.
Blake Beus 8:47 Yeah. And odds are out there. Because you you'll hear, you'll hear, you know, other other people out there saying, Okay, you need a drip sequence. And it needs to take people down this story path where step one is this introduction. And step two, is this and this and this. And I'm not saying that's a bad strategy. But what I am saying is, that is an overwhelming strategy for some people. And if you're a busy business owner that has maybe just you and maybe one other person, that that can be so overwhelming that you just simply decide to not do it. You might be thinking, if I can't do it the right way. I'm not going to do it at all. Yep. But the reality is, is writing some sort of email, maybe start saying I can do I can do one a month or two a month, right? I can carve out the time and then you work up to like one a week or two a week and and you probably don't ever need to do more than that depending on your audience or your business model. But it's better to be consistently putting out email content than it is to follow some sort of elaborate story arc and your email because I don't know if you're like this, Greg, but I don't read every email that comes in my own notes. Like I don't really like having an email this emails that build off of one another. Kind of doesn't even work for me because I'm not there. The first night like I'm I read number one and then number six, and then maybe I'll go go back and read number five, if I was searching through my email popped up, but like, I don't read them in order. So just having like these little self contained emails that can be like three sentences long, yeah, have to be something elaborate.
Greg Marshall 10:18 Well, and the other thing, you know, as far as what I always kind of fumble when I say this word, but deliverability. Right. So one of the things I found is, subject lines can't seem too spammy, like free or special sale or something like that, because that will hurt it. Having too many links, or too many pictures inside of the email also impacts whether your email gets into the promotions tab, or the primary tab, and then who you're sending it to, also matters. So you want to make sure that they're opting into your list. And you're not just like borrowing someone else's, and throwing them on your list. Right? Those are a few things that you talked about email marketing, you talked about, if you're gonna do organic, at the moment, excuse me, at the moment they have on Instagram, you can do that collaborators. That's a good feature, environmental averages. Yeah. And they created that because Instagram knows that reach organically is going down. So they have to provide some type of solution.
Blake Beus 11:15 And if you're not familiar with that, with what that is, you may have seen it on on on Instagram. But it's essentially, if Greg and I wanted to post a collaborative post, it would essentially show up, and the identity would be both of our little circle dots. And the audience, the reach would cover both of our audiences. So it's a good way to cross pollinate follower lists. If if you want to collaborate with someone because you can get followers that way. And it's doesn't cost you anything. Yeah. And increases your reach. Yeah, it increases both both people's reach, right. So
Greg Marshall 11:53 I mean, the other thing to think about is, I would and I know, there'll be some pushback on this, but there's a way to do it, I would seriously consider hiring an admin, some kind of assistant, and just pay them by the time that you're utilizing them and the beginning. So you don't have to hire someone that's doing, you know, 80 hours every two weeks, right out the gate, which is usually what people think, right, but they have to pay some salary, you can hire someone that can just work a few hours a week for you. Yep. But give them very specific, like tactical things to do for you. For example, writing the emails, gathering the emails, sending out text message marketing, maybe compiling some content to post for you, scheduling your content. These are, this is an investment that I think a lot of like smaller individual businesses really don't take into consideration, because they believe that they can't afford it
Blake Beus 12:56 right. And like, I think we can pause there for just a second and talk about how to actually find, yeah, someone to help with this. So. So real quick, I have two kinds of shout outs, the very first thing I would do is, wherever you're at wherever you're living, I guarantee you, there's some sort of a Facebook group for local business owners, find that group, hop in that group participate a little bit, and then just say, Hey, I'm looking for someone to help me three or four hours a week, write a couple of social media posts, maybe write an email or two and just kind of helped me organize that effort for a few hours a week. And oftentimes, if the person isn't in that group, someone knows someone in someone in the group knows someone. And depending, depending on where you're at the price for that could range for, from anywhere from like 25 to $30, an hour to 40 to $50, an hour for a copywriter, depending on skill level and everything. But if you think about it from a business expense standpoint, that's, you know, two to three hours a week, yep. That's really not that big of a business expense for for, you know, a business that has steady revenue, or whatever is added can have a big impact on your online presence, and your ability to get some of these things done without having to come up with all of it yourself.
Greg Marshall 14:19 Exactly. And I think that's if I were to boil down the biggest challenge an individual business owner has, it's, it's time, they don't have enough time to do all the things that they want to do to make the business succeed. And that's outside of like, when we start talking about having multiple marketing channels, you know, paid is only one kind of spoke of the marketing wheel. Right. And if you're not ready to do paid, you should be doing these organic methods. But if you can't do the organic methods, because you don't have enough time because you're either sir Losing a client or fulfilling your product, your business is going to slow down, I run into this with, you know, physical therapists, personal trainers, people that in the service industry have people that they're working with and so that it's like feast or famine. Yeah. And it's because they get so busy working with the clients, they stop marketing, they're no clients coming up is this big roller coaster marketing again, I get more clients and they stopped working. And it's just like, over and over again, versus having a consistent marketing going on at all times. One thing that you can never eliminate, ever is the marketing aspect of your business. Because I believe that who is it Peter Drucker, who says all a business's is marketing, and innovation, and everything else is an expense.
Blake Beus 15:51 That's interesting. I've never heard that quote before. And
Greg Marshall 15:53 that's to me, I've always taken that series, because what that's essentially saying is, the core business is your marketing message, and innovating against your competitors. And everything else is an expense, right? cost of doing business. And if you don't, you know, innovate, right? And this is, this is a good point right now, where people are challenged, you know, with the Facebook ads, and I'm being as effective. This is the time to innovate, this is actually an opportunity. Yeah, not a giant obstacle,
Blake Beus 16:25 right? Well, and I like it, like calling it an opportunity, because this is where some businesses are going to, some of your competitors are going to going to fall away there, they might even shift to a completely different business model or something, or, or maybe decide it's not worth it or whatever. But those businesses that can innovate and can kind of think this through get get some things figured out, are the ones that are going to come out on top. Yep. So it is an opportunity, every time I hear about something like iOS 14, or whatever, like, oh, boy, here's another opportunity. We don't know exactly how that's gonna play out. But for those people that can innovate quickly and think things through, and it's, it's a time for those businesses to be able to come out on top.
Greg Marshall 17:09 Yeah, and that's, that's the thing is what you'll learn from here, although, anytime you go through a difficult time or transition, or you have to do the change, right, air, quote, change, which no, you know, none of us really like, it's always beneficial and best for you, when you go through it. But at during that time, it doesn't feel good, right? Because now we have to get outside of our comfort zone again, and do some new and do something different. And that's part of the growth, right. And so you have to look at if you're running into, like, you know, Facebook ads aren't working anymore, or they're not working as well as they used to, or I can't run ads at such a low budget anymore, because the algorithms not as advanced. And that was your only method of getting new customers, then you have to think about how can you change? How can you adapt? And how can you start implementing these other strategies, which means it's an opportunity to innovate, because a lot of people, when they do run into adversity, they fall apart? Yeah, they just they either give up or think they can't do it. And so you don't want to be one of those. Right?
Blake Beus 18:22 Well, and when you stop marketing, you start shrinking. Right. And, and it's like many, many, many business owners, especially the small ones, are those just starting out? They are a technical expert, not like from a technology standpoint, but like, they're a technical expert in their field, maybe maybe they I don't know, maybe one of my neighbors is, is an engineer who builds 3d models for prototyping products, and he gets patents and things like he's a technical expert at that, but when it comes to marketing his business. Yeah, it's, it's okay. Like, that's not saying that's a bad thing. It's, it's that it's a different skill set. Yeah. And, and a lot of people try and do that themselves. And sometimes you're in a position where you have to do that yourself. Yeah. But doing a few key things can make that an easier, you know, an easier thing to do. Like I said, outsourcing to someone for a couple hours a week, small bit of self promotion here, using something like my SM three group where we basically create the images and the captions that are editable for you so you're not starting from a blank screen, you just like grab one, fill in the blanks, coming up with another strategy I feel like a lot of people should do to simplify this is just repurpose the content. If you only have the bandwidth to write two or three posts a week, take those posts and edit them just a tiny bit and now you have your email. Yep, right like put them together and you could even just post your post as an email and link that back to people. That's so you're not have you have to come up with email content and social media posts content and video content and all that stuff you just use repurpose it. We do that with this podcast, a lot of these podcast episodes go out on YouTube, as well. Yep. So we have a presence on YouTube there, even though it's and we pull it and we plug them everywhere else.
Greg Marshall 20:18 Instagram anywhere we can put it. And that's really what you want to be thinking about is how can you utilize different channels, different platforms, and don't stop or quit? Or think I can't do this, or I just I don't know if I can make it happen. If you if if your dream is to own your own business, and to be your own boss and to become successful, do not give up. All you have to do is push through the challenge that you have, and focus on where are the opportunities that I can take advantage of that maybe my competitors are not willing to take action on to do it. Yeah. And when you look for opportunities, and you can't, it's hard, I know. But when you look for opportunities, and the challenge that you have, you will find it. And you'll look back after you kind of overcome it and be able to go well, I'm so happy that I figured this out. And if it wasn't for this, quote unquote bad thing, we wouldn't have this good thing today. Right? But during that bad thing, it doesn't feel great. It can send you in panic mode, right? I've been there. Yeah. That's why I'm saying this is part of the game is like, when you sign up to build a business, you're signing up for both the good and the bad. Yeah. And that's what you have to understand. But it doesn't have to be those bad times, they'll have to, you know, overrun you or completely ruin you. They're they're there to help you learn something to take you to the next steps. And if you understand that, it business is a series of ups and downs. And this too shall pass, you'll be able to get on the other side of it and essentially get your get your business running and good things will happen. So that's kind of me on my motivational rant of understanding. Things will get better. Yeah, just keep pushing through.
Blake Beus 22:20 Well, I think along those lines, one of the things that came up while you were saying that was like instead of giving up, ask yourself, How can I do this? How can I continue to deliver on these marketing channels, organic email, whatever, without me having to spend more of my time because time is oftentimes almost always the bottleneck. And we've talked that several times, several times already in this episode. But if you ask yourself that question, there's some really creative solutions that we've already covered a few. I'm sure you could come up with something that we haven't covered here. I did want to circle back to talk about another thing I've seen people do. And I think this is a fantastic option is is especially if you're like a solo business, maybe you're coaching consulting, you're just barely starting out, you don't have any staff or anything yet. You can get a business buddy. And you can help each other out. And you can say, okay, maybe we can trade some services, you're you're better at copywriting. And I'm better at maybe I don't know, building out a page on your website or something, right? Like say, Hey, do you want to maybe just kind of swap some services here. And then you work on the you spend more time with the thing you're comfortable with, you're helping out both businesses grow together. And you're you're helping each other out. But both of you are able to get the things done that you need done. And that's a great way to go about something like that. Plus, you can send each other business back and forth like it's, it's a really, really great situation.
Greg Marshall 23:52 This is the time to get creative. And this is the time to negotiate. This is the time to get out of your comfort zone to start working the deals that you need in order for your business to succeed in the long term. And I promise you, if you do that, because I've got pushback before on telling people you should you should try influencer marketing, like it works guaranteed. But usually the pushback is this social media has spoiled us in a way where we are able to hide behind, you know our computers and our cell phones and everything else to avoid the fact that there's a level of entrepreneurship is a level of salesmanship. Right? And you have to sell Yeah, and reaching out to influencers reaching out to people and trying to work deals. The option of getting told no. is available and because of that, that's usually the spot people stay away from Yeah, right. But because most people stay away from that, that's also where the opportunity lies. Yep. So if you can just push yourself to go, I feel dumb. putting myself out there, someone tells me no or someone says a bad idea. And you can just keep going and try. You're gonna get some pretty sweet deals out there that most people will not get. Because 98% of people want to avoid sales like the plague. I want to do anything that has the option of you getting told no, or you being viewed as a perceived failure in front of other people. Yeah, right. And that's the key. And if you can just get over that, and push through that and train yourself to go, it's okay. If someone tells me No. And it's okay. If I reach out to 20 people and only to respond back that one deal can change everything. Yeah. So I'm here to say, get out the comfort zone. And it put the sales hat on and yep. And get it done. Yeah, absolutely. So let's,
Blake Beus 25:58 let's wrap all this up in a in a nice, nice, neat package, and kind of just summarize what we've talked about so far. Number one, stick with it, stay motivated, changes like this, with iOS 14, or whatever, are an opportunity. And also changes like this are not going away, you're going to hear people next year saying, Gosh, the stuff that worked in 2022 doesn't work anymore. With advertising, ah, you're gonna, you're gonna hear that every time every year, you're gonna hear that so. So the, if you can stick with it, considered an opportunity, find a way to work through it, you're going to be better off in the long run. Number two, get creative with how you can get these things done, delegate some stuff out there, find a business buddy, reach out to a local group, maybe find someone that can help you for two or three hours a week. And, and help you kind of coordinate and organize some of these things. They can help with writing the posts, they can help with posting the posts, whatever is your bottleneck. Find someone to help with that. And there's lots and lots and lots of freelancers in just about any city that that can help you with that. You just need to test a few of them out, find find someone that works. Focus on like a holistic marketing strategy. Don't forget about email. If you're doing just organic, maybe dip your toes in some ads, if you're doing just ads, dip your toes in some organic. repurpose content. Yep. If you're posting stuff on social media, you can use that same content with minor tweaks or even no tweaks in email, or, or elsewhere. And then we talked about repurposing content, feel free to just repost that same stuff on LinkedIn, or Pinterest or whatever, it's totally fine to have the exact same content on multiple platforms, because the audiences are slightly different. And if someone's a fan of yours, they're not going to get ticked off exactly that. Oh, my gosh, they're posting the same stuff on LinkedIn that I saw on their Instagram account earlier. unfollow, that doesn't happen. But I feel like people are afraid. Yeah, it's gonna happen.
Greg Marshall 28:04 Because Because that's like, a sales situation. Someone can tell, you know, and verify that you're a terrible person.
Blake Beus 28:12 I think that's a good summary. Did I miss anything?
Greg Marshall 28:14 No, I think I think that covers it. I mean, I think the biggest thing is just look at writing right now is a good opportunity to advance your business and different ways that you didn't think before, this is where the fun begins. And this is where if you push through it, 12 months from now, you'll say, Wow, I'm much better off, I'm doing better. And if I did I get forced to make these changes. I would have never got to the spot that I'm in today. Yep. So this is good. I know, if people are struggling with it. Just keep pushing through. Think creatively. Reach out to people to help you out partner with people. And I think you'll be good to go. So I think until next time.
Blake Beus 28:55 We'll we'll see you guys next time. Absolutely. How do people get in touch with you, Greg?
Greg Marshall 28:59 Go to Greg marshall.co. And you can book a free strategy session with me and what about you
Blake Beus 29:04 just flip the stock calm. And you can check out my SM3 group in there that Greg's going to soon be a part of. And basically, the SM3 group can kind of help you with the organic side of things get you 80 to 90% there of yours with your strategy and help you create. We create templates and things like that, that that can help you with diversifying your strategy. So definitely check that out.
Greg Marshall 29:32 Well, until next time, we'll talk to you guys later. All right, bye.
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Transcript Blake Beus 0:00 All right. Let's do this. Let's talk we're we're gonna talk about testing. Yes, yeah, yeah. And because we bring it up a lot, but we kind of realize we haven't talked specifically how to test and testing is one of those things, at least I've noticed that it's really easy to go way overboard on and stress about every little intricacy of the test, or to just say, Screw it, am I gonna test and I tend to be the kind of person that when I first started, I want to go overboard. Sure. But I've realized that's not helpful. So let's, let's just talk about testing. And it doesn't have to be just ads, you can test in other ways, as well. So so let's let's dive into well,
Greg Marshall 0:51 here's a simple way that I like to use test it to not drive yourself crazy. And it's actually testing audiences. So when I say testing, I tend to think, test the audience testing the who, to me is more important than the what? Okay, so meaning, if I can figure out the right audience, that basically, the offer, and a lot of the other things on the back end doesn't have to be perfect. And without saying client names, we kind of discussed someone I showed you earlier. Yeah, before we hit record of how the ad is not even in the quote unquote formulaic way that all the Guru's teach. It's a very simple, straightforward ABA, because we're talking to the right person. It works. Yeah. And so when I, when I say testing, I'm referring to high levels of testing the audience. Because I know if I can make an audience work with a very average offer, or ad copy or ad creative, then it you just start digging deeper into that audience and then go, how do I make this offer? And I create all that better? Because now I know I'm talking to the right person. Right? Does that make sense? So that's how I like to view testing. How were you testing in the past? You said, you may have been overdoing it. What, what was kind of your testing protocol?
Blake Beus 2:23 Yeah, yeah. So I have a tech background. And one of the ways we used to do testing was very scientific before I left the corporate world. And we would do basically split testing on landing pages, okay, or on home pages of our site. And so we would basically divert half the traffic to one experience, half the traffic would see the other experience, and then we would get our results. And we would measure that result. And we would get good, really good results. A lot of the time. For example, one of the results, we got a 20% lift for this financial institution, which extrapolated out to a year meant an additional $780,000 to their bottom line on this split test that we did. But when I hopped over into the small business space advertising space, trying to split up audiences to make sure there's no overlap and make sure the test was clean. And you're from a statistical standpoint, is is maddening. And it's not helpful. Like it's not getting you really great data. Because the because I feel like the audiences are shifting like it's, it's you're trying to hit this moving target all the time, right, because you've probably noticed this one test you can run last month will will perform different this month. Sure. And I think one of the reasons why testing audiences specifically is kind of like the main thing you should be testing, like you're saying is because of the the fluidity of audiences. And what I mean by that is, people are entering this audience and leaving this audience all the time. Right. And a lot of a lot of people don't realize that. Like, I didn't think about that, right. When I said, Hey, I want an audience that have people that are, you know, 35 to 45, and live in this area and are interested in a golf. Yep. Right. Well, new people enter that age range all the time. People leave that age range all the time, new people in that age range. express interest in golf. Yep. People stop expressing interest in golf. And so the audience is, is flowing. Yeah. Right. And so, when, when I was trying to do this very scientific test and make sure there's no audience overlap and all these things, I would get results, but then those results didn't scale or didn't perform. Again. Yep. Right. Like they weren't concern system. If I ran the test again, I would get different results. Yep.
Greg Marshall 5:02 Well, and I think one of the ways to explain what it sounds like, what you're doing, and this comes from your engineer training mine, right, I think is, you know, one plus one should equal two. Yeah. Right. So you so essentially, what you're saying is like, when you're running tests, you are making the assumption that every time the ad is showed, it's always Blake. And Greg, yes. Yeah. And it's, and it's the same person. So that's the correct way to test if the person was the same. The problem is, because these audiences are changing. Is this kind of what you're saying is, yeah, because audiences changing your know, like, today's test is Blake and Greg, tomorrow's test, maybe, Joe and John. Yeah. And so it's, and we fit the same exact criteria, we're texting, we're not tackling the same verse.
Blake Beus 5:54 No, you're, you're technically, you're definitely different peoples.
Greg Marshall 5:57 And that's what you're saying, right? That's gonna apply as well. Yeah, you were trying to isolate it in a way that it can't be constant, because the people are interchanging.
Blake Beus 6:07 And it was incredibly difficult and time consuming to ensure that that isolation was happening correctly, and ensure that the data was getting reported back correctly. And then it wasn't super actionable, because the tests weren't. You couldn't repeat the results. Like it didn't work.
Greg Marshall 6:24 The other challenge that I have seen, and I've tested that too, with you many times, and you know, other clients, myself, one, because I believe in the testing methodologies, like you should always be testing always no matter what. And one of the things that I noticed is what anytime I try to put too many exclusions on it, it seems like the ad platform would have a hard time actually spending the money. Yeah, like, or a wouldn't spend it as quickly. So it takes a longer time to get the data
Blake Beus 6:58 or your CPMs go through the roof or so. And so you're seeing for the amount of money you're spending, you're getting in front of fewer people, and therefore it's less significant data, if that's what you're aiming for. And so
Greg Marshall 7:12 there's cost could be two or even three times more expensive, right? Doing it that way, which it would be okay. If it was like a consistent person, right, like consistent audience that never changes, but because it's always changing, it might not be the best way for that particular strategy.
Blake Beus 7:33 In my opinion. Yeah, absolutely. And when and when you're, you know, one of the things I had to realize is when I was doing like, split testing on pages, for these companies I was working for the people coming to the page were literally the same people over and over and over again, because they would log in and, and it was in the financial industry. So they would log in and do some online banking and stuff. And so it was literally the same people over and over and over again. But when you hop over into the advertising space, and you're trying to get new people that you've not dealt with before, the the data is more fuzzy, and you need to start thinking instead of saying, Okay, what's working for? What's working for this audience, you maybe need to shift and say, How is the audience targeting with the platform's algorithm working? Yeah, is more what it is because the people are flowing through that audience targeting? So if I do this audience targeting inside of Google's ad platform versus, you know, targeting a versus targeting B? How does that targeting, you know, algorithmically perform, as opposed to how do those specific people perform? Because those people are moving in and out? Yep.
Greg Marshall 8:48 So it's like a river? Yeah, it's just just flowing. And I think testing audiences to me, is, is what I like to test the most to discover winning people, or at least winning indicators in the algorithm, to then try to test new offers, once I figure out that this type of audience seems to perform for whatever reason, right? I don't try to get too deep into it just for whatever reason, these type of indicators, if I tell the algorithm tends to give me the result I want, once I figure that I keep getting the same result. I focus heavier on what I'm showing them.
Blake Beus 9:31 Yeah. That I think that's a good distinction. You're You're essentially, when you're testing audiences inside an ad platform, you're actually testing how well those indicators work. Yep. And that's a much more important thing from like an algorithm based perspective. Are these indicators tagging the correct kind of people that resonate with this offer? I don't need to know necessarily necessarily, who the people are, but is this indicator of good indicator that they're my right kind of Yep. People
Greg Marshall 10:02 Exactly. And I think that's, that's kind of an easier way. And even a long term way to train, you know, they say train your pixel or train your ad account, whatever they say, to train anything. Think is really just think of it as how do I give the right information like the competitor, I guess the what does it the analogy that I tell clients, when I tried to explain to them, what we're trying to do with their ad accounts, is I always refer back to real people. Yeah. And I say, look at your ad account as like an employee, what you're trying to do is you're trying to tell that employee what you want. And what a lot of people do is they're not training that employee to tell them, I want purchases, or I want leads or whatever. And they're not giving them any information. They're sending them out blind. So it's like if you had a business, and he said, Hey, I want to hire a sales rep, to go sell my products, but I'm not going to give him any information, I'm just going to send them out there and hope for the best. That's That's how most people were utilizing their ad accounts with not trying to find the right indicators and keep communicating that those are the right indicators to the ad account, so that they can actually find the perfect person.
Blake Beus 11:19 Right. And I think I think that's a great analogy. Because what it's because that employee is basically interpreting what you say, into their own kind of internal dialogue. Yep. And the algorithm does the same thing. So I don't know, I know, You've trained people as well, I've trained new employees and things as well. And almost every time it's like, I'll say, This is what I want. But their interpretation was different. And that's not their fault, necessarily. That's because I'm making a bunch of assumptions. Yeah, based on what they already understand, correct. And so I have to restate thing. But that also helps me further understand, you know, what, what I'm wanting as well, but the algorithm is doing the same thing. It's saying, you're telling me I want this particular audience, and it's reinterpreting it to say, well, here, here's those people, but that may not actually be what you're getting at. And so it's this communication
Greg Marshall 12:12 exam. And you know, the funny thing is, the reason why I made this analogy, is because it reminds me there's actually specific life situations that are replaying in my mind, as I explained this, when I worked for a big box gym early, like it was my think second job was 23, maybe. So they would send me out to go get people to sign up for the gym. But they would give me no information about what type of person Yeah, they just wanted me to go out there. So I'm in parking lots of target. And Walmart, Best Buy, I was that guy, like literally talking to cold strangers interrupting their day to get them in. And I think of it as because they didn't tell me who to talk to. It's highly inefficient. Yeah. And so when I was working there, I figured out a way to basically not do that, and focus on more referral generation, and more, trying to be more specific. So I don't waste seven, eight hours of my day, in a place with unqualified people, because I'm not being told who the best prospect is. So when I give that analogy, I'm literally thinking of, like, Whatever you do, do not send Greg out there to just random places and just say, make it happen. Oh, because it's just it's not as efficient as going out there and say, Hey, only talk to these types of people, because they would be the right fit for a gym.
Blake Beus 13:39 Yeah, oh, man, you just use brought back some traumatic experience as a used to sell auto insurance. We would literally open the phone book. And we will open the phone book and check if they're on the Do Not Call list and then call them if they weren't on the Do Not yet list. And that's I would do that for hours and hours and hours a day. And I did that for several months. And I'm guessing you could guess how many people I got to sign up for car insurance, probably very little 00 literally got zero people signing up for you, Molly. And that's what I was told to do. And they gave me a script to read and everything and it just didn't work.
Greg Marshall 14:21 Well. And here's the interesting thing. We can apply that to how people run the ads. They gave you a script, that's the equivalent of making the ad. But you aren't talking to the right person? Nope. So therefore that ad doesn't work. Yep. It's not that it doesn't work ever. It's that it's not going to work. If I'm not giving you a list of people that you should be talking to no. Right. And that circles back around. That's basically you're trying to do your ad accounts because you're looking for indicators of audiences or pockets of people that you can give positive reinforcement back to the employee, the Google ad or the YouTube or the Facebook ad saying, and you notice by training people, they get a result that you like, you better make sure you remind them and tell them, Oh, I liked this result. Yeah, keep go after more people just like this, because this is exactly what we want. Now that helps guide the persons who go after more of those people, and then the likelihood of you getting more is significantly higher. Yeah. Because now you're actually, you see, I'm saying that you're actually like, reinforcing the behavior. Yeah. So that's, that's essentially what you're trying to do with these guys. That's why, or in any ad platform. That's why I recommend test audience. Yeah, the indicators as you put it,
Blake Beus 15:41 okay. So, before we wrap this up, let's talk about how you structure an ad campaign from a high level view. I mean, we could talk about specific ad platforms, Google, Facebook, whatever, to to test these audiences without driving yourself nuts, like I was doing.
Greg Marshall 16:00 Yeah. So the way I like to test the audiences is very simple. I just have one campaign tied to one audience, as is essentially as simple as possible, like one ad group, one ad set, have the campaign, I like to label the campaign, the audience requires even less of me going deep. So I can quickly just glance and see like how it's performing. And then all I do is I don't worry about overlap. I don't worry about any of that. I just think of themes, and I themed. And then I just run the test. And I'll do really my goal is to do as many as possible, the faster I want to know what the results are the more campaigns on launch at once, and I'll do them at low dollar spend. So they're not like, obviously, you're not spent like 10,000 on low dollar campaigns a lot at a time to quickly get what works, what doesn't. And then I just take the winning kind of aspects of those audiences. And then I relaunch again, and then I have them go against each other. And then I keep doing that to figure out what are the right pockets? But essentially, I don't feel like I go crazy, because I just run a whole bunch of them with the with the intent. Number one, the budgets are low, so you don't have budget anxiety. Wow, a lot need to figure this out. And number two, I basically just say, give it three or four days before I do anything. Yeah. So I have to train myself. And I would recommend anyone else like literally, once you launch them, just pretend they don't exist for three or four days. Yeah. And then look at it. Yeah, that's that's how I keep myself sane. Yeah.
Blake Beus 17:39 Yeah. See, and to contrast to what I was doing, I was adding exclusions or and Facebook has now has this split test feature, which guarantees the audiences are going to be completely separate. And, honestly, that's not for you. Unless you're spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year, you're gonna get worse results using the split testing feature, every time. Yep. Right. And so that's really only for big brands that have massive budgets. And so I wouldn't even worry about touching that. But that's what I was trying to do. I was adding these exclusions, I was trying to guarantee that we're testing a, you know, an audience, and I'm excluding when I'm creating custom audiences, and excluding them from one another to make sure that we're not overlapping. And and it was absolutely maddening. And then the results were all over the place and not repeatable. Yeah, and I think
Greg Marshall 18:33 the thing that you're you're explaining is the thinking you're using is the right thinking, I believe, and the right setting, it's just that these algorithms, I don't think support that thinking because they're kind of unpredictable and then change. That's, I think, that's one of the reasons why exclusions and isolating things too much can be a challenge is because what works in the algorithm today, or tomorrow and
Blake Beus 19:02 we've talked about this before, what it whenever you're dealing with an algorithm, you want to make it as easy as possible for that algorithm to do its job. And when you start adding in exclusions, and, and and things like that, you're making it harder for the algorithm to identify which people fit into your target your targeting audience. And, and therefore, if it's harder for the algorithm to do its job, it's not going to do as good of a job getting the right people and your CPMs are gonna go up, your costs are gonna go up all of that stuff. Yeah. And I think
Greg Marshall 19:37 overall to the there is a trade off that and this I'm happy rather because there's like a, like a silent agreement that I make with myself, which is, am I willing to make this trade off? It's a question that I like to ask, which is, I could be absolutely exact, but then drive myself crazy. Yeah. Or I can just be a Little bit more loose and it's not 100% exact, but I don't go crazy. Yeah, that's that's like a silent kind of contract that I made with myself. Yeah, when I'm testing so that I know like not to get worked up about it because in the past I've had, it's where it's like if I don't get exact, I feel like this like I don't feel at ease. And that that can you know, we had this conversation before at a lunch once about the marketers anxiety Oh, yeah, it literally if if you're not intentional about what you're doing and paying attention to, you know what, what could trigger it what the risk are, you could literally just be like, in pure panic mode all day long. Oh, yeah. And if you'd like, drive you insane,
Blake Beus 20:42 absolutely insane, especially when you're trying to scale and you're spending, you know, higher dollar amounts and things like that, like that anxiety is real. And it can cause you, your business, whatever to kind of choke, you know, and not not be able to function because you're so worried about this one aspect of your business, that it's, it's just not, it's just not worth it.
Greg Marshall 21:02 So make the trade off the trade off should just be you want to keep your sanity while you're doing this. And so just understand Sakana be super exact. And that is okay, as long as like, from a high level, all the numbers are working, and your business is growing the way you want it to be okay with that? Yeah. So that's, that's my advice for, for testing is have a healthy trade off. That's what you're doing. Yeah, just so you don't drive yourself crazy. Yeah.
Blake Beus 21:32 And then the other thing I'd like to say when it comes to testing, a lot of people don't think about this. But I think more people need to branch out on which platforms there are. So one thing you could test right now is an audience in Facebook. And that same same audience or as close you can get in in Google or YouTube or, or somewhere else, or tick tock or something. Right, like, branch out and see. And you you might you might be surprised. I mean, you were telling me just today about one of your clients who has traditionally done nothing but Facebook, yes. And you said, Hey, let's hop over in and run some YouTube ads. And they are floored with the results. Because apparently their audiences chillin over on YouTube. And yeah, so much on Facebook right now, higher quality
Greg Marshall 22:20 leads, higher conversion rates, higher average order values, higher lifetime value, potential lifetime value. They've
Blake Beus 22:27 been doing stuff in Facebook for years and years or whatever, right? They've been running
Greg Marshall 22:30 Facebook ads for four years, four years. So they're not like, they did Facebook one month. And then they just decided to because it didn't work in one month, they switch. They've had success with Facebook ads for years. But they noticed that their CPMs are getting higher, and the quality of the person was different target with them. So I suggested to make a move, and at least test another platform. And he's getting great results. And I think the moral of the story is, that's why you should always test and never slow down as far as like testing for platforms and one platform and maybe revisit it a couple weeks later. But you should always be testing different platforms, different audiences, so that you can figure out if something changes, you're able to move, and it almost doesn't impact. It's like diversifying. Yes. Yeah.
Blake Beus 23:25 All right. And then the last thing I really wanted to bring up and this this is my opinion, and I actually haven't actually asked you this before, but I feel like people when they're first hopping into ADS, one of the very first things they want to test is something like men versus women, sure, or age ranges, you know, 35 to 45 versus, you know, 76 or whatever. Yeah, and in my opinion, unless your business is very specific, yes. To the needs of an age or a gender. In my opinion, that is like the worst way. Yes. The worst way to cheat test audience. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah,
Greg Marshall 24:04 I would say, and it depends, right? Because the type of product like if it's a women's product, right, I mean, obviously, you want to test women, and how many of you could have manicures met with goodbye for and I've done that. But typically, you know, whatever the product is the way you test it, you just got to figure out like, could both genders purchases? And the other question you have to ask yourself, and so this is why I actually test these types of things sometimes against each other is Am I making assumptions? That are incorrect. Yeah, I made the assumption before, like, on some of the ads were, well, I'm just going to exclude other placements or only have it mobile or only have a desktop or only have this or don't have it on TV or whatever. Right. I found that the more I kind of keep it open, the better. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like because I'm not forcing it's kind of a level of a exclusions. I'm not forcing you to, like, I'm not telling the employee to only do one thing, right? Yeah, I'm actually giving it breathing room and trusting like you should trust an employee for them to figure it out. Yeah. Right. And that's, that's what I found is, the more you can keep it to where it does include both genders. Most age ranges, the better. I've seen it.
Blake Beus 25:24 Yeah. So yeah. And so what we're talking about specifically, here are interests interest based are a good place to start. Each platform has kind of their own unique things within YouTube, you can you can test based on what channels people are interested in, or whatever. So if there's a channel with a topic that's completely relevant to your product, or whatever, right, you can test based on that. Facebook has based on other interest groups and things you can test based on. You know, income, yep. Right. Facebook kind of sucks with that. But Google tends to be a better based on on in in, I feel
Greg Marshall 26:03 like that's an understatement. Yeah, I feel like it's significantly more accurate than Facebook.
Blake Beus 26:09 Yeah. And so, so look like literally look into those targeting options, and at least get familiar with what's available in each platform, and come up with some creative ways to test those.
Greg Marshall 26:20 So yeah, so I guess to end this podcast, make sure you're testing test often. And that's the main job of a media buyer.
Blake Beus 26:31 All right, well, Greg, how can people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall 26:33 go to my website, Greg marshall.co, you can book a free strategy session call.
Blake Beus 26:37 And for me just go to Blake beus.com. The SM3 Group for social media marketing is like a group kind of marketing thing where we help put together posts and things for you. That's the main kind of thing
Greg Marshall 26:50 and be able to look out Blake and I got some cool plans coming out for that program. Yes,
Blake Beus 26:53 we do. So yeah. Be Be on the lookout and we'll we'll let you know when those things drop. All right. We'll
Greg Marshall 26:58 talk to you guys later. Okay. Bye.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:01 And we're good ready to go? Let's do this. Alright, so I'm going to start off with just Yes. Just asking you asking you this directly.
Blake Beus 0:12 We've all had this clients come to us say I want the cheapest traffic possible. I like where can I get my cost per click as low as possible? And and how can I spend the least on ads as possible? And that seems like a simple question with a simple answer, but it's not. We were talking about that and why?
Greg Marshall 0:35 You just told me. Yeah, this may be not a good idea to look for the cheapest traffic it Yeah. So in fact, I think it's a, in most cases, it's a bad strategy. Not every case. But most and the reason for and I think it also depends on your industry, but usually there's a direct correlation with the costs for traffic or cost per lead, and the quality of leads. So think of it like this, if you want, because I get this from clients a lot. And I know you have to where clients will say, I want to only target people with money. Right? Okay. You go. Yeah, well, of course, so does the rest of the world. Yeah, business. Everyone wants that client that will spend the most money without thinking about it. Right. So what what does that mean? That means everyone's going after that person, which means all these work and auction, you're going to be spending more money, yeah, per click. And your CPM, your cost for the actual impressions will be much higher. With that being said, you should actually look at that as a positive side. Yeah. Because if you can make those higher cost per clicks, higher CPMs work, you're going to I mean, your conversion rate is going to be high. And if you have a good lifetime value and customer is going to be worth it. The math works out. It's just a lot of times we become obsessed with the cost per whatever we're doing right? At almost at the detriment of how quality those are. Right, right. If I got you 100 leads for $1. Or I got you two leads for $50. You spent 100 bucks on each, but one of them gets zero conversions, and the other one gets one for $10,000. Which, which one would you prefer the one for $10,000 every time every time but what happens and this goes into something that we've talked about? What happens is businesses don't know their numbers. And so they actually just use other people's kind of results to like gauge them on what they should be doing. But they don't even know their own business numbers. Yeah. On whether they should be trying to scale or if they're winning if they're losing.
Blake Beus 2:50 Right. Right. Well, I think one of the key things I want to pull out one, one phrase you said in there is, you basically said if if you have a high lifetime value for your customer, and that's, in my mind, whenever I've had this conversation with any clients, or anybody talking about advertising, it always boils down to lifetime value. And usually, people aren't thinking super long term when they're when they approached me with this specific question, I want the lowest cost traffic, lowest cost per click possible. They're not, they're usually not thinking long term. And I oftentimes will tell them, well, it's usually easier, more profitable and less stressful to increase the lifetime value of your customer base than it is to go try to find the cheapest traffic possible and make that profitable. Yep. And, and so people tend to have that backwards just a little bit. So one of the things I liked to talk about with them was depending on the model, how can we increase that lifetime value, so that we can spend the most per click out of anybody out there out there in the industry? Because if we can be insanely prospect profitable to a point where we can spend more money than anybody else on each click, then you win every pain out there.
Greg Marshall 4:12 Well, and the other thing is this, the competitive advantage is, everyone else doesn't have the stomach. If you do to pay that cost per click yes, they're focusing on how do I get a lower cost per foot versus how to get a higher lifetime value. So what ends up happening as it almost becomes a game of like, who can outlast the other? So it's like, can I deal with a $30 cost per click longer than my competitor can like, does that make them nervous? And they stop? Yeah, and I keep going right? If I keep going? I win. Yeah. Yeah. Because I know they're going to be thinking about how do I get cheaper cost per clicks, which that's really the wrong question asked and this what drove me to this thought was actually I had a conversation with a client yesterday. And he was he right now he was getting, he was slightly profit on new customers coming in. And he was actually asking, which is good, right? He was asking me, How do I get more customers? My response was, spend more No, right. But he was well, I don't know if I want to do that I want how can we get the cost per purchase? To go down? Right? And I said, Well, why would you be worried about that? If you're not? Like, if you're actually slightly profit on the front end? What is your concern? Your real job is not to be profitable on the first time customer, right? Your real job is to build a business. And there's a difference between customer acquisition and a business. Right, see a business's think of Starbucks, Amazon, you think they you think they're trying to get new customers for $1? And trying to make money off that? Absolutely not? Because that would actually cause them not to be some of the richest companies in the world, right? Because their lifetime value, they want you to buy coffee forever. They consider customer acquisition and expense. Right? They don't plan on making money on customer acquisition. All of their marketing and advertising campaigns are not to make money on new customer acquisition. Yeah, in fact, anyone who tries to make money on new customer acquisition will be small and stay small forever, right? Because there's basically it's, it's, it's a myth, it's a fantasy. And what what actually triggered this conversation, which I thought was funny, because I was like, Okay, this gives me a glimpse into the mindset of how some businesses or maybe many businesses are actually viewing this. So he had told me, yeah, I spoke to someone and like, shouldn't we be getting cost per purchases? And this is on a $75. Okay, shouldn't we be getting cost for purchases at like, $3 $2? Maybe? And you laugh, because he could see how ridiculous That's right. Yeah. And I was like, in my past, I'm trying to get better at this. Basically just telling people, no, that's not gonna work. So can we get it for two or three? I mean, instead of and right now we're paying off of purchase at 25.
Blake Beus 7:29 Okay, for 75? For seven, yeah, I'd
Greg Marshall 7:31 be I'd be thrilled with those results. That's, that's, that's a 3x return on the cold new first. That's insane. Like, that's really good. So that's working right. Now. The question was, well, how do we get it to $3 a forearm and basically says we don't, right, and it won't happen? Or if it did, you can't scale it. So I said, whoever is telling you that you can do that is probably only sharing the numbers of like how much you can get an existing customer to reconvert. While simultaneously using a tiny budget. Yeah. So if you spend like $5 a day, you can do that. But
Blake Beus 8:11 but it's not sustainable. You might have one day where you do that. But the next day, you might not you might have like four or five days, because you're just not reaching enough people exact right. So if you do get one purchase on that one day, they will be like, Hey, I got a $75 purchase for three bucks. Yep. But that's not reality.
Greg Marshall 8:29 Well, and something that the light bulb went off in his head when we were speaking, which I thought was like, Okay, I need to keep it actually helped me because I was like, I need to communicate this harder to people. So they understand that they're actually missing out on opportunity. I said, So, if you're spending $5 a day, you're getting that return. But you know, you're only reaching What 500 People was on 300, maybe? Maybe 1000,
Blake Beus 8:56 maybe, maybe 1000. It may got really good CPM, right? But most likely not. No. I said, there's absolutely no way you can ever scale that particular result that audience because it's too small. So you couldn't spend $5 a day and jump it up to 50. Because then it would just, you would have no return or negative returns because you'd be spending way too much for that size of audience. And for me, I always think, okay, so you want let's make the numbers easy. You want you're getting a $25 cost per purchase on a 75? Well, let's make it $100 product. Let's just make this really easy. Okay, so $100 product, you're making 20 $25 cost per purchase on $100 product, and you want that down for let's say $10. Yeah, right. What you're really asking is how can I get a 10x return on this investment? Not how can I get a cheaper cost per purchase? The real result is How can I 10x my money here? Yeah, and the answer that is well, let's come up with some additional products and service Just to offer people that have already purchased, you already paid the $25. Yep. For that $100 purchase, if we want to Tenex that, how can we turn that, that customer now into a $250? Customer, and now we've text, exactly, we didn't compromise our customer acquisition? It's right. And so that's really what people need to think about. And a lot of people look a lot of businesses there, this is maybe falling out of vogue right now. But there were a few years ago, there were all these, like, find my $1,000 course. And we're going to show you how to how to how to how to, you know, 5x, or 10x your ad spend on a product or whatever, right? And, and the reality is, if that's all you're thinking about, you're not building a business that's going to last and you're building a business that's completely dependent on this one advertising strategy. And as soon as the algorithm change, or as soon as some competition hits, you're going to struggle, because real businesses focus on customer acquisition, and then long term sustainability, revenue, sustainability and customer value, then just the initial sale, the initial sale is like I said, an expense. It's not a business. Yeah. And the other thing is this. And he made me think of a phrase you could tie with that. So if you're wondering, how do I get a cheaper cost per purchase? What you're really asking is, how do I make my business smaller? Because what in order to achieve that you would have to niche your audience down so small, that you're only talking to the absolute, hottest audience, which is only so big, right? And you'll burn through that audience pretty fast? And and then where do you go from there? And to kind of expand on that? If you have any aspirations of doing $10,000 A month or award sales? On your online store? You can kiss that goodbye? If you're trying to get 10x. Yeah, trying to get on Excuse me, excuse me, you're trying to reduce your cost per purchases to a number that's so low, right? You could forget about ever exceeding $10,000. Absolutely. Now, that being said, it's still a worthwhile exercise to say, can we find a way to take this existing campaign and get a little bit better cost per purchase. And that's where split testing comes in, where you start testing different creatives, headlines, different videos, maybe change up some wording on your landing page, or something like that. Or maybe you tweak the offer just a little bit to sweeten the pot? Yeah, all of those things can reduce your cost, cost per purchase. But it's also a realistic thing. Basically, all you're doing is you're playing around with your customer acquisition costs, and trying to onload onboard as many people as you can into your business. But you got to be reasonable, you're not going to get those cost per purchase for a buck. And you're able to spend, you know, $20,000 a month on advertising issues and maintain that you can't it's just really, I've never really been one to say something's impossible. Yeah. But I feel pretty confident about that one. To get, you know, $5 $3 purchases on especially anything 24 hours or more, at a big scale is going to be very challenging, right. Borderline boss. Yeah, that's, that's basically what I want to say is, if you want more stability,
Greg Marshall 13:37 don't play that game. Yeah. Play the How can I increase my repeat purchases? Faster? More regularly? How can I get one customer by every month, several times a month? In three days? Buy more? How can I upsell them at the point of sale, play that game, right? Instead of lowering cost per purchase, because that will be literally like a hamster wheel. You will just be running on this wheel in search. It's like you're in search of gold, right? Like you heard that there's a treasure map somewhere. And that there's gold that you can find the promise it might be out there, but it may take your whole life to find it.
Blake Beus 14:15 And you might even hear a story. You might even hear a story of someone that did that. Yep. But the thing is, is oftentimes those are the statistical outliers, the anomalies that that they themselves probably couldn't even repeat that it's it's, I wouldn't say winning the lottery or whatever. But it's you said Gold Rush, right. Like you had a gold rush. You had all these people had out to you know, California looking for gold. And the reality was, is that a handful of people that were there at the right place in the right time. did make a ton of money. Yep. But the people that made consistent money were the people that sold the shovels. So the equipment provided provided the tools and things for long term sustainability on They're on their business. So yeah, I mean, I did want to talk really quick about cost per click on Google search results within, if you want to move on, I would love to talk about different ways people can expand maybe a little bit more detail, their average customer value. So cost cost per click, like a lot of people, especially when they start hopping into Google Search Ads. They're blown away. They're like, I'm spending how much per click in Facebook, I'm spending it to $2 per click. But in Google, I'm spending 20. What what is with that? And it's it's a different methodology. And we've talked about this before, where we've talked about intent, yes. And Facebook is, if you see something while you're scrolling through your feed, your intent is passive. Like, you might have a passing interest in whatever is going on there. When you're doing a Google search, and looking for something specific, and you see those click Results, your intent is very high. If I'm hopping in there, I'm searching you know, roofing guys in northern Utah. Yeah, I'm ready right now to get some quotes on my roof speak to some Utah roofer. And that intent is good and, and the profitability for roofing company. I mean, I had my roof done a couple years ago. And it was almost $20,000 for them to do the roof. And so you're thinking, okay, yeah, they have some overhead material, whatever, but the profitability on that is easily worth a $50. Click. Yep. Right. Like if they can get their $50 Click for a free consultation, they'll drive around out there the same day. I mean, we had someone come the same day, I scheduled a consultation. And they showed up and gave me an estimate, looked at everything showed me the damage took pictures. I mean, they really treated us Yeah, because they knew that that would be a profitable thing. So the cost per click is extremely relative based on intent, and profitability and things like that.
Greg Marshall 17:03 Well, the other there seems to be a correlation also, with, and I've tested this a lot. So the cheaper leads seem to not like I've heard people on Facebook, right? But hey, when I do Facebook, lead ads, I can't ever get ahold of people, or I'm getting leads from Facebook, but for some reason, they're not working. Right. And you hear that, and you and you go Alright, well, they're usually getting leads at $5 or seven $8. Right. But then if you get the leads that cost 50 100. Those people almost always answer the phone and agree to do an appointment. Yeah, almost always like not kind of, almost always. So you can almost make the correlation that the more money you spend to acquire the lead, the higher likelihood that person will get on the phone. Or meet you in person. Yeah. And the lower you spend, right, so the
Blake Beus 18:10 you know, let's say you get the $2 leads or whatever, you're not going to get all in because that's almost like a direct reflection of how committed that lead probably actually. Right. Right. And I've got a personal experience with this. Right, like, so I have my SM three group, it's a monthly membership. And then the the very first product launch was my social media content plan. And I used to sell it for almost 50 bucks. And and we just ran cold traffic ads to that, Greg, that's when you and I started working together brought you in because I was like overwhelmed and stressed about everything. And, and that was going good to competition, hit algorithms changed all that stuff. So we kind of switched up the offer and came up with this monthly membership, which is super great. But then I took that $50 product and switched it over to a free lead, right to just get people on my email list and try them and try to market to them. And I was getting leads for 50 cents lower than my cost per click on the purchase outs. Yep. And I didn't have a single one of them convert. I spent several $100 to test that out. Not one of them converted they and in fact most of them unsubscribed after everything. So it was like okay, well, that didn't work. But it's it's true. Sometimes the cheaper it was it was a really juicy lead. And I think that's why I was able to get it so fast. But none of them converted over to the monthly membership. My other customers that paid me the $50 and then I email marketing to them. They hopped over and join the membership. And so it's all about kind of playing around with that and making sure you're getting the people with the right intent and align up to the correct people. But that initial offer was one that people were like, well, I just want this I'll just put my email in here and then get this thing for free and it's good enough and I don't need to do anything else with it. You know, Blake and this or whatever
Greg Marshall 20:02 I think to to, and I fallen victim to this thinking just like anyone else, right? Where initially you think you talk to clients and everyone, you want to give them what they want the cheapest lead the cheapest color for this. So you go okay, well, we'll do that versus saying, getting their mindset to change to go. Are we here to build a business? Are we here to try to, you know, try a fad? Yeah, right? If we're here to build a business we should be looking at these are, how we're doing everything different, right from the quality of the lead up front, to how we can upsell them to the lifetime value verse and let's not worry so much about a cheap lead or cheap foot. And let's worry more about a quality, the higher quality leads and the higher quality prospects because I can tell you right now, I remember acquiring a customer I was talking about right for him. I believe his acquisition cost was about $600 to get him. This is like four years ago. Yeah. And he's been with me since Yeah. So for four years, and he's been paying me a lot of money. So that $600 was well worth it. I've gotten leads where they were well, cheaper than that. Yeah, that they stay on for one month, or they're not that serious or whatever. And they're done. Right. So there's a Yeah, you get what you pay
Blake Beus 21:33 for bases. Really, it really is that and it is interesting, one other anecdotal thing, and then we can move on to how to increase the lifetime value. Or do you remember when we decided to do a flash sale on my $50 product? Right? We did this flash sale for three days, and we bumped it all the way down to seven bucks. Yep. Right. And on cold traffic at a $7 price point. We did a 2x row as on cold traffic. For those three days, this flash sale. And I was thinking great. Well, maybe this is something we could do. Yep, long term. I had way more my my refund requests, as a percentage went up by about 30 or 40%. Because, frankly, they're just cheap. Yeah, customers. Yeah, they're, they're not the quality of customers that I wanted. So people were spending $50 for this thing, but those that converted at seven, were way more picky. And only it picked every little thing about it and said, Well, I didn't like the design or whatever. So refund me. And it says it was a Digital Profit got to keep it for free. So I had a lot of people do that way more than I did when I was selling it for 50. Yep. And so honestly, a lot of the times the cheap customers are the worst customers. Oh, no doubt. It's not even a lot of times, I would almost be like 99.9% of the time. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. And it was a headache, trying to refund all those requests, and everything was just like, oh, my gosh, this is a customer support nightmare, because I went after the wrong people. Yep.
Greg Marshall 23:05 And so that's really, so really the goal is to think about maybe flip flopping. How you design your business, right? So designed to where the acquisition costs is moderate, to hire. So you can because what that would be communicating as you're targeting a higher quality product or prospect, because the higher costs are going to come from, hey, I want to reach, you know, a woman 35 to 44, who likes to exercise and it makes this much mind. That's very expensive to reach him. Right. And that's good. Because we want that person, right? It's versus a lot of advice. And like I said, I've fallen into this too before, a lot of advice people are getting, how do we keep driving costs down? Well, here's a simple way just broaden your audience. Yeah. And you'll lower your costs. There you go, right, just have no charge. But the problem is, what type of persons actually coming in? Are they the right fit for your business? Or your product? Right? Probably not. Right? So. So just don't fall into that trap? which like I said, I have been guilty of this before.
Blake Beus 24:10 Yeah, it's easy. It's easy to follow. And it's easy to look at your ad expenses and think, Geez, especially when you have like two or three days where some oil changes and you're you're not you're not even making money on ads, yes, to make money on. It's easy to freak out and say okay, what's what's, you know, let's, let's lower the cost. It's easy to shrink. Yes. So easy to shrink. Absolutely. And something that you just pointed out to me which could almost be like a philosophy would be almost the higher your costs for acquisition and CPM. The more I guess, stable your business can be Yeah. Because what that basically means now is that the prospect and buyer higher quality but the other thing is when you have it set up that way.
Greg Marshall 25:02 Like we talked about earlier, it other people aren't going to be they're not going to feel comfortable paying that. Right for a long time, most people, right. And so you can almost say like, if it's costing a lot, I mean, a safer space. Yeah. Then if it's costing really cheap, because if it's really cheap, the gold rushes are all going to come in and be running, you know, products and things and offers exactly the same as yoga. And then all it's going to happen is now the market of people that you're going after are going to expect unrealistic things. So then becomes a race to the bottom. Yes, well, my product is cheaper. Well, this person said that they give me 10 programs for $7. And you're only doing eight, and it becomes this race to the bottom. It's, in my opinion, I don't believe most business owners get in the business to be to join that race. I think they have the opposite. That's what they do.
Blake Beus 26:00 And I think it's like a panic reaction like a reactionary, reactionary thing. And let me pull what you said in a different way. If you want to be able to run ads and sleep at night, without getting stressed about your margins, find a way to be profitable at a much higher cost per acquisition, because then it's like, okay, you're you're profitable, long term, on a $50 cost per acquisition. If it goes up to 55, no big deal. So good, you're still fine, you're still fine. But if you're profitable at a $5 cost per acquisition, a little tiny profit, and if it goes up 10, you're you're losing money, and you're losing your shorts, and it's game over. And so you're waking up in the morning, and I've been here you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is you check your ads manager, see how it performed overnight, see where you're at. So you need to make adjustments and everything. But if you want to if you want to be the lazy marketer, put all your time and effort into building that long term value. Yep. And then it doesn't, it doesn't matter so much. So you can check your ads every now and then. And and just kind of see if you want to refresh your creative or something, or maybe run a couple of split tests every now and then. But yeah, at that point in time, you're a lazy marketer. Yep. But you're making more money.
Greg Marshall 27:15 I actually like how you just said that, because I think that's what everyone's aspirations actually are. You start a business not to just like live and add accounts, and market and spend 99% of your time doing it. Yeah, you start a business because really your aspirations like I want more time. Yeah, more freedom, haha, so that I can do what I want. So it would make more sense to do the exercise of what's the highest my acquisition costs could be and be sustainable, meaning you should do the exercise of if my acquisition costs doubled. Overnight. Could I still make that work? And how, yeah. And then when you get to that one, do it again. Yeah, I keep thinking like, Could I pay? Like, you know, I'm using t shirts, for example, right? Could I pay? Because I know my numbers. So well? Could I actually afford to pay $80? An acquisition? Yeah. And make that work? Yeah. And if you could, how would you do it? Well, I would bump maybe myself, you know, or maybe I would have an email sequence that gets that person that bought get 50% of my new buyers to purchase in seven days. Yeah. But play that game. And if you do it, you'll be able to relax more? Because they'll be like, well,
Blake Beus 28:29 it's gonna take a while before your acquisition costs literally double overnight, right? Because that means the CPMs would have doubled, which means competition would literally have to double overnight. Well, if you're like, yeah, if your cost per acquisition is 80 bucks, right? And it doubles to 160. Something is seriously wrong. And yeah, good place, right. Like, that's not gonna happen. But if it's five and doubles to 10, that's just a glitch in the system. Yeah, like that could happen in an hour. Easy. Oh, yeah. And so. So let's take the last few minutes of us. Let's talk about a couple of different ways, realistic ways that people can increase that long term value. We've kind of hinted at them, but I think we should just draw them specifically. So you, let's start with E commerce. You just were talking about T shirts. That's an E commerce business. He talked a couple strategies. Let's dive into that for just just a little bit longer.
Greg Marshall 29:18 So how do you increase lifetime? Yeah. So the way you do it, I precice. blue in the face is text message and email marketing. So making sure you're capturing customer information, so that you can go ahead and give them another offer? Right. That's number one. Some that's very close to as far as up there in the scale of importance. Making sure you have consistent email and text message marketing campaigns. Yes. happening immediately. So that your objective is to get them to purchase again. Yeah. All right. And then the third thing that I would recommend is, if you're an E commerce Make sure you're constantly coming up with new products to offer. If you only have five products, and you just stay with those five products, you're not going to last. And the reason is because your ads can only do so much on that front end, right, the more you scale, the higher acquisition costs. So if you're not coming out with new stuff consistently to sell to that person that's related materials, not unrelated, you're not going to be able to be as profitable you can. So make sure you're coming out with new products consistently to sell those people that are buying your front end offers, right? The other thing would be, you can increase your prices, right? You can create bundles, to get people to buy more at once. You can also create flash sales. And if you uniquely put them together, you don't have to discount your product so much. But it increases people's buy ravier, right. So these are things to really think about is making more offers to the customers you already paid for. If I simplify at all, that's how you do. So instead
Blake Beus 31:04 of spending time in the ads manager, just making everything, spend time on improving bundles, coming up with email and text message content consistently, constantly building that email list and coming up with new product ideas. That's it. So that's where you should be spending your time now, honestly, most business owners that I've run into, that's where they would prefer to spend their time. Yeah, they get distracted by all her advertising stuff. Because those numbers are addictive. Well, not only are they addictive, but people have different beliefs about money. Yeah. Makes them afraid. And that applies everyone, not just somebody. Right, right. And so when you think about that the ads manager is the one thing where you can where you feel like you have the most control, because you can just turn it off. Yeah, your problems are solved, but at least I'm not losing money. Yeah. Where people tend to get caught up. And this is where I think
Greg Marshall 32:05 this is where I think the real opportunity is. When I talk to clients about how easy it would be like every single time I've told a client to do this. It's work. Yeah. The customers you have if you give them another offer, your offer will be immediately profitable. Yeah, guarantee. Yeah. And every time they do it, they see these huge spikes, like, wow, I'm getting all these sets. I have one client in my mind, I'm not gonna say her business brand, so you don't copy her exact strategy. I have one client right now that whatever I tell her to do, she executes it. And she executes it. Well. She is literally she's cut her Aspen in half, just because there was an issue with her add a cow, and some frogs and stuff from someone hacked. But she cut her adspend in half. But, but I told her in order to make the main difference. You're not doing text or email. She started doing that. She's actually on pace ever biggest month this month, while spending half on Rakoff. And I said, Well, what why is that? She's coming out with new products. Oh, she's living far. Exactly. Yeah. And if clients spent more time just like, they usually get caught up, and they don't know what to say. Or what to make. Right? And that's usually why doesn't happen. But if you just take any action, you're likely your likelihood of succeeding with the current customer is super high. Yeah. Because she's not making anything like, you know, game changing. Yeah, they're just like maybe a different color of the shirt. Or instead of a T shirt is lost, or the hoodie is now available or create the same phrase at work into a dress. She's not doing anything like some huge innovation. Yeah, it's just it's incremental. Yeah, it's just give something new. Yes. Something something. Anything. Okay. Makes sense. I love it.
Blake Beus 33:58 Okay, let's let's really quick talk about like consulting coaching professional services, what are some ways that people can improve their customer lifetime value there? Yeah. So the fastest and easiest ways to make it a recurring model, and then focus on your customer retention on that recurring model. So that's number one. Number two, could be you could raise your prices. Number three, could be you have supplemental programs to sell to these people that are related to the product that you're serving them with. Number four, could be improving your referral rate, because those referrals come in at a low acquisition cost was increases the lifetime value of the actual customer who refer a lot of people don't think of it that way. Yeah, but one customer is paying you That refers you to another person, that customer now has doubled their worth. Yeah. Or if they sent four or five now there were five times more. Yeah, because they're showing referral behavior, right. So encouraging your current customers to send referrals and then you know, You could, you could do partnerships with other people that have different products to do an affiliate that sales to your current customer base. But that's, that's essentially how you would do it is controlling pricing, putting them on recurring model, making sure they're sending referrals and then having kind of complementary programs to what you're selling. Right. Awesome. Awesome. And then let's see what's up. What's a model we haven't talked about here? I mean, those are kind of the two everything kind of lumped into one, commerce or service. You know, the other thing maybe you could talk about, you know, brick and mortar, like restaurants and things like that, which I see almost, I don't see very many restaurants using advertising. Yeah, my thought is, I've had very limited experience with restaurants. But here's my thought, restaurants are a low margin business. And so the likelihood of how they're viewing the advertising is tougher, because they're not looking at it as a lifetime acquisition, even though the lifetime value of a food customer. Yeah, have actually be super high, as long as your food is good. Yeah. Right. Because they would just keep coming. There's some restaurants I go to, over and over and over again, there's one restaurant that serves a meal that I like, you know, it's a rice of steak meal. I go there at least once a week. So think about what they're making. All right. And if they acquired me through advertising a front, it would make no sense, right? Well, if it costs you $30, to get me to come in and buy that first time last month, but if I stay with you forever, yeah, then technically that $30 is compounded Yeah, as a return. So I would think that they just need to focus on like the fundamentals of long term things, and then treat, add, create treat ads, as if they're kind of like, a billboard or something that you can't really attribute back to, because the only way you can really attribute that back to is if you give some sort of a discount coupon or whatever. So you're already low margin. So it's most like hey, just kind of do some saturation in the local market here. But focus on customer service and retention and getting people to come back, you know, once they show up in the door. I think the moral of our podcasts on the story is build your business don't only worry about acquisition and have everything else falling apart. Yeah, right. You want to make sure that you have strong systems in place a long term strategy give you a key by awesome All right, well, we're this is one of our longer podcasts let's let's wrap this one up.
Unknown Speaker 37:29 Greg, how can people get in touch with you Greg Marshall CO and they can book a free strategy session call you can go rocking out
Blake Beus 37:36 just like me stock calm. You can see my membership on on the page there and and we can connect through them membership. Great. Well Till next time, we appreciate it. Okay, later
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Transcript Blake Beus 0:06 All right. All right. So Greg, I want to dive in, I just start asking you questions. So you brought up this thing to me, that was super, super interesting. And I feel like this is a really important topic. So I'm glad. I'm glad we're covering it. So it's no secret that Facebook specifically has been under a lot of fire for the last few years over like political advertisements, or politically charged narratives and their ads. And so one of the things they've done is stripped out some targeting options, made a bunch of adjustments to their algorithm. But it seems like there's an unintended consequence. That is, is impacting certain business. Yeah. So tell me what, tell me what you've been finding?
Greg Marshall 0:50 Well, certain segments. So I mean, the main one, I have a lot of African American clients that target the African American audience right now. They're selling cultural items and things that are going to resonate more with the African American than maybe a Caucasian. Right, right. And one of the things that I've noticed with a lot of the changes, and I think this has to do with there were so many issues politically, just a few years ago, and you know, people may be profiting off things that they shouldn't be, is Facebook kind of did the knee jerk reaction. So my guess could be they might bring it back. But anyways, what I mean is, Facebook took away a lot of targeting options that would go after or be able to target the African American community, or other, you know, other ethnicities. So you can kind of target your ad. So it's been a progressive checkoff from maybe what, two, three years ago, you could actually target. People like it was a target option, people that are most likely African American, most likely Hispanic, or whatever those options got taken away, then they slowly started to take away some of the interest targeting that you can go after that would imply that the audience may be of a certain race or ethnicity. For example, they took away a lot of the publications that were used for targeting to target the African American community. And they have taken off, I've even seen, I've got other clients that some other even deeper niches that they've taken away those interests that would target that culture. And so what's interesting is, during these changes, the knee jerk reaction seems to be over time, they're taking away more and more targeting towards those types of groups, which I think is a little bit challenging. If you're trying to sell cultural items. And broad targeting may not be the best option. It may be it could be right, but it may not be the best option, because you're not able to start to talk to the people that you're scientists or culture.
Blake Beus 3:07 Right. Right. So, so, um, I find this super interesting, because I mean, I'm also seeing publications in, you know, just broad publications. Well, let me let me talk about what we mean by publications, right? A lot of people may or may not realize this, but you used to be able to say, target a magazine, and say, you know, I want to go after people that are interested in this magazine, or target, even like a TV show or something like that. And those targeting options have been kind of removed. But when you started talking with me about that, I knew that those targeting options had been removed. But when you start talking with me about that, I didn't realize how much of an impact that had on, you know, special interest groups, minority groups, ethnic groups, because I, I've never targeted like that. It's, it's one of the things that I bump into, because, you know, I'm white, I don't I don't it that stuff doesn't come across my awareness a whole lot. Because I'm, I'm white, but yeah, do you have a lot of other people in those ethnicities targeting specifically to those ethnicities that are being deeply impacted by this? And they've had to change their marketing strategy more than someone like me? Yes. Who, who? Who has much more general audience? Yep. That, you know, and so you've had to kind of help people through this deal with this, whatever. Like, tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall 4:38 basically, there's you know, there's there's some workarounds around this, yeah. It makes you it requires you to think deeper into how to still reach that person, because it's not like these people have gone off the internet, right? Like they've been removed from the right, it's just getting the ad in front of them has become a little bit more challenging. But There are some ways to do it right. And so if you do a deeper thought, it just requires a lot more research than maybe what you had to do in the past. In the past, you could literally like, within five minutes, you could figure out how to reach this person, not even five minutes, maybe less than that. But now it's, it's more like, you know, you have to switch things up, you have to think deeply on, what else would they do? Where do they live? What else are they watching, you know what I mean? It's almost like you have to become this high level research to reach them. So that is a little bit more challenging. But there are ways around this. And one thing that I've noticed with a lot of my customers that fall into this bracket of selling culturally is a lot of their old assets that they have saved and used in the past, are being automatically turned off by Facebook, to no longer run because it contains some of these interest or targeting options
Blake Beus 5:57 that are no longer available, right? So you kind of can get grandfathered in for a time Correct. With you know, if you had an interest based targeting on one of these targeting options that got removed, you can get grandfathered in for a time. But it looks like they're turning those off at some point in time. Exactly. And then they're okay, exactly. So So when someone has a happen, and they're talking about, you know, we need to target a little bit better, we need to find people interested in these products. What can someone specifically do? Yeah, so
Greg Marshall 6:27 this is this is kind of where I've almost seen the opportunity. So because I've had a lot of pushback with a guest. And it's funny, because I've actually have run into this, personally running my own ads. So I understand the thinking with this is what, you know, before we started recording, we were talking about, I wanted to challenge us to see is there something to it. So the pushback I will get is, and you know, you say quote unquote, old days a year ago, two years ago, but that is a lot of time for digital marketing. You could, you know, there's a lot of people teaching Facebook courses on, you know, layer your targeting, put your ad in front of the absolute perfect person, and that would work. But now she's now that doesn't work anymore. Because a lot of those targeting options are gone. Right?
Blake Beus 7:23 And so what what you mean by layering, just to clarify for any, you know, if you're listening, and you're not sure what he means by layering, that was when you would pick an interest, and then you would say, okay, and they're also interested in this interest as well. And they're also interested in this interest as well. So you're, you're layering those interests and making the audience small, smaller and smaller, but hopefully more relevant than I used to work. Like when I started ads, that was like the thing you had to do. But now, you're talking about going more broad?
Greg Marshall 7:54 Yes. And here's the thing, all these changes hurt the advertiser that has a lower budget. Hmm. Okay, so this is what happens. In the past, these courses were very attractive to people who had, I guess, lower AdSense available, because you could literally enter the market, do your layer targeting, get in front of the absolute perfect person and spend five or $10 a day and actually have a positive return on investment? Right, right. And this was a strategy that was taught a lot, especially to the culturally driven community. And now this is not really available or viable strategy. Because number one, a lot of interests taken away. Number two, it the extra lane with all the data that Facebook no longer gets, doesn't work. But here's something that's interesting. So there's a couple of techniques that I've used. For example, I have a client that sells to sororities. Right. And they specifically were selling to African Americans or okay. And they had a specific ad group that they had built to have worked like magic for about two years. Okay. They're like, we'll just use that one. And explaining that is no longer available. Yes, it makes logical sense to do that, and I get it, but it's no longer available. So we have to figure out a way to reach these people. Not using that, that target, right. And one thing that challenged me a little bit was one I used a look alike. Audience customer list connect actually has worked well. Because not every ad accounts look alike audience isn't working as well as they used to. But then the other targeting that we did was pretty broad. So I went after people who are interested in fraternities and sororities targeting women, okay, and that one's working better. better than the old ad set that they used to have. And that's a bigger audience. And it's a much broader and I got a little pushback initially, from doing a saying, well, that's not targeting the specific because they were very specific. Right. That's not targeting them. And the interesting part is the two ad sets that are alter, I guess you'd say Ultra broad, we are giving the album some guidance are actually working better than the old ad set. Okay. Which brings me to, like our conversation we're having before we hit the record button, about maybe broad targeting is kind of the new way. And it requires a level of trust on the AI the algorithm to actually know who you're going after. And I think that's a difficult thing to to embrace brace. Yes.
Blake Beus 10:56 Let me ask you this, what I've been thinking this for? Well, I actually haven't told you about this thought. So I'm asking this question tell you where I'm going with this. Okay. So this was an ad targeting sororities, as best you could using the targeting options, specifically African American women that participate in sororities? Right. Yep. What was the ad creative and copy? Okay,
Greg Marshall 11:23 so like, you know, I
Blake Beus 11:24 don't know, specifics, but you might know about this, because I actually was going to ask, okay, okay. Yeah, let's talk about it, then. That's okay.
Greg Marshall 11:31 I believe, after, I don't know, probably spending, like $5,000 Over the last little bit of testing, that the ad creative and copy figures out how to reach the audience you want moreso than the interest?
Blake Beus 11:53 Okay, that's so did you have intentionally or unintentionally? Did you have keywords? Yes. In the copy? Yes. That would resonate with African American women interested in sororities, the
Greg Marshall 12:05 picture and was the QRP, the creative guy link that they go to the language on the landing page? All of that speaks to that, saying, This is made for blank.
Blake Beus 12:18 Yeah. Okay, so we're beating around the bush a little bit. But let's be very direct, I believe. I don't think Facebook has come out and said this. But I believe they're using the keywords in your ads to generate a behind the scenes interest group targeting. And they're using machine learning a lot of people call AI to look at the image or the video to determine who that is targeted towards. Yeah. And they can do that based on cultural or ethnic cues. Yep. In those things. So people don't may not realize, but like, we can read images now. So if there's a picture of two people, yes, on an image, Facebook can determine with, you know, a fuzzy level of accuracy, the ethnicity of those two people, and probably even the gender of those two people.
Greg Marshall 13:11 And I think if you combine it, so if you give it enough information, through the images plus the words, you're using your ad copy, plus the landing the landing page to Yeah, I believe that by that combination, the AI can figure out, okay, this, they're trying to reach this person. And they've given me a guiding point, with a relatively broad enough to tell me what they're trying to do. Right. And I think they're pretty accurate.
Blake Beus 13:45 Yeah. I will be very curious that. So here's something I would love to see. Tested somehow. So you tell me if this is something so if I remember, right, there was a particular magazine that you were using, yes. Test.
Greg Marshall 14:01 Do you remember what the name of that magazine was? For the African American? Yes. Yeah. Essence magazine
Blake Beus 14:05 Essence magazine. Okay. I would be curious if you put Essence magazine in your pocket, we like something like, I don't know, if you find yourself hanging out, like home reading Essence magazine, like work it into the ad copy on natural way. I wonder if behind the scenes, Facebook is still doing interest targeting based on those cues. It's just not available for direct selection. Yes. I don't know if that's the case. But I would be very curious. I would guess that they probably are because the reality is, is they dumped years. Yeah. And billions of dollars into developing algorithms to target those interests. Yep. And now that they've removed those from selection, I'll bet they didn't dump that data, but they didn't dump all of that work. I'll bet if you work those keywords into the language in it In a not in a keyword stuffing kind of way,
Greg Marshall 15:04 just a natural, staying natural, where you're building where you have where you're almost thinking backwards to how you use Foros targeting, like ultra precise targeting. Yeah. And then put her any ad in front of you even have to be good. Yeah, just any app. Yeah. Now it's reverse where you're thinking, How do I make the the ad creative, the ad copy and the landing page? Yeah, help build what I'm trying to attract.
Blake Beus 15:34 Yeah. And let's talk about landing page for a minute. A lot of people don't think about this, that when you put the Facebook pixel on a page, you're basically giving them permission permission to scrape and index all of the information on that page, just like a search engine does. And, and you're giving them the ability to do that. And then Facebook knows that landing page is the next step from this ad, and then want to make sure that everything's aligned. So you can put those keywords and that information in there as well, even video language because Facebook has the ability to, to, to transcribe language and videos, and then use those words as part of their algorithm to determine who specifically would be best to see this ad even on the landing page, like URL content on the landing page,
Greg Marshall 16:23 I think and this is where I believe the shift in mindset, including myself, I'm not excluding me. Yes. The mindset shift needs to go into making those ad creatives and landing page experiences as a way designed to attract the right audience. It's almost like fishing. I love fishing. It's like, you can go into, you know, a lake that has a ton of different fish. But what is it that causes you to catch a specific one? If you're looking to catch it? It's actually the bait. Mm hmm. Right? Yeah, you could say is the offer is the
Blake Beus 17:05 creator is the landing page, the
Greg Marshall 17:07 ad creative, that
Blake Beus 17:08 whole like combination right there,
Greg Marshall 17:09 it almost doesn't matter. Like if I went, let's say, if I went to, you know, this could be a bad example. But let's say we're using fishing. And I'm like, Well, I want to catch a trout. But I use everything. That trial hate. Even though my targeting is perfect. Yeah, if the you're in
Blake Beus 17:30 the right fishing hole, the right time of year, the right time of day. But the lure that you're throwing into the water is something that you know, trout don't like to eat, it's
Greg Marshall 17:41 not going to work, it won't work. And so that's almost kind of how you have to think about now that the targeting is kind of gotten you have to use the number one thing that is that works all the time, which is the bait itself, is what matters. Because if you have the bait that they absolutely love, particularly in the season that they're in, at the time of the year that they're in with the right weather and all that the right depth, we have that bait, you don't have to be so perfect, because it's going to attract them anyway. Yeah, you see what I'm saying? Yeah. And so I'm almost viewing the ad creative. As a way to tell these advertising platforms, this is my bait, you should be able to figure out who I'm trying to go after based on, you know, your historical knowledge of when people use this bait. You know, what type of fish catches Yeah. Now, that's
Blake Beus 18:33 that that was something we haven't talked about before. I'm glad we're talking about this. Now, because this is shifting. I've always said, especially for the last since iOS 14 change, I've constantly told people, the you need to do your final bit of targeting in your ad copy. But I didn't really consider this level of like depth to that even including the landing page. And the fact that Facebook can index all of that language and use it as part of their algorithmic targeting to get in front of the right people. I always just kind of considered the last bit of target, you go broad, but the last bit of targeting is in the human mind, and they need to self select Yep, based on the ad copy. But it's more than that. I guarantee you the algorithm is using that as part of its Who am I going to show this to Oh,
Greg Marshall 19:23 and this is where we came up with this theory. It's actually from talking about Google's in market audiences and custom affinity audiences. Yeah, we're I was explaining to you how I have a fitness club. Yeah, that their ads are absolutely crushing it on, you know, on YouTube, but we're targeting in market people that are interested in multiple results for fitness. And then when I look at the ad placements 99% of the results are coming not from fitness channel. Yeah. Which made me wonder that's interesting, because I would have thought they're watching something about finance, and then they would go to this offer and purchase. But that's not the case at all. It's actually the opposite. Right? And this is where we came up with this conversation. Well, how are they? How is this? Ai? Putting it in front of the right person? Even though Yeah, it's not on a piece of content that has anything to do with fitness. Right? And that's where this conversation started. Because you're like, well, they have to be figuring this out somewhere. Yeah. What do they know? Right? How much do they know where it's still possible to get the results you want? On unrelated channels?
Blake Beus 20:41 Yeah. So we dove in, in deep on this last week, Mike, not on and then this weekend for return the Mycoskie, the mic on our podcast would be like three hours. I don't know, maybe people want to listen to a three hour long podcast of us. But and, and but before we go too much further down the Google YouTube rabbit hole, I wanted to focus really quickly. We've talked about ethnic groups, but it also includes
Greg Marshall 21:09 LGBTQ letters, I can never say,
Blake Beus 21:13 I'm partially dislike, mostly with numbers. And so I do mix those up. But it does include if you have a product or a service that's specific to that, you know, that interest group as well, we're starting to see worse results in in Facebook, specifically with targeting that used to work really, really well. But then, when you hop over into Google, yes, Google seems to have really great targeting options on a bunch of different levels for ethnic groups, minority groups, LGBTQ groups, and interest based things like that. So you've seen a lot of success. Yeah. And we were talking about circling back to what you were saying a lot of the conversions are coming from channels completely not related to the subject or the offer at hand. And how do people get there? Yep. So I don't think people realize it's easy to forget just how big Google is. Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in our podcast last week about just how much more volume Google gets over something like Facebook. You and I, I spend all day in Google looking things up all the time. And YouTube, right? And, and I spend way less time inside of Facebook, researching or looking things up. That happens in Google, but I never do mean either. Never, never, ever, ever. So Google has a much clearer picture, just from its search engine. And from the pages you're landing on, because basically every page on the unit runs Google Analytics. Yep, they have a much better picture about what you're interested in right now. So then, when you hop over into YouTube, which is a Google property, the ad targeting can take that history that maybe you are searching for, for, you know, something specific over in Google and then you hop over into YouTube. Let's just take your fitness example. Right, so so your fitness example, I'm researching fitness gyms locally, in my area, I'm using Google Maps to see what's available. I'm maybe even looking for a gym, that's, that's friendly to one of these, a minority group, I guess, you know, African American people or women or, or an intersection of those groups, or LGBTQ people. There are maybe I'm looking for Jim friendly for one of those. And then I hop over into Google. And I'm also interested in playing guitar or whatever, right? So I'm looking at a guitar video, but now they're taking that search history, the websites I've been viewing into account. And I'm doing something different in YouTube. But but now I'm seeing relevant results in YouTube, even though I'm not on a channel relevant to what the offer is. Yep.
Greg Marshall 23:56 Yeah. And that's what and that's what's interesting is because that's what triggered this whole more in depth thinking about the Acrobat. Copy what you're saying what your landing page says, Because another thing I always forget is, these platforms have pixels. On my website. Yeah. So they're able to read everything. Yeah. Right. So they already know what my website's about and what I'm trying to accomplish, right. And so when you take down the county, your ad copy these pixels, also know your landing pages, say it's almost like you should be guiding it that way. And worrying less about the targeting that you're telling them to go after. Mm hmm. Because they're smarter than us. Yeah. Like the the machine is smarter than me.
Blake Beus 24:46 Yeah. Well, they have a lot of data points. Right. And I think from a high level, we maybe need to nudge the ad campaign in a direction. Yeah, right. Because Google is notorious for this. Yep. There have been times I've I've launched an ad and all of my budget on the completely wrong. Yep, wrong group. So it's almost like we need to nudge them a little bit and give them some high level indicators on what this particular offer is for. So the algorithm doesn't just completely missed the mark, trying to figure it out. Yep. But from there, maybe keep it high level?
Greg Marshall 25:21 Well, just thinking more being okay with a more broad audience, right. So you just give it like an indicator, similar to the sorority example. Right? Where it's like, it's pretty general, right? Fraternities and Sororities that's like,
Blake Beus 25:38 and is it a product that's relevant? nationwide? Yes. Okay. So it's not like relevant to a specific geographic location. So you can go really broaden them,
Greg Marshall 25:45 you can go broad. And if you think about it, it's almost like I'm trying to challenge myself, as well to think we'll be okay with going broad, almost like, look for broad, right? Because you'll get more volume and the sense of like you, there's more people that may be a market for what you're wanting to do, that you might not be thinking about. Yeah,
Blake Beus 26:07 well, even let's take the sorority example, for instance, right? The temptation might be to say, Okay, I only want to target women from you know, 18 to 26, whatever, right. But many parents, help their children get into college, help their children maybe get involved with a sorority, or a fraternity or whatever. So targeting just that age range, might eliminate an entire audience segment that helps get people lined up with the right kinds of things
Greg Marshall 26:42 you just made. You just remind them another point, another client that I have that sells product to, you would think only women would buy it. But then when I looked into the Google Analytics, or excuse me, the Google ads and the conversions, it's, there's about a 30 to 40% purchase behavior from men.
Blake Beus 27:07 So if you excluded men, you would basically drop your revenue by 3030 to 40%, which is a massive drop,
Greg Marshall 27:13 and to be 100%. Like, open, there was no chance that I thought, in any way, shape or form that a man would buy this product.
Blake Beus 27:25 Mm hmm.
Greg Marshall 27:26 literally zero chance.
Blake Beus 27:28 Do you think they're buying it as like a gift for someone or anything? Now when I look at it,
Greg Marshall 27:33 it makes total sense why they would buy, but I was not thinking yeah, so it's a hair product for mixed children. Okay. Well, of course, a man would buy if he has, like, for me, yeah, I have a son. He's mixed. If I saw this product, I go, Oh, my wife would probably love this. And I would buy it. Yeah. So it's like so, but going, so you have to be careful going into campaigns on pre determining who you think will actually purchase your product? Oh, I
Blake Beus 28:03 think that's a good point, too. Because we all have kind of an entire set of biases. We all do. Right? But I have three daughters. Yep. And I'm constantly brushing hair. And I'm braiding hair, I do it. And my wife is his a 20 year veteran hairstylist like she does a better job than I do with the braids. But I know how to I know how to braid. I know how to blow dry my kids hair and everything teach me it's fun. I love it. That's actually good times. But But I don't normally buy products surrounding that. But I totally could. Sure I I sometimes do buy hair bands and things like that. And at first I didn't know. I didn't know there was a difference between types of hair hair bands for you know, doing hairdos and things like that. But now I do.
Greg Marshall 28:56 And so if you saw an ad that let's say you were running into an issue of like, let's say you're you're brushing your your daughter's hair, it's super curly. And you can never figure out how to like get it to go straight over. I've just made I have what
Blake Beus 29:10 I would have known that would be a problem, I would need a solution. So yeah, I would see an ad and that would be relevant to me, even though I'm a guy.
Greg Marshall 29:17 Yeah. So like, that's basically the point here of like, this entire podcast is essentially also taking a look at broadening who could buy it and giving just indicators on who would be interested in this product. But then letting the machines kind of find that in person.
Blake Beus 29:44 Right. Yeah. And then you could probably refine later, right? Yes. And I would want them one of the things I would probably refine would be placements. Yeah, right. Sometimes all the all of the platforms do this, but sometimes they put the ads and a placement Whether it's like a sidebar placement, or whether it's a channel placement, that's just spending money and you're not seeing the elixir results. So you can then just go narrow that down to not include those places.
Greg Marshall 30:12 Right. So and that, and that's where I think it's almost like you should start broad. First, you know, budget, will it and then start chopping things down to like refine it. But I think a lot of times, you'll be surprised. Some of the results, you'll get where you'll think I never would have thought initially, that my buyer could be this. But the data is showing me that they're buying. Yeah. And so I should start maybe thinking about either expanding that segment, or being more open to different audiences that you just feel like would never be interested. But they are.
Blake Beus 30:55 And even taking the time to test out ad creatives using different keywords, and landing page landing page keywords and things like that, and not going nuts with that, because you could go down this rabbit hole that just consume a ton of time. But, you know, once every few weeks say, Okay, we worked these keywords in there, and they seem to be working well. But let's come up with a related set of keywords. Yep. Everything else the same. Just swap out some of the copy, throw in some of these new keywords and see right. And then you said, you said budget willing, right? I think it's easy to think I may not have the budget to go abroad or whatever. But some of these campaigns you're working on. Some of them are 510 15 $20 a day to start. And then if they're working, it's easy to say, Okay, well, you know, these ads are working, then I can definitely put some more money into it because they're making me money back. Yeah. But you don't necessarily have to have a massive budget to go broad either, right.
Greg Marshall 31:56 Yeah. In fact, you almost can make the argument that it could be cheaper, especially for testing, because the more expensive placements are the ones where you try to get to Granya. So when you're like, target a 27 year old female who went to college and makes $100,000 a year, in loans, a house who lives in this city, it's like, you're gonna, you might get like three clicks. Yeah. And span $100. Right. So reach out for
Blake Beus 32:25 Yeah, your your CPMs, which is how all of that platforms charged are going to be really expensive. That might not even be the best buyer. Right? For your mind. You just assume you. Yeah, you might. Yeah. So you're making some assumptions?
Greg Marshall 32:39 Yeah. And that's one of the things that, you know, you always have to challenge yourself as you're doing marketing and trying to get in front of the right customer. Because at the end of the day, it's you want, whoever, to me, the golden rule is, whoever is beating your door down for your product, is your customer? Versus Who do I just want? Or who I believe who do I believe, right? It's my customer. Right? And that's, this is a good reminder, when you do targeting to think not, who do I just want. And, you know, it reminds you of my initial business that I launched way back in the day, which we want to, you know, high level rich athletes who wanted to train five days a week, and we're all in just getting better. And it's like, unfortunately, although that's best for us, because it's more fun, more profitable, you know, XYZ, the market for that is exceptionally small. And so it's tough to build a business off of that. Yeah. But the people who were absolutely beating our doors down, was the woman who had two kids who was overweight, and had no way to actually, like didn't know how to lose the weight and get in shape. Those people were literally beating our doors now. Right. And so eventually, we caved in and said, You know what, these people just are dumping money out of their cars to say, please take us as a customer. Yeah. Why don't we just focus on that? I lean into that. Yeah. And so it's a good lesson to remember. You can do the same with targeting, which is, I want only people like this. Versus there's a whole segment out there that might just beat your door down. Say, Please, help
Blake Beus 34:31 me. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's, we're this is one of our longer episodes. Yeah, let's let's wrap it up. But I think this is one of the more important ones we've talked about, because I think we've identified identified an issue that maybe has flown under the radar with the removing of targeting options and how it's probably impacting minority businesses, businesses that that cater to minority audiences. It's impacting them negatively, more so And then other businesses, but I feel like we've identified you through testing and through some other things, some things to try, which, you know, work on the ad copy, try YouTube. If you're not in YouTube right now, try just try YouTube. It's, it's maybe feels a little intimidating, but give it a shot. Because it's it's not as intimidating as it seems. And there's a lot more room for growth.
Greg Marshall 35:28 If you're especially if like if you're a service based business, you 100% should be at least trying to, but at the Loris expecting YouTube to provide great results, but
Blake Beus 35:43 yeah, and you don't even like just on YouTube really quick before we talk about the next things like, your video does not have to be crazy, flashy, whatever it is, like, I can't tell you how many Liberty Mutual ads I've seen in the market for for insurance. Yeah, but they have these flashy, catchy, clever ads, which you might think you need to do. Yeah, but some of the best performing ads, you've seen, and I've seen very, very simple, literally, someone may be holding a camera with decent lighting, and it's quiet. So the audio is not distracting. And just talking about what the offer is. And, and sometimes that's all you need, you got to realize a company like Liberty Mutual, is trying to get hundreds of 1000s of more customers. But most businesses out there, they just need a few 100 more customers, a few 100 More customers is a big win for many businesses out there. So you don't need flashy ads or whatever. Just make sure you've got okay lighting. And the sound is easy to hear your voice is easy to hear and just be authentic and and speak.
Greg Marshall 36:48 Yep. And that's that's literally it. And I think, you know, if your E commerce, definitely look into utilizing Google, I've moved over a couple of clients that are doing Google soli that are seeing tremendous results.
Blake Beus 37:05 And these are minority. Yes, they're focusing on a minority target. Right? It's right. Yeah, yeah. Well, some you have others that are but some, some of them are and they're and those that's a good place to be.
Greg Marshall 37:15 Yes. It's I think it's ultra underutilized. It's it's a it's an area that can get you great returns. So if you're not doing some Google, you know, the performance Max coming out? Well, it is technically album, it's going to get better and better. We performance Max, I haven't heard about that performance. Max is Google. And what it is, is it takes all the different ad placements. So YouTube, discover display, Gmail, you know, anywhere shopping, anywhere you could be and you create a bunch of different marketing assets. And then Google's AI then pushes it in front of the person that you want, based on the conversion goal row as Gaul
Blake Beus 38:03 interesting. And they puzzle piece those assets together, right? So you have individual headlines, like a list of headlines, you'd have a list of images, a list of description tags, or whatever, video different videos and then it will puzzle piece all of those together. And that's interesting. We should talk about that more on our maybe on our next episode.
Greg Marshall 38:20 Cool thing that I've tested with that so far. That's pretty give you a lot of good information. They actually tell you what combination of picture headline ad copy is getting you the best result. Which if you think about it, you can use that information for your ads and other platforms.
Blake Beus 38:40 Yeah. Oh. All right. Well, that's a little I think that'll be our next talk. Yeah, I
Greg Marshall 38:48 would love it. Like five hours was Yeah, absolutely. So
Blake Beus 38:51 Greg, how can people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall 38:54 go to Greg marshall.com and you can book a free strategy session and what about you, Blake Beus
Blake Beus 38:58 calm and there's the social media moneymakers, SM three group, that's the main way to to get some of my time. And we'll we'll see you guys there.
Greg Marshall 39:09 Talk to you next time. All right. Bye.
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:03 All right. Well, Blake, I guess I got a lot of questions for you. Yeah, let's let's go deep into I think this this episode is gonna go heavy into E commerce. Yeah. And, you know, I'm just gonna open up to you to essentially start the questions.
Blake Beus 0:18 Yeah. So all right. So most people when they think about e commerce is like a business or whatever, almost everybody thinks, well, Amazon's out there. They're, they're doing this thing. And Amazon's his whole ecosystem and everything. But I mean, in my eyes, I feel like we're seeing a shift of companies moving over to their own platforms. Like it's like, it's like, what things were 1012 years ago, companies seem to be moving back towards that, because they're kind of getting sick of having things on Amazon and dealing with everything that's going on there. But I wanted on that, on that high level, what are like, are you seeing the same thing? Is that just me reading into things? Like, what are you thinking?
Greg Marshall 0:58 Yeah, so I am seeing the exact same thing. And to explain why I believe people are doing that is people that own these shops, are learning, you know, they don't want their payments frozen or controlled by another third party. But most importantly, I actually just had a conversation yesterday with one of my clients, saying, even with the Facebook, Instagram, check out they're being treated similar to Amazon, which is they're not able to get their name, email phone number, they just check out through Facebook, Instagram.
Blake Beus 1:31 Okay, so people are making sales, but they're not able to make repeat customers, because they can't continue to market to them correct. After the purchase? Correct.
Greg Marshall 1:39 And I was actually unaware of that part. She she brought this up to me. And I thought, okay, so it's similar to Amazon, what basically, the short answer is, people are kind of smartening up and realizing, well, yeah, it's great. If I can sell on these platforms, the problem is, I don't have any control, and I don't own my customer, therefore, I don't own anything, right. So I don't really have a business because the business is all about you owning your customers. And if the other platform, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, makes you check out and doesn't give you that information, then they still own your customer, therefore, you don't have a real business.
Blake Beus 2:15 So they're basically just consolidating all the customers for themselves and giving you basically giving you some of that revenue for their customer. And essentially what it is that they're basically saying you have you have products and all these things that you're selling, but these are our customers correct. And so we'll we'll let you make purchases and things and we'll give you some money. So it feels like exactly, you have a business, but in all reality, you're just giving us customers, and we're using your products to gain more customers for us.
Greg Marshall 2:42 Exactly, exactly. So that's where I think there's there's a big shift, because people are realizing, you know, 3456 years down the road, especially if you're selling like on Amazon, all these other platforms, is when they sell on there, they really end up feeling stuck, like how do I grow my business? Because I don't have a customer list. Right? So I literally have to rely on these third party platforms, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, to generate my sales,
Blake Beus 3:10 right? And if they change anything that could be have a huge impact on the business even just like Amazon changing the algorithm for their search. Correct, right? Like, or if some big player comes in and says, Oh, hey, I like that this company's this small company over here selling widgets, they're selling a bunch of them, so are going to bulk order from China a whole bunch, drop them on Amazon for half the price. And now, you know, a small to medium businesses struggling to keep afloat because someone's basically undercutting them on Amazon. Exactly. I mean, they're listed right at the same day, it's the same listing, like it's not a different listing on Amazon, this
Greg Marshall 3:45 is I'm seeing this also with Etsy, Etsy store owners, as well. All these platforms initially sound super attractive in the early stages when you don't have anything. And essentially what it does is you get tied into the platform, and over time, you start to realize that you're trading in your sales at a cost. And that cost is you don't own anything, right? And that's you're essentially renting a business. And so if you're if you have any aspirations of either growing or even selling, you don't have anything to sell, right? There's nothing there because people aren't going to want to purchase a business with no customers, or no actual control. Just the sales channel.
Blake Beus 4:31 Right. Right. Right. Right. Okay, so having having said all of that, I think one of the biggest hang ups people might have with launching their own e commerce Store, whether that's on Shopify or something like that, which I mean, from a technical standpoint, point something like Shopify makes it really easy for someone to to launch their own e commerce Store and actually own those customers, even though you're using Shopify. In that ecosystem. You own those customers, the email address, you get everything you get, you can market those. So I think one of the biggest hangups is with with people doing that is they're they're thinking, okay with Amazon, I have all of this built in audience. And so I'm launching my own. I have my own e commerce Store, maybe I've had it for a few years. How do I get an audience? And this is where you come in. This is where people reach out to you. And they're like, Okay, Greg, I need help with this piece of things. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 5:20 So essentially, what you're saying is, how do I build an audience? If I'm running Shopify? Yeah. What would you recommend people? Yeah, no high level. So number one is utilize any kind of channels that you already have as far as followers or people that understand who your businesses, that's number one, right, so use those to start building awareness to drive them back to your website. Number two, and this is the fastest way to do it. And if if people execute this, it will work, the fastest way to do it is just to start reaching out to people who have access to your customer, and negotiate a joint venture deal with them. Mm hmm. So for example, if you're selling personal training, products online, find people who are talking to people about nutrition, or maybe if your target demo is women between 25 to 54, find an audience or a business that has access those customers already work a deal and say, hey, I'll give you a percentage and affiliate percentage, or we'll split the revenue, or I'll pay per customer that signs up. And this I'll track it with a promo code, but go that route. Those are the to me, it's just start there. If you just focus on that, you will start to build an audience. Yeah. And then you'll be able to generate customers.
Blake Beus 6:41 And and a lot of E commerce platforms nowadays make make that pretty easy. Yep. Right. Like, you probably have seen some influencer in whatever space saying, hey, click, go over this website and use this promo code to make a purchase, and you get a 10% discount, that promo code is what then the company can use to say, okay, all of these purchases came from your social media efforts, and therefore will pay you a percentage of that revenue based on whatever agreement we have. So it's not like it can sound intimidating. But it's not that hard to
Greg Marshall 7:14 execute it is, in fact, it's really, it's surprisingly simple. If you just do it, if you just reach out to people, this is where, you know, salesmanship and negotiations. And if you're not good at this and find someone who is to help you do this, yeah. But basically, all they need to do is reach find the people out there that have the audience, and negotiate a deal. I don't want to say guarantee, but a super high likelihood that if you were to make a list of 20 3040 people, and then execute on that list that day, within two to three days, you can have a deal.
Blake Beus 7:52 Yeah, I would say it's pretty fair, because most of the people that have larger audiences, they, they've put time into scooping up people for this exact reason for other companies to reach out to them and say, Hey, we want to do some sort of a partnership where you get a revenue share on all the traffic that you send over the the one thing I would say is I would not pay someone to just post no talking about you, it needs to be some sort of a revenue share or something like that. Not only does does that mean that the influence or whatever could actually make more money, but they're more invested in getting people to actually come over and make a purchase. And you actually can see
Greg Marshall 8:34 the model and to actually clarify something have you brought that up, the one thing you want to do and in order of value is actually if you reach out to a company, an influencer or a business, you actually want them to if they have an email list, that's the most valuable. So that's the first offer you want, Oh, good point going second would be on their social media feed. Third would be on their story reels. That's the value ladder. So typically, when you reach out to an influencer, they'll try to sell you on the story, not the feed, or their email list. So the influencer, the business that you talk to will try to sell you in reverse. What you want to do is negotiate in the order I just told you email feed store story and you pay accordingly. So if there is a price that they want you to pay, the highest price one is should be the email and the lowest price one should be the story. Right and it should be in that order. And if they try to do it the other way. That's that's not good. Yeah. So that you don't want that because the exposure and click through rates are not as high on stories as they are an email. Email marketing list. Email still number one best highest converting sales channel. Hands down, no doubt about I don't even have anything else to say, when it
Blake Beus 10:03 comes. I would hazard a guess if an influencer hasn't if you ask them about that. And they say, well, we don't really have an email list, that influencer probably hasn't put the time and effort into getting the type of people that actually purchase, follow through. So that may not be that may be a sign of a partnership. That's not that great. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 10:21 it could be that. Or you could also try to essentially teach them or groom them on how you would like them to post. They might just not be as business minded. Right? Right. So there, they understand how to build a big audience. And they understand algorithms and things like that. But they don't understand the business side. And this is an opportunity for you. This is why you want to have written down strategies on how you're going to pitch. Because you could say are the campaign I want it to look like this. It needs to be on the feed it nice to have these types of words, the ad picture or creative needs to look like this. In order for us to get the biggest one.
Blake Beus 11:01 Yeah. Okay. Okay, so we've we've done the low hanging fruit now let's talk about ads. Because yeah, before we turn the microphone on you were talking to me about some unique ad strategies for E commerce. Sure. It's no joke. It's no secret that E commerce and ads have gotten together. I mean, I see I see E commerce ads on Facebook all the time. And yeah, Instagram. Google Shopping. Yep. Uh, you've been using YouTube? Yes. E commerce, which I feel like not a lot of E commerce businesses do. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall 11:31 with YouTube, what I'm finding is you can target so there's some audiences that I've been testing with that have been working well. And they're pretty targeted. So the custom intent audiences, which is different than keywords, or in market audiences, custom intent is basically you put in a bunch of keywords of people that would have searched out these terms on Google, like, for example, like, pizza place near me, you would put that in a custom intent audience, instead of a keyword audience, okay? Because what you're you're actually piggybacking off the previous search history on Google, which makes it more relevant. Then if you put it in the key words, that means the meta tags and YouTube video is tagged that way instead of what they've searched. Oh, okay. Okay. So that's the difference. Now, those audiences are like really targeted, I've been looking at the the ad placements worth, because usually, that'll give you an idea of like, how targeted the ads are, okay, is if you look at where the ads are being placed, if you see like in a bunch of kids channels, you know, then you know, it's not very targeted, right? Kids are seeing your ads not right actual people in market.
Blake Beus 12:44 And this is this is a not really a unique thing. But a lot of people that have run ads on Facebook, this is kind of a new concept. Yeah. Inside of the Google ads platform, you can actually see which channels your ad showed up on right. You can see which websites Yes, your ads showed up on if you're using like the Display Network to show things outside of Google, which apps which apps like us, because because Google owns, you know, the Android ecosystem. So if your ad is showing up in apps, and on a quick side note, I had one, one client that was helping with the did e commerce software as a service for E commerce companies and and our app ads were showing up in all these kids games. Yes. And they it was just, it was wasting our budget. And we could so we had to adjust our targeting to make sure that didn't happen. But you couldn't you can't really do that in Facebook. So that's a new concept for people coming from Facebook over into Google. And it's a helpful bit of information. Yes, really helpful.
Greg Marshall 13:44 Well, and the cool thing is it also itemizes where the conversions happen where the clicks happen, so that you can expand on the strategy. One thing you can't do, like on social media platforms is you can't really tell like, where or when the person saw the ad, like what their kind of mindset was, right? Right, because they're scrolling. But if you use Google, it'll show you channels on intent, like they clicked on this ad, while they're watching another ad. That's similar to what topic you're talking about, which means the intent is higher, right? And you can kind of use that to build out strategy, right, which is great. So this is something that is, in my opinion, stronger than just social media ads, because you can you get more insight on what people are doing, and what is working and what's not. And then you can double down on strategies that work.
Blake Beus 14:37 Right. And I feel like Google is probably of all the ad platforms out there. Google is by far the best determining intent. Yeah, mostly because of the Google search engine, right. And so you have the Google search engine and that information and that intent can pull over into YouTube because they're owned by the same company that are they're very hot. integrated. And so that's one of the reasons why it feels like you're saying the in the custom intent. That right? Is why that's working inside of YouTube. Because you can say, Okay, I want people with this intent, and Google take all of that data from their search engine, and then show that ad to the read those people in YouTube. Exactly. And so that's one audience, another audience and I, I always get this backwards. So though, you know,
Greg Marshall 15:27 don't quote me exactly on the name of the audience, but it's where you create the same type of a custom intent audience, which is similar audiences to URLs. Okay, so that's another good one.
Blake Beus 15:40 Interesting. I've never actually heard of that one. Yeah, and I've run a lot of YouTube ads. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 15:44 So basically, what you do is, when you're creating the audience, you plug in a single URL of the type of customer you want to go after. So for example, you're selling dog food, you'd find a dog food website, find that website, especially if it's high trafficking, and then you'd plug that in. And then Google finds visitors that you know, quote, unquote, match. This might be the same visitors but quote unquote, matches those website audiences. And then you target those people. What first thing that basically saying is, people who are shopping on those websites, you'll also get in front of
Blake Beus 16:21 interesting interesting and so the, I would have to say the the, you know, you might be a listener out there that's thinking but wait, wait, wait, didn't the iOS thing make retargeting or whatever, based on website views, less effective and, and yes, but you got to remember they Lupul Google's search engine is the biggest search engine ever. So maybe Google can't track quite so well, once people are on that website. But they know who's searching for that website. And who's going to that website, regardless of what Apple is doing, because you're using the Google search engine?
Greg Marshall 16:53 Plus, Google is so much bigger. Yeah, Dan, all these other social people don't realize that they're way, way, way bigger. Yeah. So even if you took away 20% of the data, Google could have got that 80% is still significantly larger than any social media site has on anyone. Right? You don't I mean, and so that being said, it's tough to and unless Google decides to shut itself down, then it's gonna be pretty tough to eliminate. Right? All that data. So therefore, Google, longterm wise, I feel like has the best chance of you running into those issues of the iOS and apple on third party because they actually own the other. The other main competitor? Yeah, right. Yeah, Android?
Blake Beus 17:41 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we're talking about using YouTube and people are thinking, Okay, we've talked about targeting, what does like an E commerce YouTube ad look like? Right? Because there's different ways. Yeah, put an ad inside of YouTube. And not all of them are video?
Greg Marshall 17:55 Sure, sure. So on if you use if you do use video, the ones that work the best are the ones that are similar to the TIC TOCs, with a really, really quick explanation kind of highly engaging, quit fast, choppy to keep the attention of the buyer.
Blake Beus 18:12 So you've got like a cut happening every second second or half something like Thank you.
Greg Marshall 18:16 That's the word. I was like, Yeah, cut, right. So you've got cuts kind of happening. You're showcasing your products? And then obviously, you're telling them where to go.
Blake Beus 18:24 Okay. Okay. And then we've got the, you were talking before this, you were talking about the discovery ads? Yes. So tell everybody what a discovery ad is. And so using
Greg Marshall 18:36 those, if you use like YouTube discovery ads, what that basically is, is it's it comes up in the suggested on the right hand side, or under video that someone's watching. And essentially, what what's good about that is you can build audiences with those types of videos. And then retarget, the people that watch that video as an ad, so then, you know, they're actually really targeted, because you put the initial targeting end, right. Okay. And so that's a, it's a really, like, effective way to, you know, do an air quotes, like, organically, it's more of an organic click right? So they have to actually click it to watch it versus an in stream AD, the ones that show it right before you're watching it, it's more interruption, right. And so the quality, not the quality, but the intent of that user is not as high as someone who saw your video, and then chose to click Yeah, to watch it. Right, right. So there's a difference. And so that's a good way to build high quality audiences is by using the discovery app.
Blake Beus 19:42 Okay, so a discovery ad. It shows up on the sidebar or under a video and I choose to click on it and that takes me to a video correct. And that's a video ad of mine. So someone chose to click on that sidebar link and now they're and now they're sitting there watching my ad correct. And then you were telling me the watch times
Greg Marshall 20:00 Yes, so wash times are okay, on Facebook and most, you know, social media platforms, the watch times are only like three seconds. Right? And so, because of that, even if you run video campaigns, it's tough because on those platforms, you're you're paying for people just to watch some three seconds, which we both know to watch something three seconds, there's no intent, right? It's literally, you know, I saw it skipped it wherever. Right? On discovery as both well in stream and discovery. On YouTube, just in general, the average watch times are significantly longer. So we're talking 3040 50 seconds, a minute, two minutes, sometimes even more. Yeah, right. Think of how much more of an intent and how much more someone is kind of being, you know, indoctrinated into your brand. By watching that much. Right, right. 30 seconds is a pretty long time for someone that didn't expect to watch you. Yeah, right. Right. And a minute even more. So the watch times are much better. And if if you're using In Stream Ads for conversions, which is when you tend to use those, the industry matters, you don't pay unless they watch 30 seconds of your video. Which is way better, right? Paying for if someone watches 30 seconds, I don't
Blake Beus 21:23 think people realize how powerful how big of a difference that is. That is an absolute giant. If on Facebook, you're paying if someone just sees the video, like not even if it's like three seconds sometimes, right? Exactly. Like if if someone scrolls past your video you got paid for you had to pay for that set of eyeballs looking at it. Yep. In YouTube, you know, you don't pay unless someone watches your in stream ad for 30 seconds or more. Yep. That's a huge dummies
Greg Marshall 21:52 that here's here's the difference. Example one, three seconds. Hey, what's going on? My name is Greg Marshall, Skip, done three seconds. Right. Here's the other one. Example number two. Hey, guys, guys, me Greg Marshall. I'm going to talk to you about Social Media Marketing ads and how they can impact your business. And why you should really be thinking about using Facebook, that and that wasn't even 30 seconds.
Blake Beus 22:15 That was 12 seconds. I kept an eye on that you there's so much more information in there and so much more opportune and grab someone's attention if you
Greg Marshall 22:22 hit skip at 27. I didn't pay for them. Yeah. As the advertiser I don't pay for but you still saw and heard all you still
Blake Beus 22:30 Yep. Yeah, someone still saw and heard and everything. But you weren't. You weren't charged that. So? I mean, look, I feel like moving forward, with all the things that are happening in the ecosystem and everything. I think we're gonna see a ton of advertisers, the good advertisers, shift from, you know, 80 to 90% of their marketing used to be on Facebook. Yep, I think you're gonna see that shift, and maybe see 80 to 90% of their marketing is on Google, Google Google system, and maybe even YouTube, just specifically. And then maybe just to maintain a presence. Maybe 10% of their marketing is on Facebook, or Instagram or something like that.
Greg Marshall 23:08 Well, and I agree. And the other thing with E commerce too, that you should implement Google Shopping, you should definitely implement Google Shopping, because you can get just as good a results that you were getting on Facebook years ago, or better. And those are the ads that show up in Gmail on the side of YouTube, under certain videos, specific websites. Same thing, you can go after custom audiences and market audiences, things like that keywords. You should also implement, the more traffic you get, you should be utilizing brand search. Oh, interesting. Brand search does extremely well. I have one client that we got, um, I want to say 300 conversions in the last maybe seven or eight weeks, just on the branded search, really. So explain what branded searches branded searches, like let's say you run an ad, let's say your your pizza hut, right. And you're running YouTube ads, and you've got blog posts, and you got Facebook posts and all that. Well, what happens is we all we all do this, which is if we see a brand we don't necessarily know. But we're seeing them everywhere. We tend to go to Google and type in who that is. Right? So we would type in pizza. Now, if you don't have the branded search ads will show up at the very top of the Google search, like ecosystem. And your ad will pop up for pizza be triggered and it's a guaranteed way to be number one. Now this is why it's important. Number one, you want to capture those. Some people say why would you do that they want to convert anyway. No, that's not true. Because if if you got other campaigns running, and you're really building brand awareness, people that don't really know you but want to know more about you're going to type your name. Yeah, right. If you do that, if you're not like basically buying that key term, your brand name, then you're going to lose out on that traffic because maybe your website is not ranked number one on Google or could be another website, right? And the other thing is, competitors can bid against that name, and knock you off your own brand name. Right, right. And so what you want to do is you want to go to Google search ads, and basically pay for anytime someone specifically looks up your brand name brand, so that if you have all these ads running, you're able to capture everyone that is looking up your brand name, because you should own that because it's your brand name.
Blake Beus 25:42 Right? Yeah. So to deviate from where you were going with all of that? I know a lot of people out, you know, you might be thinking, Well, I've heard search ads are really expensive now. And that can be true, sometimes based on industry, lots of things. But branded ads are generally relatively cheap. They're
Greg Marshall 26:02 so they're insanely cheap, just customer, his average order value, as is about $80. His cost per conversion on his brand search terms is around five.
Blake Beus 26:12 So yeah, see, that's, that's insanely cheap. Because I'm sure you know, people think well, sometimes I have to pay 1012 $13 per click on search ads, but branded ads, it's, you're charged based on relevance. And if this is your brand name, it's hyper relevant. And anybody else out there any competitor that's bidding on your brand name has to pay sometimes five times the cost to get above you. Yep. And so you can hop in there and do a branded search with a low dollar amount, and still be number one, whereas all of your competitors would have to bid, you know, like I said, five times 10 times more. But if you're not in there doing that with search, then your competitors can get up on top relatively cheap, because there's no competition because you aren't doing that. And that's why it's so important
Greg Marshall 26:59 to do that. So essentially, what you want to do is you want to make sure you have branded search campaigns to capture all the traffic that is even coming from other traffic sources. Another thing I like to use, I don't know how many people use this, but I know I like it as a marketer to think I prefer changing the attribution to first click, versus last click okay. And the reason for that meeting, the credit goes to the ad that they first saw, okay, the reason why I think first click means more than last click is because that would give me a better indicator of first time exposure. Right? Because if if they saw if this is the ad they saw first, and then they bought, to me that's more valuable than an ad that they saw last. Because last click feels like it's eliminating credit from every other marketing activity, which is not true. There's no such thing as like, there's one ad only that convinced someone completely, especially if you have multiple channels, right? So instead, I like to do first clinics a lot of sense to make sure if they saw this ad first and then they convert it. To me that's what that weighs more than an ad that like you know, let's say do retargeting ad and, and you do last click, all that's going to do is just take the traffic that probably would have converted anyways, and give the credit to that right versus first click. It's like, this is the first ad they saw before they did all the other activities are bought. That makes a lot of sense. That's that's what I really never
Blake Beus 28:40 I actually never did that. And the default is last click last right? So you've got to make sure you go in there.
Greg Marshall 28:44 And yeah, you have to change that you have to change it. But that's as a marketer, and even as a salesperson, that's I look at it because I'm like, if I see an ad for the first time, and I know Oh, wow, that's, that's incredible. I gotta click that. But then I don't purchase for a few days. But I I've seen all this other stuff that first as should get the credit. Because if if it if I did not click that, then I most likely
Blake Beus 29:09 wouldn't have triggered all of the other I would have triggered everything right. So therefore
Greg Marshall 29:13 the first click matters more than the last click in my opinion. Yeah, there's probably other people that would argue that Well, they'd be wrong. And I'm not saying they're, they're wrong. Yeah. But I'm just saying in my mind, the way I think about it is the most important interaction when it comes to Martin, because that's what everyone wants to know. Is that first one, what got them in? Okay, what got him into the ecosystem? So,
Blake Beus 29:38 yeah. So if I were to take a big step back, while we're wrapping this up and look at a high low level view of what you're talking about here, it seems to me that Google and the whole Google advertising ecosystem for E commerce, once you hop in, there's a lot more breathing room to grow. There's a lot more ways you can take your ecommerce strategy to the next level. So say you maybe only have the bandwidth right now to do some simple YouTube ads, whatever, but that but once you get that going and get those processes in place, you can open that up to branded search, which is super easy, right? Like you can tack that on. And you can open that up into Google Shopping, you got open that up into Google search, and even the display ads and everything like that. So there's like, a lot more breathing room because I I would guess that a lot of E commerce businesses right now that are still trying to advertise heavily inside of Facebook, are feeling suffocated. They're feeling the pressure, they're feeling a lot of pressure I ceiling, they're feeling a little called claustrophobic want on what they can do. Whereas hopping over to Google, you've got a lot of areas to expand.
Greg Marshall 30:49 Well, let me to simplify what you're even saying. Remember, on social media, everyone is competing for the same exact placement, the feed? Yeah, or the story, right? On Google, that's not the case. If you're doing branded search terms, you're only competing with a certain amount of people, right? For your brand name. If you're using YouTube, you're only competing with certain amount of people for that particular website, or that particular keyword search. Right? Not the whole world. Right? That's the part you have to remember is in social media, you're competing with real estate agent for the same space, as someone's on dog food.
Blake Beus 31:27 Yeah, because I only have one newsfeed, right likes to Facebook, I only have one news feed, and I see a couple of cat videos from my friends. Yep. And then the first ad there is, whoever is trying to target. Yep. Whereas inside of Google, I don't necessarily have a YouTube feed correct, per se, correct. I go to YouTube to look at some things and based on what I'm doing there is then what I'm going to see. So
Greg Marshall 31:54 unless people are bidding against the exact same intent as you right, then you're really competing only against a much smaller audience versus on a newsfeed, you're competing against every advertiser in the world. Because if you think about like Blake, Blake doesn't just have one interest. Right? Right. He has multiple hitches, therefore, anyone that's trying to target Blake, listen to Blake likes, music, he likes fishing, he likes, you know, marketing, he likes creative editing, right? All these advertisers that are trying to sell to that particular pocket, are still trying to reach Blake. Yeah. You see what I mean? So it's like, so you're competing with a lot more people than you actually think on a newsfeed because there's only one placement versus on Google, you have multiple placements that you can go after Blake. And it doesn't have to just you're not competing with everyone in the world going after that exact
Blake Beus 32:52 intent. Right. And in general intent. And this is where Google is great is the intent is oftentimes relatively singular. Yeah, if I hop into Google, I have one purpose. I'm not hopping into Google and typing in the search bar. I need to find some new dog shampoo. And I need a real estate agent. Yep. And I need to find someone to clean my carpets. And my car's been making some weird noises. So I need to find a mechanic. I'm not doing that I'm searching for one of those things at a time. And then that intent can pop up whatever those ads are. So I'm not competing against all of those other things.
Greg Marshall 33:25 Exactly. And so that's, that's really what why I think, big opportunity comes kind of like in that Google ecosystem that a lot of people don't use. I know in the E commerce space because of intimidation. The ads feel harder, like scarier because they there's so many within the app platforms, there's so many things to like, click on gotchas to like, you know, yes. Oh,
Blake Beus 33:51 we've we've experienced, we've bumped into some gotchas. And maybe maybe we can have a podcast because this is getting kind of long, where we talk about some of those gotchas on Google. They're not hard, but you just need to be aware of them. Because there are ways that you can accidentally waste waste your budget
Greg Marshall 34:05 and fortunately, I've done that
Blake Beus 34:09 too. So anyway, let's let's wrap this up, Greg. How can people reach out Yeah, so
Greg Marshall 34:15 you go to Greg marshall.co and book a call you can do a free strategy session and what about you,
Blake Beus 34:20 you just go to Blake Beus calm and the big thing I'm kind of pushing right now is my SM three group it's targeted towards people between you know if you have 100 or 100,000 followers on how to essentially use us marketing strategies how to post consistently how to make that work for you, instead of making your social media strategies take over here. Oh, I
Greg Marshall 34:40 exactly. So alright, well outside of that. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the episode. I will talk to you guys next time. Bye.
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:02 Okay, we're good. All right.
Blake Beus 0:06 So it's funny you You and I both had an idea to talk about something today. We hadn't talked with discuss before. And it was the exact same topic
Greg Marshall 0:16 as the same top 100%, the same topic. And I was curious, because I was going to actually ask you if you heard about this, right, yeah. So why don't you reveal what this topic was?
Blake Beus 0:28 Google announced, what they call privacy sandboxes. And and
Greg Marshall 0:34 what's the translation for that translation log interactive?
Blake Beus 0:40 Well, they're kind of light on detail. But let me let me just talk about sandboxes really quick, because this is not a new concept. This is a concept that's used quite a bit from, like a security standpoint. So quick, super simple example is there's there are people out there security experts that research computer viruses, but they don't want to infect the computer with the viruses, but they need to run that virus on a computer to see what it's doing and see how to write their software to remove it or detect it or whatever like that. And so they put it in what's called a sandbox, which is basically a walled off area of the computer, that when something is inside, that it can't escape and get out. So that's like what a sandbox is. So Google, Google's privacy sandboxes would be would be something along those lines where things would run in isolation. And it sounds like I mean, they're kind of light on details, but it sounds like, they're going to either give people the option or enable the option by default to make sure that your apps are running in isolation. And so what you're doing in the app is stays within the app. And then the tracking doesn't bleed over out outside of the app or data aggregation or gathering data doesn't, doesn't, you know, can't get into the the app from outside the sandbox or whatever. So yeah, that's, that's the topic well, and
Greg Marshall 2:03 essentially, what that means, you know, the what caught my attention, because, you know, always good headlines always fear tactics work. And I saw the picture of the head of Mark Zuckerberg face. And I said, you know, something along the lines of like, you know, Facebook's in serious trouble, because now Android is doing what Apple did, which is taking away. What is the third party tracking? Is that what it's technically called? What is it called?
Blake Beus 2:31 Yeah, it would it would be called third party tracking, basically, Facebook's ability to track information outside of the Facebook app. Yep. And and apply that information to advertising strategies inside the Facebook app.
Greg Marshall 2:44 And what do you think? So what are your thoughts? I have a couple of thoughts, but I'd like to hear yours. What are your thoughts on how this will impact digital advertising? Particularly? Facebook? I feel like it impacts everyone. Yeah, like every platform no matter what. Yeah. It seems like Facebook, for whatever reason, is like the target.
Blake Beus 3:03 Yes. Well, I mean, a report came out last week or the week before that talked about how iOS his privacy changes, impacted Facebook's bottom line by about 20 billion in the last 18 months. Wow. So clearly, I mean, that's a number big enough that everybody, every executive, Facebook is worried about it. Yes. So this could also have another massive impact. Because what is something like 95% of people that use Facebook, or the time spent on Facebook happens inside of a mobile app? Yeah. And the two platforms are iOS and Android. Yeah. Right. And so this clearly is going to be causing them concerns. What it means from a practical standpoint from advertisers and things like that is that most likely Facebook is only going to be able to use reliably use data gathered within the platform for for targeting data interest based targeting data and things along those lines. So historically, if I browse something on my computer, Facebook could track that back and then deliver me ads on my mobile device. So things like that are going to be less reliable. Yep. I think moving forward. But we'll start see some some additional things happen. So one thing that a lot of people don't really notice. You see him inside of Facebook, and I click on a link inside the Facebook app on my Android phone. It opens it up in a browser. And you probably notice that's not your web browser. Yeah, that's a Facebook web browser. So you're still inside the Facebook app. And so they're still gathering that data, being able to attribute things but if I close Facebook on my phone and open up Google Chrome or Firefox on my on my phone or Safari, if you're on iOS Do some browsing there. Facebook's not going to have any any knowledge about what he did what I'm doing, what if I'm looking at, you know, dog beds? Yeah. On him.
Greg Marshall 5:11 Now, let me ask you this. How much of an impact does that really make? So meaning is it mostly due to what I've been hearing a lot of just like within like forums or Facebook groups or whatever, Twitter, Twitter's a place that I actually see a lot of information from advertisers, because I follow them. And what I'm hearing is they're they're basically saying that you can no longer really rely purely on the algorithm. And so you actually have to like be a marketer. Right? And, in my mind, that's kind of good luck. Do you believe that's true? Is it most because like, I always felt like I saw courses all the time about hacks. Yeah. Right. And I don't see those anymore. Yeah, my guess is those are going to be completely gone. Yeah. So what are your thoughts about that?
Blake Beus 6:04 Yeah, absolutely. I was gonna mention hacks. And like back in the day, you probably you probably remember this more than 90, but four or five years ago, a winning Facebook ads strategy was to have have have your ad with a couple of catchy phrases a catchy image, and then you just duplicate that ad set, like a bajillion times targeting different very tiny, tiny audiences? Because because that would that would essentially trick the algorithm into delivering your ads, more that those types of things are just not going to work? They probably I mean, they don't really work now. Yeah. And they're probably going to work less. So what people are going to have to start focusing on is product market fit. Yep. And the language and things will stuff read the language needed to to get people inside that target demographic, to take action to take that next step to click on the link. And, and it's going to go back to traditional marketing strategies. I personally think we're gonna see a lot of these small Facebook ads, ad agencies kind of go away. Yeah, right. And when I say small agencies, I'm talking like a single person agency that watched $1,000 course and his business has been target has been running Facebook ads for people, I just don't think many of those people have enough passion or drive to really dive into the core principles of marketing. And and to put in all of that extra effort. They were relying on the tricks, right, you set up your campaign like this, use this objective. You you you do this, and this and this, and it all happens inside the Facebook ad platform, and you win. Yep. I don't think that's going to work and video
Greg Marshall 7:46 game has passed. Yes. Yeah. Well, and what am I here? My thoughts? So if there's less tracking? I mean, theoretically, it shouldn't necessarily matter, as long as you have good messaging and good ad creatives. And a good product. Good. You know, just like the fundamentals. Right? Yeah. What do you what do you think about? How well do you think do you think it shifts? As far as how Facebook and these other ad platforms show an ad? I've been hearing a lot about what your ad copy and ad creative becomes your targeting? Is Yes, what I've been hearing a lot of explain to me, my understanding of that is essentially like, if I write an ad, let's say I'm targeting people who own dogs, yeah, it would still be somewhat broad targeting. But then you're saying, Hey, if you own a dog, I got this dog food is the greatest thing ever. Blah, blah, blah. And that somehow, the algorithm or Facebook or Google, whatever, figures out who to put that in front of is that? Is there any accuracy to that?
Blake Beus 8:55 I would, I would hazard a guess. And it's honestly, it's all kind of guesswork at this point. But in my mind, I would say yes, in and that's not a new concept either, right? Like, interest based targeting has not always had as the number of interests that are available in there, right? That's always kind of fluctuated, so. So you probably remember, and I know I've done this before, especially, this is especially useful for small geographic areas. You can only target so small geographically, but if you want, like if I'm running some ads for dentist's office, yeah. Or something like that, you would target as close as you could. And then and then you would say something like, you know, hey, Hill City resident Yep, target to call them out, because then you're the last bit of targeting is happening in your ad copy. You're basically telling people to self select, oh, they're speaking to me. Right. And that's, that's a totally entirely not creative way to do the targeting the ads, but, you know, with dog owners, you could really speak speak to the dog owners. Talk about the very First line could be something catchy that resonates wholeheartedly with someone who has owned a dog. I'm not a dog. Yeah, so I don't know what that would be I own cats. Yeah. So probably the very first thing for me would be like, you know how that cat keeps scratching your favorite piece of furniture? Yep. Right? I'd be like, yes, yes, I do know, that frustrates me that that gives me an emotional response. And it makes me want to read further.
Greg Marshall 10:24 Well, here's a question for you then. So as far as the delivery, and maybe I'm looking at this different, or incorrectly? So as far as delivery of the ad, though, how would you would you still rely heavier on interest targeting to guide it? Or would you just say broad, and then somehow the platform would have to figure out how to put that in front of someone? Because hypothetically, if I launch an ad, and you launch an ad, and there's no targeting, how does the platform decipher what pocket of people to show that?
Blake Beus 10:58 Yeah. So in my eyes, this is where you, you got to just test, I think this is going to be different based on on the the product, the industry, the market, whatever, because some some industries or interest interests are going to be easier for and, you know, a Facebook ad platform to identify than others, right? Like, if it's something along the lines of does this person like dogs? Yeah, Facebook could determine that based on how many dog Facebook groups they're in. Yeah. Right. That's the pictures they post. Yep. They're scanning the pictures to see if those are pictures of dogs. And yep, like, they have access to all of that information. But if if it's something along the lines of, you know, is this person interested in? I can't think of something right now. But something there's not like a clear face like roof or like, like fixing my roof. Yeah, if I'm, if I want, yeah, that's a good example, something that I need right now. Like, I there was a hailstorm and I need my roof fixed. Face. I'm not following roofing groups on I have a followed roofing group for years and years. And Facebook, this is something that I kind of need right now. And so Facebook is probably not going to know anything about that. Right? And so it's going to be one of those things you'll have to target. But when you say if I target something broad, how does Facebook know who put in who to who to put it in front of this is where historical ad account data kind of comes into play in my eyes? Yeah. So what they do at first is say I have $100 daily budget, and my target audience is 50 million people. That's super broad, right? Obviously, they can't show it to all 50 million people to get a good sampling of data. Yep, on my $100 a day budget. So they're going to pick a pocket of people to show it to. And then And then based on how those that pocket of people react, whether they're clicking through whatever, and who clicks through and what attributes they have, they can then expand that to larger pockets of people. That that pocket of people is probably picked based on historically who has clicked on things in your ad account. And they're going to try to show it to the best people first, to get kind of a good idea on that. But again, Facebook doesn't publish this stuff. But yeah, if I were to write algorithms, and if I were to write a platform to try to figure this stuff out, it's not just me, other people that are in data science and everything. This is how it would probably most likely work. Yep.
Greg Marshall 13:29 So here's my thought to that, then, if you had something like roofing, right, that you would have to then you made, my thought is you may have to rely more on research, and then plug in the kind of the demos that would match that. So one thing that I know from selling, you know, even like some T shirts and specific areas, yeah, remember that company that would sell shirts that were based off of where you're from. So that that's a good example to like, in the past. If you were to try to just target like, let's say, Baltimore, or Atlanta, or New Jersey, whatever. It seemed like that audience was always like, too small for Facebook to like, really scale to anything, right. Only spent so much money. Yeah. But I wonder now, if you were to do targeting based off cities like that, if it would start to work, because at least it gives you a better direction. You know what I mean? Like, there's not as much interest targeting, for example, like, if you're doing roofing, you would go like, well, what places have the most storms? Yeah, right. And you and you would plug in all these cities? Yeah. And then target the cities. And then you would say, well, homeowners usually are like 30 Plus, right, right. And you'd have to use more like logic like that. Is that what you think would happen or is that oh, yeah, the wrong direction?
Blake Beus 14:57 Definitely. I think I think the market is Make it are going to be the marketers that are good at high quality research of identifying those things and figuring those things out. And then taking the extra step of doing that extra targeting inside the ad copy, which you and I both know, those are two totally different skill sets. And not a ton of marketers have both
Greg Marshall 15:17 both either really strong and one. Right. The other but both,
Blake Beus 15:21 not both. And it's hard to be an expert at both. Because there there is, I don't know, using different parts of your brain I
Greg Marshall 15:28 like it's just, it's just different. It's different patterns. Like it's like doing math and painting. Yes, that's the way you think about that is not the same. No, not to come up with some No, not the
Blake Beus 15:41 same. And so if you're doing it as like, you know, a career or whatever, you're spending some dedicated time focusing on the one piece, while at the same time, you're getting worse at the other piece, because you're ignoring exactly you're ignoring working that muscle. So I mean, now that we're talking about I think a good combo for an agency would be to kind of basically pair up the analytical research person with a an emotion based copywriter. That's flexible. Yep, that would be in my eyes, a pretty killer combination.
Greg Marshall 16:12 That's essentially what you need. Right? And, you know, I feel like with the question, I have them moving forward, as, as I guess, targeting becomes weaker? Right? A lot of the optimizations were done, because there's so much data being fed back into it. Mm hmm. How do you think that's going to impact like? Or would you even need to be using conversion objectives? If you're doing because the point of conversion objectives was to like, get the algorithm use all this data it was getting Yeah, or to get a result? And then it needs a certain amount events in order to optimize? Yeah, well, if it's not getting all that data, you may never reach that unless you spend like $10,000 a day.
Blake Beus 16:53 Yeah, I think I think we're going to need longer runways, when you first launch an ad for conversion objectives to get the right kind of data or you're using conversion objectives for that are super simple conversions. So for example, a conversion objective on a $500 purchase May in the past may have been fine. But now, that's that's too far down the road, people have to think about it, because what would happen in the past is people click on the ad, that maybe 500 bucks is not something a lot of people just buy on a whim. So they maybe come back and think about it, maybe bookmark the page and come back in a couple of days and then buy, well that that conversion, a couple of days later probably won't get communicated back and count towards your ads. Whereas historically used to if so, I would say we would like to use conversion objectives that can happen in a single session. Yeah. So So you're still within Facebook's browser window, you click on the ad, you're in the browser window, I make a gut decision right now in the first 30 seconds, I'm going to go for it. Yep. And I make that purchase, then that conversion objectives will probably get communicated back just fine. Because you're still within the ecosystem, you're still inside that same sandbox. Yep. And so the data in there can be shared. And that's, that's what I would think the the other thing to think about is you can use conversion objectives for like, percentage of video views and things like that, and then retarget, and follow those people up with just a general, you know, general targeting that just blast it out to everybody in that group. Because, again, that information is still all within the sandbox, if someone's watching a video on inside the Facebook app, and they're watching two minutes of this four minute video, and you're targeting people that watch two minutes or more. Facebook already knows that like that, that data is really available to the algorithm and you can retarget based on that very easily.
Greg Marshall 18:47 Well, here's two things that I'm seeing currently running ads. Number one, there's been two ad accounts, where I almost shut the campaigns off, and then they picked up. But both of them had the same exact characteristics. It took 14 days before actually started to opt interesting. And then it picked up interest and then it's become consistent. What kind of a daily budget. Were you looking at? 100. So one is 150. And the other ones 200?
Blake Beus 19:17 Were they at least like break? They were making some Yeah, it was breaking even so it wasn't like you're losing $150 a day for
Greg Marshall 19:24 now. So it wasn't like $0 Yeah, it's just you were you were probably like at a point eight row ads.
Blake Beus 19:31 So you lose a little bit of money. You're, you're losing about 20 bucks a day.
Greg Marshall 19:35 Yeah. And so you're like, well, if it's not hitting you the temptations to relaunch. Yeah, but then after the 14 day period, now it's been consistent. Actually one of the other accounts the one account name talking about has actually jumped to 3.6 and the recharge 3.6x rose on cold traffic. Dan five on retargeting, what, but it's taking literally weeks weeks like enemy he was not interested in at all
Blake Beus 20:04 interesting.
Greg Marshall 20:05 And so what as I saw that I'm thinking, I'm wondering if and same thing, same budget $100 a day. Yeah. I don't see any of that with anything less than that. Yeah. So if you spent 2050 bucks there's there's literally no stability whatsoever. Yeah, it's almost like now before a lot of people that would get in like smaller companies, they could spend $20 or 10 or whatever. And in my experience, try testing those budgets is has an hour
Blake Beus 20:31 interest. You have to be spending a budget or you putting into retargeting.
Greg Marshall 20:36 The retarget on this one, I
Blake Beus 20:38 believe is only 10. Okay, so targeting was pretty small. Yes. Okay.
Greg Marshall 20:43 So yeah, sorry, I left that part. So the retargeting budgets. I always think of cold traffic. But yeah, the retargeting budgets, our website visitors, they haven't bought last 30 days using $10 A day budget,
Blake Beus 20:54 interesting website visits. So I would say in my eyes I'm guessing retargeting website visitors is probably going to get worse and worse. Yeah, over time. Yep. And retargeting based on in app events is going to get is
Greg Marshall 21:10 going to be the agent like Facebook or Instagram and gays in our video views. And so
Blake Beus 21:15 one of the things I wish they would do, you can do this with a video you can do with a post is I wish you could retarget people from a specific post yes, that have interacted with a specific post? Because then you could you could build up some some things with image ads, you could do that with a video people have watched a portion of the video ad or whatever, but not a specific post
Greg Marshall 21:36 or even like people who hovered over specific posts. Yeah, a certain amount of time. Yeah. Is that were expanded the comments. Yeah. Because that takes at least give you like, an insight on how qualified they are. But the other challenge you always run into is like the size of the audiences, right? Like, if you have something where let's say you're in an ultra niche market, it's a lot harder to build a retargeting audience than it is for like fitness or yeah, how to make money or more generalized topics. And so that might be where Facebook becomes more challenging is for highly niche audiences. That just, there's just not enough people. Yeah, to actually like, reach. That's where well and hit before I even move on to the next thing. Here's the other thing that I've been running a lot of tick tock ads. Oh, yeah. Early testing of the same. Like. So here's, here's something. So we spent let's see what campaigns $100 a day and others at the next Rama test is $200 a day to see a budget determines anything. Here's something that's super interesting about tick tock. You know, on Facebook, when you run, like, optimize for add to cart or view content, it tends to not do that well. So far on tick tock, if I optimize for purchase, it does horrible. Uh huh. But then if I optimize for Add to Cart, it does great, really. And it's very odd, because you're like, that's an easier conversion to get to add to cart. But I get more purchases optimizing for Add to Cart than I do for payment. And here's the thing, I changed no variables, same audience, I didn't have any competing. So I turned off the add to cart one. So like there's no overlap. I had multiple the same exact ads, everything the same, the targeting was the same, same budget, but no purchases on the one optimizing for purchase after three day period. And then the other one is $100 a day. And then the other one had I want to say was six purchases within the same timeframe. Same budget, same audience, but I was optimized for Add to Cart
Blake Beus 23:46 interesting. In my eyes, that probably is an indicator that their algorithm is still young, it needs to be refined some more, because it's easy. Like that's an easier thing to capture algorithmically. I guess you help them it
Greg Marshall 24:06 says add to cart. So I was I was curious. The other thing that was very interesting was, I like to look back at the data as far as accuracy. So so far, I'm still in like the early stages of optimizing for purchase, right? So I've only had around 30 purchases or so in the last few weeks. What I'm seeing though, is the accuracy of the ad, ads manager and the conversions are 100%. Really, so every single purchase that came in through Tik Tok shows on the ads manager 100% accuracy. So it was there was none off because I went to went and I'm using a Shopify store. I went into Shopify, look through all the traffic, the traffic actually says tick tock, this person converted from there, and the exact number of tick tock buyers showed up on the ads manager, which I thought was. That's interesting, really unique because i How are they getting?
Blake Beus 25:08 The same with Facebook and Google? It's always all over the place. And I might just be because coincidence. I mean, maybe I guess it's gonna say might just be because traffic from Tik Tok is very specific, right? Google's this massive ecosystem with all of these different platforms and everything. So it's, it's probably, there, there's so many different ways people can get to a particular landing page inside the Google ecosystem, sort of that that it's it's probably hard to identify even for Google or Shopify or whatever, where you know how to attribute that. Whereas with tick tock, it's like one path. Yep. So so that was my that would be my guess. But I really don't know.
Greg Marshall 25:53 Because I was, I mean, well, to me, it sounds like a great guest. Because I was looking at it because I don't understand the the data science part behind how algorithms all work. And I was just looking at it like, wow, this is incredible. It is 100% accurate, like, how is and it tells you exactly how many events it separates it out to how many events have happened that the pixel has captured. And how many events came specifically from ads, which is different from the Facebook events manager? Yeah. Which clumps them all together? Yeah. And you have to use the ads manager to see yeah, here. It actually has a lineup, it almost feels like Tik Tok is looking at all the weaknesses of Facebook and what Facebook advertisers complain about. And are giving you those.
Blake Beus 26:36 Yeah, I would guess, and this is all just a guest. But I would guess over time, that's going to get worse. So one of the things tick tock does, and this actually drives me nuts get like absolutely nuts. Excuse me, if if you click on a link in tic toc and go somewhere else, you're open, you get opened up in tic TOCs. Browser. Yeah, there is no way to get out of that browser. You you can't like all the other browsers, you have to you can click on a button, say, you know, open in my my Firefox browser or chrome browser or whatever. Or and I'm talking inside the app on web yet, but very few people use tick tock on the web, like so few. I can't even copy a link inside of the TIC tock browser by long pressing on it, copying it and opening it elsewhere, which, which I do that's part of my regular flow, because I like to keep certain tabs open to come back to them later. But within tick tock, tick tock, if you open up a link, you can't do anything other than go straight to that link. You are stuck inside their app. So maybe that's how they try and they're forcing that but I'm guessing over time due to pressure of people saying This sucks. Yep, that's going to go away. And you're probably going to start seeing less
Greg Marshall 27:53 got it as the time to get accurate database. Yeah,
Blake Beus 27:57 I guess. It tick tock tic TOCs an interesting one. Yeah, sure. So anyway, well, I don't have anything else to talk about on the subject. I think we've covered really well. Did you have anything else?
Greg Marshall 28:08 No, I think that's okay, that covers it. That's where we're at. All right. Well, Greg,
Blake Beus 28:13 how can people how can people chat with you? Well,
Greg Marshall 28:15 if you want to chat, go ahead and go to Greg Marshall co book a call. You can talk strategy. And what about you
Blake Beus 28:20 just Blake Beus calm? I kind of have everything on there.
Greg Marshall 28:24 All right. Well, thanks, guys for listening, and we'll we'll talk to you next time. All right.
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:03 And ladies and gentlemen, we got our audio is actually working on this one this last time. We forgot to double check it. And and I thought it was a good one.
Blake Beus 0:13 Yeah. It's good. It's it's good to be back. I think this is the first one we're actually recording in the new year. I mean, we've recorded some Yeah, before the new year and they launched after the new year, but now we're actually recording in the new year. So all of the holiday season is over now. 2022 Yeah, especially for us. And advertising is going to, I think advertising is going to take a big bunch of changes are going to, and you were just telling me right before Yeah, yeah. This this big, big admission?
Greg Marshall 0:46 Yeah. Facebook, I couldn't believe it. That's why That's why I think I had to like do a double take, because I thought I was like, Is this real? So there was like a big notification on one of the ad accounts when I when I went on there. And essentially, it was Facebook saying we understand that tracking is not is accurate. And you know, and I'm paraphrasing here, basically, that you're you're seeing worse results tracking wise than you ever have. That's essentially what it was saying in a very nice, nice way.
Blake Beus 1:17 Or they ran through a whole team of PR people or something but not opened ourselves up to any sort of legal acts. Yeah, having a terrible product.
Greg Marshall 1:27 And that's, you know, and that's basically what it felt like, right is I was reading it, and I was saying, but we're working very hard to fix this. And so, with that being said, I think a lot of customers and people that are using ads are are coming to the realization, which was something that I felt like, I will communicate with clients a lot, which is, and we've done this for years, right? Where even when we thought Facebook was super accurate, it still wasn't no 100% accurate. And so it's just now less accurate. Which, you know, is, you know, what are your thoughts on that? Like, for me, I know what I see. And like, it doesn't really bother me that much. Because there's there's a way around, then yeah, it actually makes it a little bit more, where you have to, I guess be a little more skilled at what you're doing. But what are your thoughts?
Blake Beus 2:21 Yeah, I'm gonna have a couple thoughts here for first and foremost, I feel like it's a little bit like Reagan in the Cold War when he said trust, but verify. Yeah. Except for I don't even know if I would entirely trust reported data into ad platforms. In fact, none of the ad platforms, right, just just the nature of how data works. It's never 100% accurate. So you always need to kind of verify it with with some hard data, right? So if, say hard data, yeah, if Facebook is saying you got 10 purchases, you look into your actual purchase system and see did you get 10 purchases that day, right. And so it's hard to pair up those purchases with a Facebook ad from your, from your purchase system, unless you're maybe dumping some traffic tracking codes into your purchase purchasing system, then you can but but you just want to kind of double double check. The second thing, the second thought that comes to my mind is, is I think we're gonna start seeing a lot more companies turn more and more to good media buyers and advertiser advertisers, because Facebook used to be a very easy platform for an entrepreneur to hop in there and kind of do their own thing. But so many things are changing with how tracking works, and how everything works, that media buyers are going to have to step up their game and the media buyers that are fastest at learning, the new things and fastest testing things are going to be the media buyers that are going to succeed in 2022. And beyond. And more companies are going to hold their media buyers to higher standards of communication and talking through what's going on and explaining those things. And more companies are going to look for media buyers to help them with this because it's becoming more and more time consuming for them to manage it themselves.
Greg Marshall 4:08 Well, I what I'm seeing just from an inquiry standpoint, I'm definitely having more people reach out needing help with their, their Facebook ads. Yep. And what that tells me is it is becoming harder and harder meaning the the novice, were in the past, you could literally just go in member like even you can even set up your picks without having to do website domain verifications and doing all and setting up your aggregate event. He didn't do any of that, right? You get a piece of code or a number. And you put it on your website and you started running ads. And essentially, the pixel algorithm did all the work right? Right now it's actually you have to do most of it. And so because now there's More people reaching out needing help. That right there tells me that it's just getting harder to track, it's getting harder to track and you can't get away with like, the easy stuff that you could have back in the day. Now, it's actually, you have to think this through and come up with a real strategy, right. And one of the one of the things that I've been thinking about recently that may change, and since you understand the back end data more, you can verify this, but in my opinion, I don't see any of this tracking that we've had in the past ever coming back. I don't think there will ever be a time where you can track every piece of behavior. And when I say track meaning off platforms, right, right. So like, with if you're on Facebook, or on Google or on YouTube, I believe that's not going anywhere, because they like own that. And they can track all that but meaning the behaviors that you made when you went off of the platform. So
Blake Beus 6:00 and what we talked about what Greg means by that is, when you click on a link to take you off of Facebook, now you're on say, my website, Blake Beus calm. Yeah. I used to be able to track and send a lot of data back into Facebook, using their pixel just kind of did it automatically. Now that data is limited. Facebook doesn't see as much of what's going on when someone's going around on my site. Yep. That that they did 345 years ago.
Greg Marshall 6:28 Yep. So I feel like one of the big changes that will happen, or strategies or moves that you'll have to do is get really good at in app. Just you know, retargeting tracking, setting up. So the fundamentals are always the same, right? build awareness, engage with them, and then convert them. Yeah. But instead of you could just a few years ago, not even two, three years ago, you could actually skip a lot of that you could just go straight for purchase, like just just buy. Yeah. And you didn't have to warm people up and use kind of the quote unquote, old school methods. But I feel like it's gonna we're going to be forced to do that. Yeah, to be forced. Go back to that. And that's where it becomes a little more challenging, because you're, you're losing your teammate base.
Blake Beus 7:17 Yeah, and like, I think what a lot of people realize is, is, well, I think about it this way. This is going to make lazy advertisers drop the platform. And unfortunately, businesses that are a little bit less sophisticated with advertising are going to maybe just drop online advertising altogether. But what that means is you're going to have more sophisticated advertisers on platform and everything like that. But to talk about your point, when you start talking about off platform versus on platform, what I'm going to what I'm going to guess is going to see a lot lot lot more improvement a lot more use is retargeting based on on platform events. Yes, right. And you brought this up, you taught you right before this call, you brought this up talking about retargeting based on video views, which is not a new strategy. Yeah. But but to to explain to you how this works. You know, you who out there is listening. If someone is watching a video on the Facebook platform that you uploaded, Facebook knows and can fully track your behavior, your customers and visitors and viewers behavior on that. And then you can retarget those people based on those, those events, the events where we can't retarget as good anymore. With it with as good of accuracy is the events that happen on my website. Yep, yep. Right. So that so basically what that means is,
Greg Marshall 8:50 you'll have to, I feel like this is what's gonna happen is you'll have to be very good at enap retargeting and thinking about the entire, like flow of them. And I also think that there's a couple of changes that are happening on these platforms that are going to impact that. So number one, did you see the update with Instagram? That's gonna roll out here soon. We're gonna change the option to do chronological. Yes, based on I did, I did, I did. I think that's a big indicator that the algorithms are gonna have to switch. Mm hmm. Because now since they have way less data, they now need to, I feel like they need to focus heavier on making sure people don't jump ship completely off the platform. So now they actually are like going backwards. So making because if you need to do in app ads, you need people to use the apps you write. And people have been complaining about the algorithm saying I don't see any of my friends posts. I just see what you're feeding me. Yeah. And that's something that I believe forces people on other platforms? Yeah. Because they're seeing stuff they don't really, they're not choosing to see it's their Facebook is dictating. Yeah, what they see right now they're offering that option back. And I feel like that's going to be a big That, to me that communicates a shift. And they understand they're probably gonna have to do a lot more in app conversions type model. So they need people to stay on.
Blake Beus 10:23 They need people to not leave the app. And to be fair, that was the goal. That's been their goal all along. The longer people are on their app, the more money they make from advertisers, the more eyeball inventory, yeah, they can, they can sell advertisers. But I did see that I mean, Instagrams feed used to be chronological, and then they switched it, claiming, quote, it's going to be better experience, we're going to give you posts, that's nice, that's corporate, that's a marketer speak for we're gonna make a whole lot more money by showing you the posts, we want you to see and not give you a choice what you can see. But I feel like Instagram has been feeling the heat from things like tick tock, oh, there's, there's, and they're and they're reverting back to the old way of things on the for their people's feed, or at least giving people the option to view their feed that way, and giving them the option choose how they want to eat. Am I in a mood right now to explore content that I may not be aware of? Yeah, or am I in the mood right now to only see the content of people I know and, and want to see that content. And so they're giving people that option to keep them more interested in the platform. I ultimately think that is a good move for most people, though, because I hated when they got rid of the chronological feed. I
Greg Marshall 11:39 was like, I love the craft. And here's the thing, kind of the irony of all this is, there's a there's a podcast I like to listen to, and he talks about this all the time, which is competition is good. Instagram, and Facebook would never do this. If tick tock wasn't the number one visited website last year. Growing, right. And that's, this is a good lesson to show you can never believe you're bigger than your customer base, because they will leave the second a better experience or service comes out. And this you know, tick tock right now, like I remember, just two years ago, there was almost no one using tick tock. No.
Blake Beus 12:20 I used to think tick tock was stupid. Me too. And I use it a lot.
Greg Marshall 12:23 And I'm on there. I mean, it might be to be honest, it's getting close, you choose my favorite platform, but tick tock is getting very close, because there's a lot of fun stuff on there, and cool content and and that's the thing. That's that's where I feel like these changes are being made to enhance the user experience on their platforms, because they now feel threatened. I feel because this other platform is gaining so much momentum. Yeah.
Blake Beus 12:50 Yeah. Yeah. So I completely agree with you about you know, the the competition being good. What is is interesting, though, is the players are having to play different and one of the things that I find very interesting with with tick tock versus all of the others is from like, a, a business perspective. And I don't know if you're still seeing this, but from a business perspective. I'm still seeing people are struggling big time to monetize tick tock. Yeah, I I listened to an interview of a guy that has nearly a million followers on tick tock, and he was talking about, you know, how many views and things he gets on stuff and he didn't talk about hard numbers, but I kind of went through and, and looked through his sales funnel from his home screen and everything. I I can't imagine this guy is making more than a few $1,000 a month off of his following. Whereas on Instagram, as someone has a million followers, I know a few people that have a million followers. And again, they they don't tell me how much money they make.
Greg Marshall 13:53 But another day,
Blake Beus 13:55 I mean, I trade up houses every couple years to bigger and bigger, bigger homes and they're driving super fancy cars, and this is literally their full time thing. They do nothing else other than this. So So Tik Tok is a platform is is fantastic, but it's not super mature from the monetizing perspective just yet. Yeah. But I definitely want to keep an eye on and I'm sure it will get figured out. Someone will. Someone I'm sure a few people have figured that out. Right. But But the other thing I found interesting about the Tick Tock platform when we can dive back into tracking and we wanted to talk about server cookieless trucking, but the one thing I found interesting about tick tock with this guy that has a million followers on Tiktok he'll have a video that will get 10 million views and then the next video will get 5000 Yeah, and then the next one will get 500,000 It's it's almost like the number of followers you have is has zero indication as to what you're going to get view wise Yeah. And and that all has to do with how their algorithm works and everything. But the number of followers you have is a flex yes does give you authority to people's eyes, and can be leveraged to monetize in ways and just say, well, this person has a million followers. So they're selling washing machines. And I saw this guy, he's got, like, 500,000 followers, and he's this local appliance seller in Canada. Gog. I love his video. Yes. So good. Yeah. And I'm sure he's the best seller in that area, because he has 500,000 followers on Tiktok. But anyway, we wanted we kind of got off track, but we want to talk about tracking the track
Greg Marshall 15:45 because we have to talk about if you're going to go the cookieless world, then an app experiences is going to play a big role a big role. Yeah. On content, what's what type of content is being put out there. And I do think one of the advantages at the moment that Tik Tok has, and this may be a strategy of theirs is they are making it easier. There's, there's less limitations to what you can put, like what you can put out in order to get more views. And the regular user that doesn't have a lot of followers can still get a lot of views. Right. And so I think that is what hooks more people in is because the opposite is true. Instagram face. Absolutely.
Greg Marshall 16:31 If you have 10 followers, there's no way you're going to get well not no way but the likelihood is very small, that you'll get a lot of views versus on Tik Tok, you can literally have like five followers come up with a video. That's pretty good. And you can still get 10,000 views. Easy, right? Yeah. And so that's why I think that may be a strategy of theirs is to help people get seen more, because they know the biggest complaint that people have on Instagram. Is no one sees anything.
Blake Beus 17:00 No, yeah, if no one sees anything, and they tried to fix that with reels. And you can on rails, if you've done rails you can get with you know, so you have 1000 followers, you can get 10,000 15,000 20,000 views. Yep. But it's not as it's harder to amplify that then than it is on Tik Tok. But it's easier to turn it into money on Instagram. So there's there's like
Greg Marshall 17:26 those a trade trade off? Well, let's let's talk about cookieless. Tracking, right. So cooking is basically meaning not being able to track people all over the internet. Yeah, so
Blake Beus 17:37 let's just real quick tech, deep dive on on cookies, right. So when someone comes to my website, you're going to have a script, set a cookie on the browser, it's literally this little tiny piece of data that sits inside your web browser that can then be sent consent events back to your server. That's not how it really works. But that's how effectively it works for a technical person. So but the thing with cookies is they're very easy to block, right? So you have ad blockers, iOS 1415 plus whatever, they're they're just blocking any sort of tracking cookies. And, and they, they can just have errors with network problems, right? Because the internet feels like it's pretty great. But there's a lot of dropped data packets behind the scenes that can cause problems. So yeah,
Greg Marshall 18:27 I heard Google Chrome's taking. Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be taken Absolutely. But
Blake Beus 18:30 Google, Google as an advertiser, Facebook as an advertiser, and a few others have announced that they are going to be moving forward with cookieless. Tracking. Yeah, so it is going to be the future. Yep. And what does that mean for people? Well, well, what what that means is, for many people is you're either going to have to do your tracking in app, or using an in app browser, which tic TOCs in a browser. pisses me off is not good? Well, it won't let you leave it. Meaning meaning so on on Facebook, if I click on a Facebook ad, it opens up in their web browser. But I can click on that and click on the buttons that say, Hey, open this up in my phone, whatever, right? So if I'm looking at my phone, tic TOCs phone browser, you can't do that. They force you to stay in there. I can't copy the URL on any buddies profile pages and open it up in a different browser. So you have to use their browser and I guarantee that's because they want to force their tracking. Oh, yeah. Cuz on it's gonna be it's gonna You're still in app at that point. You know, you're maybe on my websites gonna be the new way. Yeah. And so it's frustrating, but I think that's what they're doing. But But then you're what you're gonna see is you're gonna see a lot of people, right? You're going to probably need to have a better website hosting server infrastructure to send data back to Facebook and Google whatever. And what I mean by that when when someone lands on On my website, their own web browser on their own computer sends the the tracking code and information back to the Facebook's ad platform. But the new way is going to be your web host, will send it from server to server send that tracking information background. But that was going to require your that you are on a web host that has those capabilities. So we're going to start seeing that pop up and become more and more and more interesting because most web hosts don't support that at all right now. And that is going to give us much more accurate information. When we send this data server to server. both Facebook and Google already have that capabilities. It's just that most people are on a server platform that doesn't support it. Got it. So we're gonna see more and more and more of that happening. And so it's not super urgent right now. But people are going again, this is one of those things where I said, people are going to need to reach out to media buyers, because it's getting more sophisticated. Well picture, people are going to need to reach out to more sophisticated hosting platforms, or even companies that do managed services with hosting to set this up properly and manage it properly for them.
Greg Marshall 21:17 What do you think? Here's a question for them. What do you think? All right, so a lot of the reasons in the past with pixels. And what made it effective is not only the targeting, but the optimization, right? So the more data you fed back into the account, typically, the lower your cost per purchase will start to become Yeah, what do you think will happen with an app? Essentially? How do you do that? If there's no real information really getting pushed as effectively in the past back into your ad account? Because that's where all the optimizations happen.
Blake Beus 21:55 Right. So I think, I think what people are going to need to do more and more and more is leverage the offline conversions features that is both in Facebook and Google. And what that is for for you that may not know is, if I have a list of customers that purchased yesterday, I can essentially upload that list in a CSV file, or write some software to push it manually push that over there with a couple of unique identifiers, their email address, maybe the NPC ID that they would that gets appended to the URL when someone clicks on a page, send that data back into the Facebook platform. And then and then you'll you'll be optimizing that way. Also, you'll have server platforms that can optimize. And so you might the net effect, if you're doing both of those, you might actually get more optimization data than you were with the pixel. Yeah. But there's more setup more, it's hard. It's hard to say it's harder and logic. Yeah, it's just not done for you. Right, the pixel was he so you copy and paste some code on your site, and it's done. This is another level.
Greg Marshall 23:07 One, this is like, what some of my clients to like, some of them aren't even aware of what a CSV file is. Yeah. Right.
Blake Beus 23:15 And where should they have to? Like they do, they don't necessarily need to know that to run a successful business doing, I don't know, plumbing or something like that. Right. In and, you know, that's why they outsource to people like you or whatever. But, but yeah, it's
Greg Marshall 23:33 well, here's Okay, so here's another question for you from the data side. So like companies like a high growth? How does this impact if it becomes cookieless? How does that impact a business like that?
Blake Beus 23:46 So Hieros, and companies like Hieros, they all claim to be able to handle cookieless. But none of them really do it. Okay. iros runs into the exact same problems. And the reason it worked really well, at the beginning was because the cookies weren't noticed as tracking cookies, and they weren't blocked yet, because they were a new player out there. And they weren't big enough for Apple to care about for ad blockers to care about. But they still they still are using cookies and everything. And so what Hieros if you look at setting up Hieros, or some of these other platforms, what they have you do for their quote, unquote, cookieless support is either build some way to push data directly into their platform from your server, yeah, or upload a CSV file of your data into the server. So it's the same, it's the same kind of thing, right? Offline conversion, essentially the same kind of thing and they handle the conversion tracking, a little bit different and probably a little bit better for some use cases than like Facebook does or whatever. And it's probably a little bit easier to integrate into their system from server to server than it is to maybe Facebook or something like that. I don't know, I haven't actually done an integration. I've looked into it. But they're, they're going to bump into the same problems. And I have looked at their site and I have seen when I run an ad blocker on on Hieros website is a blocker, it blocks any site that I know that that is running Hieros, it will block those transactions. So they're bumping into the same problem.
Greg Marshall 25:24 Again, too big,
Blake Beus 25:26 they're getting too big. And they wanted to push the easy button because they needed to onboard enough clients and copying and pasting some cookie tracking code is the easiest way to get more clients. If you have a sophisticated integration process. You can't onboard a bunch of new clients. If you're a brand new startup, you need to onboard a bunch of clients before you start becoming cashflow positive. And so they push the easy button. I'm confident they'll they already have plans in the works to have deeper integrations and things for those people that need it. But they're bumping into the same problems.
Greg Marshall 25:57 Well, here's a question, you know, just from like a super high level. Alright, so why why is there such an anti tracking issue? What meaning Why is it such a big? Like? It seems like one of the challenges with digital marketing is attribution we've talked about? Yeah. And it seems like, anytime a solution comes out, it eventually gets blocked. Yeah. So my question is, from a high level, philosophical reasons, why do you think there is such an issue? With the tracking when it comes to the marking? Meaning? Why does each company want to stop or block it?
Blake Beus 26:43 I think it's a big question. And then as a big conversation, I think there's a couple of different reasons. Reason number one, I feel like that it's, it's so that these big companies can try to gain a competitive advantage. So a lot, a lot of people know this. But Apple has its own advertising network. It's specifically for apps in their app store, on iOS devices, but they have an advertising network platform. So they very conveniently blocked all of Facebook's ability to track and then came up with and then came up with rules that Facebook had to follow in order for them to be partially tracked on the platform. And, and but conveniently, Apple still allows their own tracking cookies on their own ad network. Strange, right? And so So, so that's one of the reasons and here we have to, I don't know what they're worth trillion dollar companies butting heads, and the consumers are over here saying, I just want I just want my shit to work.
Greg Marshall 27:49 I just, I just want my business. Yeah, no, it's working. Yeah, that's it.
Blake Beus 27:54 Yep. And then the other part of why tracking is because in the past companies, specifically Facebook, we have the whole Cambridge analytic a thing, and 2016, where they were very clearly abusing the amount of data that was collected, and giving it to their advertising partners to a scary level. And so protections, new new legislation came out. Europe launched a whole bunch of new legislation. That's why there's the GDPR, California came up with its own, like cookie tracking registration or stuff. So there's all these new things that came out, because of the abuse of data collection. And really, most people, most people don't know how much data is collected about them by advertisers and then sold to other average other advertisers. And if most people knew how much data was collected about them, they would probably not be not feel comfortable with that. Sure. But you and I know how much it is. And I'm like, Yeah, I'm like, I still want to use Facebook.
Greg Marshall 29:05 But yeah, what's my alternative? Right? Well enter the cave and have no internet and no, yeah, access to the way the world right now. And sometimes
Blake Beus 29:12 that sounds nice. But it's not in reality, it's not sustainable. So so that's kind of the two the two sides of it. The other thing is is like a matter and this is a little bit of a deep, deep and going off the deep end here, but it's a matter of custody, right? And what I mean by custody is, is who owns that data? And are they taking good care of it? Right? So if Facebook knows a whole lot about me where I'm going because they have GPS enabled on my phone, what stores I'm at, I know who I'm talking with, because I'm sitting next to Greg right here for for an hour and our phones are right next to each other. So clearly Greg and I know each other so it's gonna show up. Hey, do you know Greg Yeah, next time we see each other, like, like, they know a lot about me and are they taking good care of that data and and making sure that it's secure? Yeah. So that Hackers can't get to it, are they making sure that they are doing with they are being transparent about what they're doing with that data, and a few other things because people have a reasonable right to privacy. But with digital, that line is lousy. And the laws kind of don't catch up with how fast technology advances and how fast how technologically knowledgeable the general population is. And so there's this like gray area where
Greg Marshall 30:29 they're really smart people can be steps ahead. Yes. And he's right. And yeah, bad, bad actors and bad people could could abuse that kind of like a sporting event where you know, the play of the other team. I don't know that you know that. Exactly. So you can't exactly easily win. And I guess, so I guess that's probably the biggest thing. And so I think with this with this episode, the, the key changes that I believe will be made from from a marketing standpoint is get really good at in App Tracking, get really good at coming up with true media buying true messaging, and you're just gonna have to do things differently. And the same at the same time, right. So like, you're gonna use the same thought process and concepts that you were using before, when you had access to all of the tracking outside of the platform, but you just are going to do it within. Right, right. And so I just got to get really good now, being able to understand what's happening, who to target, and what behaviors indicate that this may happen. So you're going to use a lot of the same thinking patterns. Yeah, it's just mostly going to happen within that, right,
Blake Beus 31:46 you just need to maybe shift how you're handling retargeting and shift your understanding of how tracking works. And I would say, take a big step back. And if you're going to dump a ton of time into something surrounding your marketing, I would spend that time and energy on your marketing message and your offer. Yep. Right. Because you're at the end of the day, you're speaking with people. So you want to trigger those, those emotions that are going to get them to take action, you want to be very clear about not only what features your product or offer has, but what benefits and what what that actually means to to them and what they want their hopes and dreams and helps them run away from their fears and anxieties, and focus on those things. So that's where I would do my time and then I would maybe look into kind of outsourcing or offloading some of the technical bits Yeah. To a consultant or a media buyer or someone that you can do some brainstorming with and then can help set up the tracking and everything that demand
Greg Marshall 32:46 is gonna go up I think big time. Yeah, I
Blake Beus 32:49 think I definitely think so.
Greg Marshall 32:52 Well, I think outside of that, I guess we will Blake how to get how do people get a hold of you if they need to?
Blake Beus 32:58 Yeah, just go to just go to Blake Beus stock calm. And you can you can see a couple things I have going on there I have my SM three membership, which help. It's like it's like a group membership where we do 90% Done For You kind of content creation where you kind of puzzle piece the things together. And then trainings and community and challenges and stuff like that. That's the main offer I have right now. And you can just find that at Blake calm. And what about you, Greg,
Greg Marshall 33:23 you can just go to Greg marshall.co. And if you need help with any your marketing, you need a strategy call. Just go ahead and book one and we can hop on and talk about how we can help you so outside of that. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you guys next time. Yeah,
Blake Beus 33:37 we'll talk take we'll catch you later.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:00 We're recording now. And it is moving now.
Greg Marshall 0:03 All right. We just had a wonderful experience where we record a beautiful podcast for you guys. But for whatever reason, technology just paused on us. So
Blake Beus 0:12 I was the best one. It's, but it's gone. It's it's gone forever. But But we got this and we'll, we'll do it again. And I think we'll we'll make it even better.
Greg Marshall 0:22 Oh, yeah. 100% agree. So basically, our last podcast was about essentially, you know, when people people want to change, what they do that's already working? Well, you shouldn't write like, a challenge that I have, with a lot of clients, as I actually talked to them about, I have to talk them into not changing what's already working, because they're becoming bored with their own marketing campaigns. And so they want to, like, shift them, or let's try something new, or everyone in the whole world is seeing this, or my customers are too bombarded, which that typically is more about, we're thinking about ourselves too much right thing like, because I saw this 20 times, because I'm on the back end of my business that everyone else saw 20 times. But trust me they have. Yeah, because you got to spend a lot of money.
Blake Beus 1:13 Yeah, well, and what kind of sparked the whole conversations before we started recording the first time that didn't record correctly? You made a statement to me that kind of just really caught my attention. You said, I can't tell you how many times I have to have conversation with clients telling them not to change things not to make changes that that things are working. But they they want to like keep switching steps. Right. And we went off on a big tangent about why people do Yeah, some of that is never going to never going to be heard ever. Yeah. But I do remember some some bits of it. And one of them we were talking about? Well, let me let me tell you, you have some great ideas on why you think people want to change something that's working. They're spending, you know, $500 a day and they're getting $2,000 A day back. Yeah. And they want to shut the campaign down and try something.
Greg Marshall 2:08 Yeah, yeah. So those are basically the reasons why people want to do that. It's fear based, right. And we all run run into this, we're not excluding us, we're just saying, this is something that we all have to constantly, you know, be aware of, are we making decisions based off fear, or actual data, a lot of times, people present data in a way where they think it's data, but it's actually fear based. And they've just come up with a great argument, right. But really, it's two fears of fear. Number one is the fear of kind of looking like played out, like people see your stuff too much. Or like, you know, they've already done that there's no creativity in that. And, you know, creators pride themselves on having new stuff and coming up with new ideas. So it goes against their internal kind of makeup, to keep showing the same thing over and over again. And so one is they don't want to look like, you know, they're played out or going out of style, because they keep doing the same thing. And number two, is the fear of lack of resources, right? So they believe that, well, if I add on to what I'm already doing, I may not have the money, the mental capacity or the time to actually do this. So they want to cut things off. And another kind of reason for that is, when there's more things happening, there tends to be a feeling of loss of control. So the fastest way to kind of feel like you're back in control, is to stop something, or cut it off. And so that's, that's where I think a lot of that comes from,
Blake Beus 3:29 yeah, do you? Do you think that sometimes there's like this pressure from peers, or even a perceived pressure or pressure that doesn't really exist other other than something we put on ourselves, or the business owner puts on themselves? That, that I want my peers out there that are also business owners to, to respect me and think that I'm innovative or think that I'm always reaching certain levels or doing things and I'm worried that they're going to think I'm boring and lame, if I keep selling the same T shirt over and over and over again, even though it's making me loads of money. Yes,
Greg Marshall 4:03 yeah. So I think that definitely comes into play, especially when you have, you know, I had this situation happen to me before, where you have an outside adviser that doesn't actually have the experience yet. In this field, they're very skilled, but they don't have the actual experience yet making suggestions that are the right decisions, and another business model, but not in this one. Right. Okay. So I'm not saying this person does not know what they're doing, or that, you know, their their advice is, like, done with ill will or even not credible, I'm saying is the advice is applicable to that particular industry, but it doesn't transfer over 100%. So, my example would be like, I can't say because I understand, you know, digital marketing that I now know how to do heart surgery. Because I've had success of digital marketing, right? My advice might be keep doing the same thing in the digital marketing world. But that may be terrible advice. If I'm like, operating on someone's heart, right? I mean that that could be, you know, catastrophic. So what I mean is, typically what happens is, outside noise definitely impacts how people can behave, particularly if they're tied emotionally, to what the product is like, they made it, they tend to, they tend to, if anyone kind of goes after, they will actually take the criticism and try to change it. Mm hm. Because they're like, Oh, I can't be I can't have people viewing me this way, or thinking about things this way. So I need to change it. So you're absolutely outside forces all the time. And of course, if you're someone who communicates with family and friends, and they see what you're doing, people are always going to give you that sideline advice on how to do things they've never done. We've all run into, right, where you have family members telling, you really shouldn't do that, like, well, how many businesses? Have you started? Yeah, because I haven't seen a single one. So how
Blake Beus 6:19 are you if they do, you know, do on a business, or whatever, your business might be totally different. And it's totally fine. I, I do understand very, very deeply the stress that comes from creating something yourself, yes. And then running your own ads. And that's something that I ran into. And that's really, that's literally the reason that you and I started working together. And we had met before that, but that's the reason we start working together. Because I had created my kind of initial product. I was running my own ads, and like, everything was so insanely stressful for me, because it was my thing, every time a negative comment would come in, I would be stressed because it was hard for me to not take that personally. Because this was all I had done. All of it. Yep. And delegating that to you. Took a lot of took a lot of stress off of my mind you didn't you say you had clients literally this week, reach out? Yeah, I can't take it anymore.
Greg Marshall 7:19 Yep. Yep, I've had in the last two months alone, I've had a couple of new clients come in, where they know how to run ads, they have run ads before they were running them before they reached out. And they've taken all the courses and everything. But when they when they get in the game, as I call it is a lot different. Because you're not actually if we were all cold and emotionless, then the it wouldn't matter. You can step in and do anything, right? The problem is, when you're practicing, and you're not in the game, yet, you don't feel the pressures of when you actually have to go at your product. Now you're spending your money, and people are commenting, or not buy or buy and whatever. And now that you feel like that's a reflection of you as a person on your character. It starts to play games with you when you run an ads because you start to get emotionally tied to you know, is this going to work? Am I doing the right thing? Do people hate my products? Do I need to do this, I just switch it up. And it reveals a lot about how you handle a lot of other problems in your life, right. And I can speak from personal experience where it's like, you take these and you're like, if you have a tendency to go, if things aren't working out, you just scrap everything and you start all over again, that's essentially that's going to show up when you're running your ads. And that's not the best strategy. The best strategy is not to act, overly impulsive. And emotionally, the best strategy is to kind of like, change course, slightly, slowly, don't take anything personal, and make your decisions off data. The problem is when you get too close to it, your emotions are tied. We're all susceptible to this. This is like I said, we're not excluding ourselves. It's just now delegating it out will help because it allows you to stay in your strong space, and, you know, event essentially not ruin the part that needs to be run a certain way by getting overly emotional about it.
Blake Beus 9:19 Yeah. Yeah, so one of the things and I liked your response to this in our previous one that no one's ever going to hear ever. But But I asked you, you know, do you do you feel like there's some sort of daily spend threshold are some arbitrary number different for everybody where, where they hit this certain spend and all of a sudden the anxiety goes goes through the roof, right? Because and I said this last one, I have worked with people where they think you're spending $100 A day in ADS. That's crazy. And then I've met other people worked with other people where they're like, I don't Don't even turn on a campaign if it's not at least 150 or $200 a day. And then, you know, and then you have people that are comfortable spending 1000s a day. Yep. Right. But you feel like people have some sort of threshold that they don't know about. And all of a sudden they hit it and, and shit hits the fan and anxiety goes through the roof, and they're freaking out?
Greg Marshall 10:19 Oh, absolutely, there's no doubt about this. So every single client that I work with has their own threshold daily, that they can operate under and be just fine. Even though the number that they're deciding is not actually accurate. Okay, so for example, you'll have because it's all based on expectation levels, and the thing that will kill you, when coming up with a budget, the thing that will absolutely destroy is doing the what I'm spending today, times 30 times 12. And what that means is, if I'm spending $100 a day, if I spend that in 30 days, that's $3,000 a month, because what happens is you overly focus on that number, wit and what you're actually doing subconsciously that you don't realize is you're actually making the assumption that you're going to spend this money and get zero sales bet. That's actually how you decide you're not deciding, oh, if I spent 3000, I get like 2900 and sales. And I have 50% margin that really only spent like $1,500 out of pocket. It's $1,500 loss. It's not a $3,000 loss.
Blake Beus 11:26 Right. Also, you're not going to keep spending a loss day in and day out of the campaign is literally just turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, because it's not working. But you're right. We like mentally, consciously. We're making the decision based on zero sales. Yeah. Why? That's why the hell do we do that? Like, I know, that's what my brain I've done. My brain does.
Greg Marshall 11:49 And I know and that's why you laugh. I said, what you do is you take the daily times 30 times 12. Right, because you understand exactly, yeah,
Blake Beus 11:57 I mean, in the last one you asked me, you know, cuz we hit we hit about three grand a day in sales on not in sales in spend on mine. And, and that's when like, I got it, I got ridiculous. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 12:10 it was? Well, of course, because that's that's, you know, you you shared the story of like, you know, you're spending $3,000 a day and what does that mean? You're not actually taking it day by day making assessments or even week by week, what you're doing is you're saying, well, 3000 times 30 times trial, that's a million dollars, Aspen, I don't have a million dollars, right? Well, of course, you know, because what we're doing is we're running ads to grow that and if it doesn't work, we turn it off. Yeah, there's always a way out. And that's, that's the thing, but we play this game of like, I'm going to spend this much. And then assume I'm actually going to get zero sales back. Yeah, which is totally false. Unless you're a store that has like just started, that's not going to happen. And if you've got long history of like, you're always selling $10,000 a month, I can make the argument you should be testing more aggressively, trying more, you know, more things harder with your ad spent to try to ramp that up. Because your goal really should be to spend as much as you can. But the reason why you're not is because everyone has a bad experience or something that causes them to not be able or okay to spend it. Right, right. And so I think in that last episode that we talked about, I shared an experience that I ran into which I almost can guarantee, you are also running into this without either acknowledging it or not realizing it's even there. I had experience in the past where I couldn't spend more than $50 a day and ad spent, like I literally, I couldn't get myself to press the button, to even at 51 I couldn't do it. It was literally like a mental block. Because I had an experience where when we were spending ad dollars, we were making great returns great profits, everything was going great. But the people that I was surrounded by did not feel comfortable. They had their own spent number that made them feel very nervous and anxious and scared and kind of go into survival mentality. And so what happened was, I would get on the phone after this and just get hammered about, well, why are we spending this money? Well, and then when sales go down, because we spend less well, why don't we get as many sales? Why do we stop spending that much and it was a constant roller coaster? And it's because there was emotion tied to that. And what what basically the reason I'm sharing that it's because it took me a long time to be able to kind of release the brakes to that because I understood the reason why I can't get past this level is because I need to be spending more but the reason why I can't spend more is because I've internalized as negative experience as truth as a can never get around that. So therefore I had this like this little block or ceiling that I put on myself. That shouldn't be there should be removed. But on the one actually key was older. So that's the experience of how most business owners that are running as are having some level of success, they could reach the number that they have in their mind, or that they're idolizing someone else for reaching, they could reach it right now, if they just removed that block of doing the daily span times 30 times 12 in their head, they could get rid of that, they will be able to reach the goal. And I can almost say this. If, if if I could convince a client, let's say that was just like, you know, I'm going to take a risk. And I would say, I'm going to be the analytical person, I'm going to not allow you to see what's going on in the ad account. Okay, at all. I'm just going to run it based off of the numbers you said you need to achieve. I'm going to block you from being able to see what's being spent, and I'm going to maintain that number and grow it. I bet you would grow way faster. Because you wouldn't know what's going on. You would just you would just be like, Oh, well, sales more sales are coming in. And then numbers are working out. Yeah. But because you can't see it. You will freak yourself out. You'll spook yourself by just looking at it. I go, Oh, man, what if this happens? And he started playing whatever game?
Blake Beus 16:23 Right. I think there's a caveat to that. Because with you definitely. But I think and this is something we don't talk about a lot. I think a lot of business owners have tried hiring someone to help them with ads. I'm guessing you are oftentimes not the first person they've worked with. I never have. And and many times you get someone that talks a big game. I mean, a lot of agencies do this. They they say yeah, we can definitely do this. They run ads for six months, blow other money. And then they say, well, it didn't work out. Sorry. Why? Right. And, and so and so I wonder if that's and this we have not talked about the last one. But I think I think that might be a reason why a lot of people are like, I need to see the numbers. Yep. Because they've been burned in the past. I know, when I was doing agency web dev stuff. Literally every person I talked with had been burned by a developer that had promised them they would get this thing done on time. And they didn't. And they were all super hesitant to hire me because I was way more expensive that I was like, I'm expensive because I deliver. Yeah, you know
Greg Marshall 17:30 exactly, exactly. That's, that's actually a good point. Because every conversation that I've had, I won't say every but 90 out of 100 they either ran ads themselves, or that they hired another person an agency or took a course all kind of the same, right? Where it's like, we can get you, you know, these unrealistic results. And that's the problem is, a lot of the issues that people run into, is there being sold on unrealistic objectives or goals. For example, you see the, you know, the course, if you if you do these hacks, you'll get a 10 return. So, this is a conversation that I actually have often happy brought this up, because we didn't talk about this unless there's benefits to this. So there's an assumption because of bad players out there. They, their programs say that you should be getting a 5678 10 return on adspend on your dollar. And not only that, when you scale up, it should be the same. Right? So the belief is, well, if I spent $10 a day, right, and I got a five return on adspend. Then if I spent $10,000 a day, I should be able to maintain that near five return on investment, which is absolutely false. Correct. But a lot of these programs they teach that they kind of leave that part out, like oh, when you scale up, you should get that. So a lot of the conversations I actually what have with people that are new that used to work with someone else, is they they like to say this? Well, yeah, if I if I spent 100 And I'm making, you know, and they'll throw a ridiculous number. If I spent 100 I'm making like $5,000 Then why would I not spend 1000 and make like 50 And I know that's because that's not gonna
Blake Beus 19:33 happen. That's because that's not realistic. And whoever told
Greg Marshall 19:37 you that's lying, right? 100% Instead, what you need to do is think more realistically, how because if you could do that, then why is it the person that taught you how to do that? Why are they not on the cover of force is the richest person in the world. Right? Because then all they'd have to do is just go, well, I'll just spend a billion dollars and then I'll be worth 500 billion Don't be rich and everybody, I'll be richer than all the people. Right? But that's not how it works. Right? So what you have to think about is do it more or less thinking, if I put $1 in how do I get like, you know, a 50% return on my dollar? Not, you know, 20,000% return, because that's just not that's not gonna happen. That's just greedy. Right? That's, that's,
Blake Beus 20:25 and you, I mean, maybe you get lucky, you spent $1. And you make one sale, and that's worth $100. So your return on investment is 100x, or whatever. But when you scale that up, it doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. Because you're reaching more people. It's just how it's mathematically how things scale in the ad world. But like we said, and all of all of you know, we'll say this, again, I'm sure. But the companies out there, you're seeing running ads all over the place, the big companies, right, they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. And in many times, they don't have a direct way to monetize those ads, think of like Pepsi and Coke, right? Like, these are massive brands. Yep. All of their marketing campaigns, you still have to go into a grocery store, buy, buy some and buy some coke, or some Pepsi, right? I'm not seeing a Coke or Pepsi out on Facebook and clicking it and buying coke to get delivered to my let me get a 12 pack delivered straight to my house right away right away, you know, let's do a try and ask me what's the return on adspend, I don't calculate return on adspend the same way you do, right. And so if you're comparing a company that's making, you know, $10 million a year, and your company is making $100,000 a year and you want to get to those levels, and you want to maintain the exact same row as you have right now, versus then it's not going to happen, you've got to explore other channels, and some are going to be more profitable, you got to scoop up a much larger market, and probably launch some new product lines, or some new product offers or something like that. You've got to explore these other things.
Greg Marshall 21:57 Well, and I think, you know, speaking with, you know, how to manage your your psychology when you're doing that, if you okay, here's here's why you become stressed out, is number one, the fear of losing money, right? But you're not thinking rationally that's only emotion. Like if you spent 100, and you only sell 80, he didn't really lose $100. Right, that but you think you did, yeah. Or your mind will trick you into believing that that's not actually what happened, you may have lost $30, right? 40 bucks, right? Because you've accounted for all the cost and all that. But your mind will make you panic and keep doing going into survival. Right? The other thing is, if you go into running ads with unrealistic expectations, you're actually causing your own anxiety. Because if I went on a weight loss plan and said, If I don't lose 100 pounds, and the less and the next 14 days, something is seriously wrong, then every day, I'm going to be stressed out to the max because my expectation is unrealistic. I'm not gonna lose 100 pounds for today. So therefore, I shouldn't be thinking about that. Right? Right. I should be thinking about just lose two pounds a week. Yeah, eventually I'll get there. Right, right, that's how you should be looking at your ad account is if I can get a 20 3040 50% return on my dollar. And I can do that over an extended period of time. That's how I'm actually going to become wealthier than if I try to hit homeruns. And go, I need to spend, you know, $100 and get a 1 million return back, it ain't it's just not going to happen. So that's what causes your own anxiety is your unrealistic expectation of what should be happening. And I don't blame anyone, because they just don't know. But my goal in this pocket is to explain to you how this actually works, right. And the way it works is you got to look at your ads as a way to get decent returns on the front end. So on the back end, your email marketing and your new product launches and all that can make you all of the profit because you've acquired those customers. Right? Right. If you look at it that way, you would be a lot more aggressive with your advertising versus thinking, my advertising suppose if I put $1 in, I'm going to get $10 back for ever at unlimited spend scale. Right, right.
Blake Beus 24:19 Yeah, so it's, I mean, we we talked about this in the last one but essentially two things. I think this episode should be named Zen in the art of advertising because it really is this this mental game and people talk about a mental mind shift whatever a lot, but I feel like a lot of the Guru's kind of missed that. Like, everybody has some sort of hang ups when it comes to running a business running ads, whatever. And this kind of exposes those things. And so the best media buyer is one that's also a good, a good therapist, and you know, so hat make sure you have those realistic expectations, make sure you're you're not doing something to try to just get rich and the next 30 days, the the courses and the people telling you that that's that's what they can help you do. It's it's a statistical anomaly, right? Like, that's not realistic the people that have the good businesses, the successful businesses that are working long term are those that grew steadily, slowly made smart decisions and kept doing what was working. Yep. And didn't just throw that out the window to manage their own anxieties to try to start something new. To bring us back to kind of our initial topic, I really do feel like a lot of people, if you're getting sick of running, selling the same coffee mug, even those make you so much money as a business owner, you delegate that out, delegate that off have, have your media buyer or your other team members work on that. And you work together putting another offer, whether that's a new product, whether that's a companion product, or maybe that's some sort of bundle, we've talked about bundles, we love bundle, yes, yes, they're the best. But come up with some cool, unique, interesting angle to then say, okay, media buyer, Greg, here's this new bundle I've worked with, you know, I've reached out to a lot of my customers, I feel like this is going to be the next kind of interesting combination to put things together or interesting companion product or whatever, let's test this while also keeping all that stuff running, because you've already got that stuff figured out. Yeah, well, we'll leave that going. And that's how you scale up a business, right? With stability, maintaining stability, without the fluctuations and, and into the long term, you know, kind of success?
Greg Marshall 26:36 Well, and the thing, if I can emphasize anything, there is a benefit of delegating as well is you can protect yourself from yourself. Because the worst thing you can do, when especially when running ads, but same in business and everything, you never make your best decisions at your highest emotional peaks. Right? You actually make terrible decisions, the more emotionally stimulated you are, right, because you're no longer thinking rationally, right? And you go into survival instincts. And so one of the things that, you know, I'm thinking of a couple scenarios that I've run into where things are working really well. But because we've surpassed that, like threshold, that daily budget span, threshold, the stories and falseness that we tell each other, while this happens to get out of it, just because we feel uncomfortable, we'll start manufacturing stories. This isn't profitable anymore, even though the numbers are showing that it is, it's just that you're trying to escape the discomfort of doing something you're not used to. Right, and you're going to the next level. So what we do is we come up with a story I like we try to nitpick it to say it's not working, but not really because any data showing that it's only because I feel very uncomfortable, I want to get out of this. Right, right. And I want to go back to where we were, where we can, you know, where I felt comfortable.
Blake Beus 28:03 But then I'm also not comfortable with how with with what our revenue numbers were right? So so there's this push and pull. And that's why the conversation needs to be had. And, and and I've said this before, I'll say it again, I'll always say it. I'm a big fan of therapy, there's occupational therapists out there that actually help deal specifically with professionals in the work environment, and how to manage some of these uncomfortable things. I think that's fantastic, too, to pursue that and explore those options as well. But, Greg, I think we should wrap this one up. And unless you had anything final you had to
Greg Marshall 28:40 say no really what I would say the final message, work on your emotional you know, your emotional intelligence, I guess, or focusing on how to manage your emotions, and be truthful to yourself when you're making decisions on if you want to grow, you're gonna have to do things outside your comfort zone and you will feel discomfort. So you have to do everything in your power to fight against the desire to go back to your comfort zone. Whatever it takes to not do that if you want to keep growing and so with that final statement if you want a free therapy session go to Greg Marshall Dotco book a free call with me But all jokes aside if you need help growing your business and you're not happy exactly where you're at and you'd like to grow it in a business minded mindset go ahead and book a call me
Blake Beus 29:32 late How to Get a hold he just go to Blake Beus calm I've got a membership on there where I basically help coach train people with social media marketing specifically like organic marketing. But I do answer questions on ads when those pop up. And or you can just reach out to me contact me and we can have a chat on whatever I just like chatting with people. Yeah. All right. We'll talk to you guys later. Bye. See ya
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:00 Okay, we are live. Greg, I want to start off first and foremost, asking you about you. You said you had some some, some feedback, some results based on what we talked about, in our last episode about success signals, soft signals. I can't remember all of them. But
Greg Marshall 0:18 well, basically, it was an idea of remember, and I'm gonna make sure I give them credit. Depeche. Yes. And I don't know how to say his last name correctly, man, Dahlia
Blake Beus 0:26 maendeleo. I think I think that's what it is. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 0:29 But basically, he was talking about a concept that I've thought of before and have tried and had success with. But everywhere you go, and look, you're told to not do right, which is, if you're not getting enough conversion events, which Facebook says you need to get 50 or more, then in a week, in a week. They, they're maybe you should optimize for the next highest step that's closest to what you want. And in a lot of cases, you know, the Facebook, you know, gurus or experts will say, Never optimize for those, because that's just poor quality traffic. But in my experience, I've never had that really happen. It's more so of it seems to give me better results when I'm optimizing for softer conversions if I'm not getting enough of like, let's say the purchase version in that week.
Blake Beus 1:22 Yeah. Well, and we even talked about optimizing simultaneously. Yes. For softer conversion, yes. The the the purchase conversion, the add to cart conversion, and the view cart conversion, at the same time with different campaigns.
Greg Marshall 1:38 Yep. And one of the campaigns the the account that I'm utilizing it on right now, in fact, that day that we implemented it, they actually did end up getting, what is it, we spent 50 and got $200 back, and I optimized for each event, the day that we implement it, which was kind of interesting, because then two days later, they almost repeated not to $200, they got to about like 170, or whatever, when previously on that particular like product that they're trying to push, we're spending 40 $50 a day and getting virtually I mean, just maybe a couple add to carts here and there, and no sales,
Blake Beus 2:18 really, so a huge increase in ROI from zero to 200. Correct. And I'm assuming you're only spending $50 a day because you're testing strategies to before you ramp it up.
Greg Marshall 2:29 Correct? Correct. So obviously, we don't want to go there, you know, dropping three, four hours a day on unproven right, you know, tests, right. And so then the another account that I've launched is with, they also so they stopped advertising for like about a month, which we all know, when you do that. It's almost like you have to like revamp your ad account. So what we did was we optimize for add to cart, and now simultaneously optimizing for purchase. Now previously, we launched a campaign just for purchase, and was getting $90 cost per purchase, whatever very expensive for the for the product, because it's the, the average order value is only 35. Okay, so
Blake Beus 3:12 now I need to look at cost per purchase is not is terrible, that's not sustainable.
Greg Marshall 3:17 So what we did was then I used the method of RM optimize for add to cart and then I'm going to go ahead and simultaneously once we get enough Add to Cart, duplicate the ad set, keep both of them running side by side and optimize the next one for purchase. And lo and behold, that day we got a $20 cost per purchase, the very day that we launched those simultaneous account wide, right? Because account why? Because Facebook's not going to give you this blended cost per purchase or if you're running multiple campaigns, correct. They're only going to give you a cost per purchase on each campaign. Correct? Correct. And so basically by duplicating that, that that goes against what they say, you know, remember we've I don't know, we've talked to this ad nauseum about audience overlap. Yes. And how real is that? Actually? Because what by duplicating? I'm literally targeting exact same audience. Yeah. And the first example I gave you same thing, the exact same eyes, it's one interest, the same interest on every single optimization. So I did not change audiences, nothing. The audiences are exactly the same, same. I'm just changing the conversion optimization event.
Blake Beus 4:29 Okay. And then the conversion optimization is a campaign level set. Correct. So you have three campaigns? Yes. All targeting the same audience. Yep. One is optimized for for purchase Correct. One, the optimization objective is Add to cart, and one is view content. And if you're not familiar with view content, that's essentially a page load. Yep. For but it's a conversion of a page load. Well, and
Greg Marshall 4:54 what's interesting about running those simultaneously is the more I'm talking about There's more. There's another ad account. So I'm actually doing the same thing with, we're optimizing for purchase, because they have enough purchase data for all we've done is duplicate the same audience look alike. 2554 year old female, three different times with different products. There's literally no increase in CPM. There's no increase in anything. But they're all getting purchases. Interest, right. And so I think, basically, this is too early to tell, right? It's only what it was seven days. So yeah, it's still early. But it's showing signs that there is some merit to optimizing for even soft conversions, and that it can help your entire account, even some of the campaigns that you're running that are not optimized for that highest level, right? Yeah,
Blake Beus 5:51 it will. And this makes me realize, like, I'm not entirely surprised by this. I mean, sometimes it's hard to come up with, with an idea or concept like this, you need the idea to kind of be Spark, which is why we're here talking about it. But when we take a step back and look at it, if you understand how AI doing finger quotes, AI works as we don't true AI doesn't exist. It's machine learning. Yep. But how that works. And understand that there are these signals that it takes to identify the success or failure of things. It's just a whole bunch of like, if then statements. But if you understand how that works, from a high level, you can then realize, oh, okay, this totally makes sense. We just need to keep sending positive signals that I helped kind of people self identify to the algorithm that they're interested. And then the algorithm can go out and find more people with those similar traits. Yep. And it just makes a ton of sense. Feed
Greg Marshall 6:51 it a good diet. Yeah. You
Blake Beus 6:52 feed it a good day. Yeah. We talked about nutrition. Right? Not just, you know, you're not just feeding it dessert all the purchase conversion. Yes, sir. Right. You're feeding it a whole
Greg Marshall 7:02 every course. Yeah. Vegetables. Yeah, carbohydrates. So I think it's, it's, it's interesting, though, I definitely would like to follow, I want to keep following up with this, I think maybe give you a small update every week to, to kind of maybe challenge some of these things that are given to us. Because another thing that I'm testing, because of this previous seven day test, is what happens if you have multiple conversions just within a single campaign. That's in a CBO. So campaign budget optimization. Because from what Depeche was saying, he says that, when you have set under CBO, the campaign keeps all the learning. So even if you turn off and duplicate new ad sets, the campaign itself was holding all of that data. So then with that being said, you could use this same formula, and keep duplicating ad sets, and build more and more data much quicker, and expand the size of your audiences over time. Because you can start with a laser targeted audience, duplicate it, and then put a bigger odds and a bigger audience. And hypothetically, if campaign budget optimization holds all those optimizations in there, and all the learnings, when you start to expand the broader, broader audiences, it should understand now who exactly we're going after. So you can find more of those people. I broader scale. So that's my next test is to actually see if there's merit to that. And what I'm going to test against it is, could you do the same at with ad set level, budgeting, keeping all the assets within the same campaign to really see if there's that big of a difference?
Blake Beus 8:53 Right? And if you do that you can only have one objective per campaign, even with a CBO? Correct? Correct. Correct. Right. Right. Okay. So you're basically layering, ever expanding audiences in the CBO setup, right? Because the data learning is, is housed under the campaign umbrella. That'll be interesting, allegedly, right? Like a legit legit, like a court of law in here.
Greg Marshall 9:21 But that's, that's kind of what I think, would be an interesting test to learn. Because if you could do that way, then you'd be able to systematically scale campaigns, and that matter, versus maybe more of like, chaotic manner of like, I think this is gonna work or maybe not right, and you can come up with a system until Facebook changes again, which will be a couple of weeks. Yeah. So that's how we cracked the code with a new code.
Blake Beus 9:52 Well, I'm interested to see how this plays out. And I'm definitely going to be testing out some of these things on my own products and funnels. In the near future for sure. Well, I
Greg Marshall 10:03 think that should segue us into the topic because these are all technical stuff right? You know messing with machine learning things duplicating answers and all that. But marketing never really changes from like, human behavior stamp. Yeah. And so you had a topic that you wanted to go over which I am excited to go into, which is what did you call ethical clickbait?
Blake Beus 10:28 Clickbait ethical quick, right. This is actually one of my favorite subjects. Headlines are one of the most fascinating things for me too. I mean, I know this sounds nerdy and dorky but I love when you start looking at headlines and start looking and realizing that someone somewhere for a good headline someone somewhere stood over that headline for for way longer than you think a person should up and and and came up with something that that made you click on and I fall for this stuff all the time. I need to I have a really good eye at not falling for the dumb clickbait I'm like yeah, absolutely. Especially news story. Yes. Clickbait I'm out of that most of the time Yeah. If if a news story says something like so and so may be wanting yada yada yada I'm out I'm not clicking on me maybes especially if it's like a political figure or something. I'm like, I want I want solid facts. But when it comes to marketing materials or or something like that, or or YouTube video Yeah, I'm, I love it. I love it. And this whole topic was was sparked by by a video that I shared with Greg Yeah. And the YouTube channel is Veritasium it's a Science Channel. I do science Sunday with my kids and we watch science YouTube videos in the morning. And this is one of our channels. And he has one on on clickbait Yeah, and he talks about it and it's it's a great video. I can't remember what the title of that video is. But it got me thinking about how how you can actually have ethical clickbait that does trigger that part of our brain and curiosity gets us curious, gets us interested gets us to click on that link. But then also delivers on what the curiosity you know, whatever piqued the curiosity, and that's what I would consider, you know, ethical clickbait the kind of clickbait that everyone hates is the is the clickbait that's its it tease is that something grand and big or curious or scandalous? And then when you click on it, it's a non story. It's a non issue later. It's unrelated. And then and then moves on. Yeah, I mean, you see, you see it all the time, I saw one for a political scandal. And I had pictures of two politicians. One of them is a politician from my state that I'm not too thrilled with. Yeah, all the time. And so I clicked on the article. And it was the scandalous headline. Yeah, I read the article and has one sentence about my sander. And it was actually something that he did good. Yeah, to oppose the the, the the scandalous thing. And but it wasn't like a super great thing, either. It was kind of just a half measure effort. And I was so disappointed that I feel Yeah.
Greg Marshall 13:22 Every once in a while you get one of those quickly, because you know, I'm susceptible like anyone else. But everyone's like, Oh, man, I clicked What a waste. I just wasted my time thinking that this is gonna be about something totally, you know, different or unrelated. So I think, but, you know, so let's talk about why headlines are important.
Blake Beus 13:42 Okay, so headlines are important, because they're literally the first thing that people read or look at it. I mean, if you have an ad, some the term headline gets a little bit mushy. When you have like an ad in Facebook, cuz you have the image, you can have text in the image. So your headline is technically probably the text in the image, not the text underneath the image. But if you don't have text in the image, the headline is probably either your first sentence in your ad copy, or the the text underneath the image. So it's basically the text that people see first. Yep. Is is going to be what we would consider a headline right now. So at least we have that defined. Now, if we're talking about ethical clickbait it, it needs to be something that builds curiosity, when I first started running ads, my ad copy was was so bad. Yeah, it was terrible. And it would be something like I've written my ticket. It would be something that focused solely just on the features of whatever I was selling. Right. So So let's see, when I when I launch my social media content plan. At first it was something like social media calendar. Yeah. You know, and that was my headline. Yep. And I'm like, I think thought it was gonna be awesome. Yeah, we've all been there. It wasn't, it wasn't. So you need to have something that piques curiosity. And honestly, there are books out there that cover this subject subject in tons of depth. But let's, let's just talk about a few commonalities that I think both you and I could see. And I don't have a formula for this. But I've seen some formulas that I think work, not not formulas, I've seen some things that work well that you could probably use. The first thing I would say is, you absolutely need to have an understanding about two things about your customer, what they actually want. And what they actually are afraid of. Yep. Right. So their, their hopes and dreams. Yep. And their their fears and insecurities, essentially. And you know, you
Greg Marshall 15:49 could also add to that to the second one, hate? Yes, that's because it's a powerful emotion.
Blake Beus 15:56 Yes, it is. It is. And if you have a good understanding of those things, then your headline can be centered around this the concept of push and pull, right? We're going to pull them towards their hopes and dreams through our product or service, or we're going to push them away from their fears, insecurities and hates because of our product. Yep. And so that would be kind of the the first thing. So with the social media content plan, I shifted my headline to and this worked way better to be something along the lines of never, never stare at a blank screen again, when publishing your social media account, something along those lines. I mean, it was probably more juicy than that. But, but yeah, so Greg, tell me, I mean, what are you thinking? Are some of the good things that give you a good a good headline?
Greg Marshall 16:45 Yeah, I think anything that draws big emotion, like you said postpone emotion and is very like polarizing, ooh, polarizing. Yes, that's absent. That's. So for example, if you have a love or a hate of something, then the headline by itself should be able to stir that emotion. Right. So it should trigger it in some way. For example, we all love Donald Trump. Right? Love.
Blake Beus 17:18 He's a polarizing person,
Greg Marshall 17:20 right? But they think about what is happening. I said, we all love Donald Trump, it becomes as uncomfortable. Yeah, because what it does is like, Donald Trump is a polarizing figure. And it draws big emotion on either side. And the way to get one side or the other to pay attention is actually like, use his name, and then say the opposite of the belief of the person watching it. So like Donald Trump does is the best, you know, president to ever, you know, be elected. And that's going to trigger one side, right?
Blake Beus 17:58 And why would that trigger the most?
Greg Marshall 18:00 I think it'll trigger more on bullet don't like that. Don't like him. So
Blake Beus 18:03 if you wanted someone to click on that headline that did not like Donald Trump, you would use the headline, Donald Trump is the best president Correct? Here's why.
Greg Marshall 18:16 Correct? Because what that does this like, there is no way that is possible, I have to see what kind of, you know, lie or made up thing that they're gonna say, and then I want to comment on it, which starts triggering a whole bunch of other things, right. And vice versa, you know, you would do it the other side. And so, to me, he's like the perfect sound because he is like the definition of
Blake Beus 18:39 polarizing no, and no one I know. And I know people that love him, and I know no one I know. Phil's lukewarm. Yeah, Donald, like he's a he's okay, or whatever. Yep. I don't know a single person like that. I only know people that love him or hate him. Correct. And that's what we mean polarizing and you can do the same thing with your product or service. Something along along those lines you can one strategy I've seen a lot of people do is they'll they'll take down like a common belief share about a particular thing. And then they'll attack that. That common belief like it could be something if I wanted to target if I wanted to trigger advertisers Sure. I could say something I could say something along the lines of Facebook ads are dead, you should not use them moving this day forward. And I will get every advertiser to click on that link. Now I need to if to make this ethical click I need to be free. I need to like deliver on that which I don't think I could deliver on that unless unless I had some serious proof about a specific use case in a specific industry where Facebook ads just completely dropped the ball and fails. Then you could probably use a headline like that and still make it ethical clickbait
Greg Marshall 19:51 well, and one thing that you just brought up I remember reading a book on Steve Jobs, and how he like prepared his speeches. I bought this book years ago, because I had to give a speech and I was like, Man, I, you know, I need a few pointers on how to position. And that was like the one that the only one that like made sense, but one of the things that he mentioned, is a good headline would actually be creating an enemy. Okay. And then this is what he did all the time with Microsoft. So he would build up the enemy, the story of Microsoft is bad. And we're good. Yeah. Right. And by creating headlines that maybe create an enemy, that's also very powerful as far as getting people to click it, because you're speaking to your base, essentially. Right, right. And that's another way I think of getting a headline to work really well, is to very powerfully talk about a subject that people feel attached to, and then prove it by showing the other side is wrong. Right? You see this in politics? Yes, with how they communicate about the left or the right or this. That's a good, it's a good thing to learn. If you're trying to get someone to consume something, your message is, is how do I speak to the base, where they're very attached to it, and then create an enemy of how they're trying to take this away from us? Oh, yeah, that's, that's like a very powerful, you know, click Beatty headline, is to be able to communicate that in a concise way.
Blake Beus 21:35 I think you just summarized American politics 100. Because I do feel like so much effort is put into turning, you know, the other side into the enemy, therefore, vote for me, because they're going to screw up everything. Regardless of what side you're on. That's the exact same message, I feel like, you know, is said, and we probably see that in a bunch of other ways in advertising, but because it's not politics, yep. We, we, we see it and we kind of don't think about what's actually, what's actually,
Greg Marshall 22:11 here's a question I have for you. Yeah. Since you're, you're a computer guy. Yeah. Right. So which computers better? Mac or Apple?
Blake Beus 22:21 Mac or apple? I mean, Windows
Greg Marshall 22:23 or Windows? Are or Apple windows? Or? Absolutely, that shows you how much I'm not. Which was better?
Blake Beus 22:32 So I'm, for me, it depends. And I'm an I'm an IT depends kind of guy. I'm not a super, super passionate about that argument, like some people are Yep. I personally use Mac computers. But I dislike everything else about the Apple ecosystem. I don't like I don't like iPhones. I don't like the air pods. I don't like iPads. I don't like any of those other things. But I do like Apple computers. So I'm a little bit of an anomaly. But most people do have that question. And they're going to have a very strong opinion, it's going to be Windows or it's going to be apple. And usually, if it's a Windows guy, the windows person gonna see well, Apple, Apple is they just try to control you with everything and try to force you to use everything in their ecosystem and all of that, whereas Windows is much more open. And I can do kind of whatever I want on it. And then you get the Linux people and they're just out in left field. Those guys are right, those guys are deep, and I fit in that category A lot of the times but the apple people will will talk about the sleek design, and the the new processor that's super fast, which it totally is, and all of these, all of these different things. But a lot of people are very passionate about that subject.
Greg Marshall 23:39 Well, I asked that question, because you're considered lukewarm. And look how many examples you just gave. Yeah. Microsoft is better than this. Apple is better than Linux better. Yeah. And those might even be all related. I don't know. But that's, that's the definition of like, if you're lukewarm, if you're trying to talk to people that are big time windows or big time Mac, or then you can basically kind of play off that and build the enemy on the other side. Right? Yeah. And that's, that's the whole point of like, the headline is, you almost have you almost have to do that, in order to spark someone's attention or grab, you know, grab their attention and interest. Because if not, it's just it's not going to be enough for them to go, I need to read this, I need to watch this. I need to do this.
Blake Beus 24:29 Right. Right. Which leads me into the next point that I wanted to bring out. And this is where a lot of people go wrong. And this is where I went wrong for so long with headlines. And I see this all the time. But but but when you ask most people, what's the objective of the headline? Why are you writing this ad? Why do you have this image? Why do you have this headline? What are you trying to get people to do? And most people will say, Well, I want to get them to buy my product. Sure that's wrong. The purpose of the headlines too far too far down the road. The the the objective of your ad, your ad, copy your ad image, your ad video and your headline, specifically your headline is to get them to take the next step in your sales cycle, the next step in your customer journey and for an ad that is to click
Greg Marshall 25:15 Yep, that's it.
Blake Beus 25:15 That's the the whole point of all of those things is to get someone to click. Yep. And then and then the the the objective of your sales page is to get them to add it to the cart not to sell yet. Yep, add it to the cart. Right. And here's another thing a lot of people fail to realize, in in any sort of sales journey for a customer, you have multiple headlines. You have a headline on your ads. Yeah, you probably multiple ads at the same time. You have a headline on your sales page or your product page. You have a headline in your cart. People don't realize this, that headline in your cart matters. And then you have a headline in the card processing page. Yeah. Right. And all those headlines need to be considered at each step of that process, to get people to move to the next step. Yep. Right. And, you know, your your headline on your cart page could be very, very simple and very generic, because you don't always know what cart what items are in the cart. But your headline could be something very simple, like reassuring them. Yeah, right. 30 day 30 day guarantee simple checkout process, something like that, right? 100% secure, yep, whatever could be reassuring, or it just just whatever to remove any sort of final objections someone might have. But that headline also counts. Yes. And it matters. And it needs to be looked at. Well, headline, also, one word trigger.
Greg Marshall 26:49 What the headline needs to do is trigger something. Yeah. Right. And so whether that emotion and it's triggered the emotions, whether that emotion is starting from, you know, this is outrageous, all the way to, you know, let's say they're going to go purchase that the car page, this is safe. Right? Right. So you're trying to move them on an emotional roller coaster, essentially with headlines. Yep. is communicating things in the most concise and powerful way to cause people to act? Right. And that's, that's what the headlines are all about. And I feel like some of the best ones I see. They use emotional words in them as well. That's like another tendency I tend to see is in the headline, it'll have some level of emotion. And the words, yeah, right. whether, you know, for me, some of the YouTube stuff that I see, that seems to work really well, is like using words like blasts, or, you know, things that that that talk about, like, essentially overreacting, if I were to make like one simple way of saying something that causes an overreaction, right is the type of word that tends to be, you know, in the headline and a marker that I see that uses this is the that Alex, rosy guy. On YouTube, he's really good because his head, I can tell he spends a lot of times headlines because he'll say, like, how I figured out the Starbucks business model, how maybe $100 million or something, right? Yeah. Things like that. Which say, like, that almost makes you say that's impossible. Clicked. That's impossible. This this guy's full of shit. There's no way that he did. But you know, he has done it, but he's using the headlines in a specific way. Yeah, to make you feel a certain way to click it. Alright.
Blake Beus 28:40 Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So before we wrap this up, I wanted to give people a couple of practical strategies that they could start using today. And my number one tip is I don't know, if you use Google Drive, or whatever, some sort of central way. My favorite thing that I do is I screenshot headlines and thumbnails and ads, and I put them in a folder called add inspiration. So whenever I come across one, while I'm browsing Facebook, or something like that, or YouTube or whatever, I screenshot it, and I put it in there and I think, oftentimes are called swipe files or whatever. But I think nearly everybody, if they're interested in advertising and marketing, they need to be doing that. Yeah. Even if you schedule some time. So you schedule 10 or 15 minutes to go look it up, get headlines. The other thing you can do is Facebook. Facebook has their ads library. And a lot of people don't know about this, but I think it's just facebook.com/ads/library or something like that. You can Google it, to find it. But you can go in there and type in any advertisers name and it'll pull up the ads that they're currently running. Yep. So I got a huge kick out of this during the 2020 election. because you can go look at that. And if it's a political ad, they will also publish how much money they spent. Yeah. So that was interesting to see how much money the campaigns are spent because they know which one is worse. I mean, I'll tell you both campaigns spent probably a little bit over $200 million on Facebook alone. Yeah, Facebook ads alone, which
Greg Marshall 30:22 is insane. And that's that's not including I saw a ton of YouTube.
Blake Beus 30:27 Oh, yeah. YouTube. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So anyway, but political ads. So if you think about this, if they're spending $200 million on Facebook alone, they are clearly spending a lot of money on the nation's best copywriters for ads, right. And the NES the nation's best video people for every video so that so when when you have a presidential campaign, go, you know, in the United States, wherever you go look at those ads, because they are structured so perfectly to to rise, emotion, and then screenshot the ones you think you can adopt the principle behind what they're doing to your products or services, and put those in your ad swipe.
Greg Marshall 31:10 Yeah. So I think that's a great tip as far as learning from the best because love him or hate him. Politicians, political campaigns, they are the best in the world, at coming up with direct response. I mean, you name it direct response, branding, public relations, they got the best of the best. And so that's a great way to learn. How are they positioning themselves on the products to drive a lot of emotion, because if you notice, the emotional, I guess, feeling of at least here in America, right now is nowhere near what it is around election time, no matter who's running, it doesn't matter who's running, it's always the same when it starts getting closer and closer, you can almost you know, you could feel the tension in the air. It's, I hate this guy hate that guy. And so I just feel like, it's a great tip to learn powerful headlines, how to structure them, and how to like effectively use them in your business, because you can use those same concepts in virtually any business, right create anatomy, create your, your, you know, your your base of users create, you know, a headline that really like hooks the person in and in the most concise way possible. And it should make them feel a very overreacting emotion in order for them to click it. If you get that that's when you know you're doing it right. And so when you talk about your swipe file, or your ad inspiration, you take a look at some of those if you if you notice the ones that tend to do really well, if you show them to other people or talk about what they're doing, the general response from the people you show it to is I hate that ad, or I can't stand when people do this. Yeah. Or when they market to me like this, that typically means is working. Because there's a huge emotion attached to it. Yeah, for example, Tai Lopez, right. Most people, I mean, he doesn't run as many ads anymore, like on Facebook, but like you as someone five years ago, what do you think of Tai Lopez, it was almost the same as Donald Trump. Like, oh my goodness, this guy, he's flashing this and he's doing that I can't stand it. He's a Ferrari. And, you know, vote and on and on and on. But he also is highly effective, because he's, it's almost like you have to have the guts to drive that kind of emotion. Right? Right. Because that does take you do have to have a stomach for that. And I do feel like people like
Blake Beus 33:45 Tai Lopez really, is a little bit too far. It's on that last line of clickbait because he's really promising some pretty crazy stuff. But you can use those principles and shift it so that you so that it works for you. And then it becomes ethical and for raining that bad. Because yeah, I get it like, yeah, Tai Lopez, definitely, he's flashing cash all over the place and basically, very heavily implying that if you follow what he's doing, you'll, you'll be fine. You can be flashing this kind of cash to all your friends. And that's just not realistic. Now, if you're selling something, you know, like T shirts or whatever, you can use the same principles of envy of emotional poll, whatever, to to sell a t shirt, and there's less of an ethical correct, you know, dilemma there because you're not promising by this t shirt, and you're going to be flashing cash to all your friends. More like buy this t shirt and your friends are gonna laugh and think you're like the cool person or you statement or whatever. You're still drawing On that same principle, but you haven't crossed the line over into the unethical side. Yes. of clickbait.
Greg Marshall 35:06 Yeah. So I think with that being said, you know, I think, work on your headlines focus heavily on improving them and drawing more emotion. There's like, if there was a hack, it would be focus all of your effort on driving the motion. Yeah. Right. So, with that being said, Blake, how do people get ahold of you?
Blake Beus 35:31 I'll just go to Blake calm. I got all the contact information on there.
Greg Marshall 35:34 And if you need to get ahold of me, go to Greg marshall.co. And if you want to book a call, feel free to enter your information and I'll reach out and then Blake
Blake Beus 35:46 Yeah, you can reach out to me on there and we can I have a membership where I help people with social media marketing strategies. That's super fun. Oh, that membership, a lot of people love it that are in there and you can sign up on there. It's called SM three. And in that and then you can contact me on my website. So we'll talk to you guys later. All right. See you Bye.
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Transcript
Greg Marshall 0:00 Let's talk about right before we always we almost get our topics from our pre talk, basically before we hit record, so they were talking about algorithms and bundles, and you know, just kind of do things differently. So let's kind of first start off with, let's actually talk about the bundles that you're telling him with Gary Vee. Oh, okay. Let's actually start with that. Okay. I think that that's super important, because there's a huge lesson and what he did, which was, he made an unbelievable unique, exclusive offer to accomplish a certain goal. Now go ahead and share with us. Yeah, that was
Blake Beus 0:40 Yeah, so so if you don't know who Gary Vee is, you're living under a rock, but that's okay. It's fine. He's He's a social media guy. He's got a bunch of books and things like that. He's got a new book launching that I honestly don't even know the name of the book. It's like 1212 and a half something. Yeah, and has something to do with business and marketing. But I've seen a lot of news articles talking about how Gary Vee sold a million dollars worth of his books book in 24 hours, because he offered an NFT to two people that that bought the book. And if you're not familiar with an NFT, not to go to off in the deep end, but it's basically a digital asset. It could be a video or an image or something like that, and your ownership is is granted through blockchain technology. And there's several different marketplaces out there. And I don't want to dive in deep to the technicalities of that, but that's essentially what it is. But it's a digital good. And so what how he structured his offer is if you you bought 12 books, you he would give you one of his new NF T's, which I think is literally just an image. Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's all it is. NFT is you would get one of these NF T's for free and your ownership would be verified through again the blockchain. So it's like an image plus this like blockchain thing. And it's a buzz buzz phrase. So but I've seen a ton of people just gush over Gary Vee for for using a new way to use NF T's and yada yada, yada, yada, but, but for me, I don't feel like that was the magic of the offer. And I feel like the magic of the offer was, he sat down and thought, I want to sell more books. But people usually only buy one book at a time. Like how many how many times? Have you bought more than one of the exact same book Greg like never I never do. I never never I mean, maybe maybe I'll buy an extra a year later and give it to someone
Greg Marshall 2:34 as a gift. Or I'll do maybe an audio that yeah, full extent. That's the full
Blake Beus 2:39 extent, right. And that's what that's how most people consume books because their books, Gary Vee came up with a plan to get the same person to buy not one or two or three books, but 12 at a time, by giving them something, this digital asset that literally costs him nothing to give them. Yep. That's the magic to me. And I feel like that magic can happen to many, many, many other businesses without having to dive into the NFT space, because that can be kind of overwhelming for some people or whatever. But I thought that was fascinating. Like, yeah, I
Greg Marshall 3:16 think, kind of the uniqueness of that offer is it's obviously well thought, as far as wanting to hit the number one book selling lists, right, knowing the knowing the rules of the game. Yeah, right. That's what I think he's very good at is dissecting the rules of the game, and then maximizing his opportunities within those rules, right. So number one, he's gonna sell even more books, because not only did he do pre order of 12 books at a time, right, which gets him a million copies. But those numbers will also impact his, you know, near Times bestseller list, which will place him number one, in all the categories that, you know, he's looking to be in front of which gives them even better distribution. So that selling of 12 books, is not only 12 books, but it's also premium placements. Yeah. On all of the distribution centers to buy more of his book. Yeah. And grow his following even bigger. And so it's, it's a genius move genius. And it's something that I think what Gary Vee does better than I believe anyone on the planet is, he has the guts to do things that people won't do, right, like most people will not even think about. Let me go ahead and offer 12 books. Right. So to one customer, right?
Blake Beus 4:41 I mean, many, many e commerce companies when they think of bundling offers, they think of Alright, if someone's buying a t shirt or a mug or something, let's get them to buy maybe a pair of shorts or something else with it. When something like this, Gary said, what kind of get him to buy 12 Yep, right 12 have the exact same thing. Is that Is that doable? And now I'm thinking, Okay, so for any e commerce clients or whatever, I'm thinking, why why have we been thinking so small? Why not think way bigger? And say, Yes, you bought this t shirt for 25 bucks. Do you want 10 of them?
Greg Marshall 5:18 Yeah, why not?
Blake Beus 5:19 Why not is no rule 10 of them. And And here's 10 of them. And you get this free thing. I think the other magic was, the only way to get that free thing was to buy the bundle as well. You couldn't buy the NFT in the marketplace or anything. You had to get 12 books
Greg Marshall 5:41 and to get it not only that, it's not only a unique offer, but by doing it that way, it also creates urgency. Yeah. Because then, you know, this is a scarce deal. And it could be going away soon. Yeah, therefore, I must do it now, which is every marketers goal and dream is to get you to buy now. Right? Not next week. Right buy right now. And so it's a great way to position an offer to be extremely impulsive. And to create a buying frenzy. Yeah. Is to make that offer that unique so that I'm happy brought that up this morning about because that that can you can learn a lot from that. Right and your own business. Yeah. Well,
Blake Beus 6:22 and I think I think I mean, let's talk about some specifics on how a non Gary Vee business because let's be honest, like, yeah, I don't think Gary Vee listens to this podcast. But for your for your business. You know, you you the listener? Well, there's lots of different ways you could apply this, Greg, Greg, what are you thinking like for maybe an E commerce business? And maybe even a service base? Sure. digital product business? What do you think?
Greg Marshall 6:48 I mean, I think you could probably just pack is like, whatever it is that you have it? I mean, it kind of makes sense, right? I mean, I think of my own purchases, there is a specific type of shirt that I have that I actually do own 12 or 13. No, yeah. And if if and it's it's actually a workout shirt. It's like a very specific kind that I like, it's the same color is the same people probably think I'm wearing the same shirt every day. But it's if this company were to offer me buy 15 shirts for this price. And it's the same exact shirt. I would do it. Yeah. Right. And so I can even give you like
Blake Beus 7:24 a since it's a workout shirt that can give you something for free. Yeah. As part of that that's related to working out. Yeah. And whatever that whether that's I don't know, a headband, or hat or some shorts. Yeah. Or socks or something. Or maybe even something crazy. Like some earbuds. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 7:43 I mean, but that would first that would solidify the deal. Yeah, that would be like, I have to buy it now. Yeah. But that's what I'm thinking like, you know, if you got like E commerce, business, e commerce stores sell T shirts, or maybe jewelry products. I'm like that, really thinking about? Well, how could you get? How could you create the messaging that the person when they go to purchase? Feels like, I feel so strongly about this. I like this product so much that not only will I buy one for myself, but even possibly for all my friends and family. Yeah, right. That's a great way to package it. And there's no better way to authority interested in the product, then they might be interested in more of that same product. Yeah.
Blake Beus 8:24 Right. Yeah. And I think I think the incentive needs to be unique, probably even something that the buyer has not heard of. Yeah. Because everybody's heard of, you know, free shipping on orders, or by one guy, like everybody's heard of those things. And so you want it to be something that's, that's different and unique.
Greg Marshall 8:44 I actually, you know, what, sorry to cut you off. Because I don't want to forget, when you ask this, I actually did give a client an idea of this, he sells. He has a hip hop community. Okay. And most of the hip hop music, not all but most of it is like retro, right? Like 90s, who, like kind of the older rappers and that culture. And he sells a he sells a book. Right? And his goal is he wants to get this book out to as many viewers so I told him to create a better offer. Instead of just selling the book say if you purchase the book, you can actually he does a zoom podcast, okay with the with the actual artists. I said, for the first 50 people who buy or whatever you position where if you get the book, you get access to q&a directly with the hip hop artists themselves. Right? And I said make that the bonus. And it'll make people buy more of the books and it's worth and that's just a kind of a similar angle of like purchase something that is available and people will see before a billion times but offer something else that's unique that they haven't been offered before to increase conversion.
Blake Beus 10:00 Yeah, now now make that an offer to buy 10 of his book exam. But
Greg Marshall 10:03 I didn't even think of that. Yes. Next level
Blake Beus 10:06 that is next level. Yeah, I think that's amazing. I should actually send that client the link, you have yet to say, try to mimic this. Yeah. 10. So like, 10 of those, and then you get direct q&a, we have a hip hop artist, because that is a cool, that's a really unique offer. And that's definitely gonna resonate with people.
Greg Marshall 10:22 Yeah, I think, you know, and we, and before this, we were even talking about, you know, you got to have powerful offers. But another thing to think about just to do things a lot differently, then your competitors, right, that's the one way that you can learn from that is to try to do everything differently than competitors. And we were talking about algorithms and one of the gentlemen that, you know, I think he has very good information. I think I don't want to mess his name up, but Dipesh a Deepesh. Yes. deepish men, men baleia men deal. Yeah, I think he's, he's great. Super good. super intelligent, always has great insight. And he had mentioned something on a video that he ran an ad towards to me. So hopefully, if he does hear this, your ad is working. That sent from Facebook directly to a YouTube link, which I always thought Facebook would squeeze that even if you're paying for it, I always thought they would almost like give you a negative relevance score because of that. But I watched the content that he had in the video, and he talked a lot about
Blake Beus 11:26 just just for clarification, why why would you think that Facebook would give you negative, like a negative relevance going over relevant score, if you're linking off to a YouTube video in a Facebook app,
Greg Marshall 11:37 specifically the YouTube just because YouTube's their competitor, gotcha. And so that's why I would think they, you know, they don't want you to go there. But obviously, it must be working because the ad was served too. And in the video, he talked a lot about positive signals, and optimizing for ads and the importance of doing things more than just like optimizing for purchase. And sending more positive signals inside of your ad account to get actually better results. And it's a different way of thinking which I was telling you. Before we hit record, I've accidentally done some of these things just as like thoughts of like, why can't you optimize in this fashion, where it would actually help your conversions. And in my past experience it has, but I've never been able to actually explain why I just saw that it worked. So I would just keep doing it. But he actually went more in depth with you know that it's it's okay to actually optimize for Add to Cart versus purchases, if you don't get a lot of purchases. Yeah. Because that actually, that conversion rate information is getting fed back into your ad account. And that could have a less, it could be less impactful than if you were doing Add to Cart. And I always had the I guess false assumption that if you're not optimizing for purchase, and just only add to carts, that somehow you're targeting, like a less quality user. But you you mentioned something that I really liked to say. But that would be we would be assuming that we're giving the algorithm too much credit. Right,
Blake Beus 13:16 right. And I feel like a lot of people do do that. I know I've kind of fallen in that camp. And a lot of it definitely has, I even think a lot of gurus out there people teaching others how to run Facebook ads fall into this camp of the algorithm being super smart. It's, it's great, but it's not all intelligent. It's not it can't predict who's going to purchase it can guess, who might be likely to purchase. But one of the things that people bump into is they say, Okay, well, if I'm targeting add to carts, I'll get I'll get a ton of add to carts and no purchases. But here. And that comes from place of assuming that the algorithm knows who are the people that will just add to cart? And who are the people that will just purchase. But the thing is, is those groups are the same people because anybody that purchases needs to add to cart first. Yeah. They have to add to view content. And all of those things. And so when we take a step back and look at how algorithms actually work, you you they're not smart, they're not these intelligent, we say AI they are not artificial intelligence. The correct term is machine learning and you have to train the machine to do what you want it to do. And these are really really sophisticated machine learning things. But But where I started going when you started talking with me about this and when you were saying that Depeche was talking about positive signals. I think that kind of really resonated with me and got me thinking about okay, so, positive signals are identity buyers that you send into the ad platform, the machine learning platform to train it saying these are the types of people that I want. So anybody that view content, they have to view content before they can add to cart. Yep. So I want I definitely want these people, this is a positive signal. When I send, hey, you know, the objective is Add to Cart, these are the people adding to cart, that's another positive signal. I'm training the algorithm. And Facebook knows that view content is a lower priority than add to cart, they know that already. You just need to get the data in there, the types of people and then the purchases when you're sending the purchase data back into the Facebook algorithm or any ad platform algorithm. That's another positive signal. So you're sending positive signals at each layer of the conversion funnel. Yep, yep. And it's not surprising that you're seeing better results that way.
Greg Marshall 15:48 Well, I've seen so a couple of examples that I have. And this typically tends to work really well with lower budget clients, meaning like, they don't have a ton of money to spend, right, somewhere around the 20 to $50 day range. And what I found is, there was a, in fact, this happened a couple times, where someone's only spending 2030 bucks a day, you would optimize for purchase, the purchases don't come in, as well as if you optimize for add to carts, you actually I was actually getting more volume, and less cost. And the cost of purchase was lower on the Add to Cart than the actual going direct to purchase. Which that started to make me wonder, like, interesting. So I'm going after, quote, unquote, less valuable part of the funnel Add to Cart. And this even happened with view content. I showed I think I showed you my ad account one time, one of my customers where I showed you, I'm actually optimizing for view content, but my costs per purchase are actually lower. Yes. And the purchase was right. And my theory is, well, it's more important to get more data into the account, because I found that if you do optimize for like, let's say purchase, it seems like it does tend to lower your view content, add to carts, and other kind of top end funnel data. Yeah. Which I believe slows down learning of your ad account. Yeah, right. And some of the best ad accounts that I've grown. I actually started with, which is, which is kind of funny, because it's not, I don't know if it's ever been recommended this way. But I started with view content first, and then move to the next objective Add to Cart. After we got 1000s of view content. And then built up the add to cart and Informatica cart, then moved to purchase. Yeah. And it seemed like the results are way more stable. Yeah. And you still get purchase off view content or add to cart?
Blake Beus 17:52 Did you leave the view content that add cart objective? campaigns running?
Greg Marshall 17:57 I did not. You did? No. And that's actually something you brought up earlier this morning, where I was like, I wonder if you were to actually just do all of them in a row, if that actually would improve and keep them all running. Keep them all running. Yeah, like when you were talking about this? And I'd like I did, like you said, I
Blake Beus 18:13 did bring it up before we hopped on here. I've never actually done that. And I'm definitely gonna go try that. Well, you know, see what's gonna happen. Because if, if that does work, I can see that being a much more reliable and stable way to get results. Because one of the problems everybody runs into with their ad accounts is you, you have a week where you're just crushing it. I mean, you, you and I were together. When I was thinking of one week that you're probably talking, I had one week where we're doing $5,000 a day on my digital product. And I was like, This is amazing. Yeah. And then the results completely fizzled out into a bunch of different things. But, um, everybody has physical problems. Everybody has Phil's a problem. But I wonder if you run an ad campaign with the objective of you content, a campaign with the objective of an decarnin campaign with the objective of purchase? It would make sense because you're giving all these positive signals, it would make sense that you're going to have much more stable results long term because having a really great week is fantastic. But having a good we're having a good week for 52 weeks in a row is way better
Greg Marshall 19:23 is way better. Yeah. And versus a great week, and then a non existent we finally got a great, it puts you on the bipolar rollercoaster ride away. Oh, man. But I think here's something that you just reminded. You asked me if I had done that simultaneously, what there there was, you can't do this anymore. Which which makes me think there is merit to this, okay. Where I was running a campaign for a specific customer and they they spend about, I don't know, $10,000 a month, and we were running a conversion campaign. We started it at view content, kept the cat everything the same. And then after we built up a whole bunch of data, then I switched the delivery optimization and the conversion event to that add to cart. And then I switched it again to purchase, then I didn't even
Blake Beus 20:20 like launch new campaigns, You're just swapping Yep, the objective.
Greg Marshall 20:24 Now you can't do that anymore. They changed it. But when I did it that way, everything stayed 100% stable. It never like we didn't have any dips. And so then the final one was the optimization for value, because ad learned from the ad set. And we've been running that for six months with no changes, no change the ad, no change that set nothing. The only change is where we were changing the conversion events, and the delivery optimizations within the ad set that whole time. Interesting. So my theory was, well, if I can get this ad set to just build so much data, that it would be learning just from all the past data, regardless of if I change the conversion event. And it says you're going back into learning limited, because it's not really because it still has all the previous day that that I built into it. Which makes me think there's merit to maybe if you just have those types of campaigns running at all times, the way you said, to view content, add to cart, initiate checkouts purchase, that it would serve that same purpose of building up data and continuously feeding more into it.
Blake Beus 21:35 Yeah, and I think so. So the old school way of doing this would would be to have like a top of funnel ad and then you have an Add to Cart objective ad ad campaign and you exclude people that are you do a lot of these exclusions. I correct me if I'm wrong, but in my experience recently, having these different buckets where you're including and excluding people has not worked as well. No, I mean, it's actually were terribly terrible. So what I'm thinking is you run these ads in parallel, and you just let them overlap. Yep. And see what happens.
Greg Marshall 22:11 Yeah, so I think, I think what, what, based off this episode, what you should take from it is we're really trying to feed as much data as possible
Blake Beus 22:23 in a good positive indicator. Yeah, positive indicators like positive he calls them signals, you patch that yes, signals, positive signals,
Greg Marshall 22:31 but you want to you want to, like send those good signals, like, oh, yeah, they did this good thing, they had a constant thing. And you're like educating almost like your own computer. You're teaching it, how to get the results that you want. But the phrase I said before we had record was viewing it almost like nutrition and a healthy body. Were like purchases are like protein. But you can't just only live off protein, like you have to have other nutrients like vitamins and minerals, and carbohydrates and fats. And so I'm viewing the rest of those conversion events as you still need to protein carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and you need to feed that into the body, in order for you to get the best results possible.
Blake Beus 23:21 Part of a healthy, healthy, balanced diet. I've heard people say, I've heard people say, you've got to feed the machine talk about the algorithm. And this, this is like a different way of visually, yeah, which I really love your it's like, literally, I want to feed the machine good, healthy. Yeah, I want to just a vegan strong,
Greg Marshall 23:36 I don't want it to be a competition cutting face with only eating protein. So this, this has been interesting for me to have captured that information off, you know, off that piece of confidence. So with that being said, I think our next episode, we can go into more depth on this kind of case study. In fact, there's a couple clients that I know would be interested in being involved in testing this this area out. So maybe what we do is follow up with some actual data or at least follow up and with some of your clients or maybe when your products. Let's run a week's worth of different objectives. Yeah. And then let's come back and talk about our learnings and see see what happened.
Blake Beus 24:25 Absolutely, absolutely. I want to this whole conversation reminded me of something we didn't talk about before. And it got me thinking about positive signals. So uh, want to get your thoughts on this. So I have a subscription product where people are billed every month, month after month. I'm gathering that the purchase data into my own internal systems. But I realized I'm not actually sending the lifetime value purchases back into my ad platforms, which I can Yes, I wonder if sending that back into Those recurring monthly purchases back into the ads platform saying, hey, this this person purchased again. Yeah, they purchased again, they purchased again, I wonder if that would have an overtime positive impact on the quality of the targeting that Facebook does. And Google does behind the scene. Yeah. What do you think
Greg Marshall 25:18 about I think 100%. And in fact, that one client, I tell you spent attend, I also left that part out, they do feedback, data, offline, uploaded data back into their ad account, so that they can constantly see what's actually coming in. And I think it makes a huge impact. And in fact, some of the some of the accounts that I have found that done the best, which is this is actually kind of a unique finding, right now have followed that procedure, continuously feeding back into their ad accounts, even the offline conversions. Right. And even if like Facebook isn't, you know, deduplicating perfectly my mind, I don't really care. Because it they're still getting the data. Yeah. So it's like, I mean, I'm looking at just my revenue, right? Like, did the money come in? Through my store? That's what I'm based off of. But if Facebook can get data that's 95% accurate, so that they can help my targeting? I'd much rather do that. Yeah.
Blake Beus 26:19 And and I think that's a strategy that's going to lead to better results. Long term. And when I'm talking long term, I'm not talking like three months. Yeah, I'm talking years. Yes, Facebook ads as a as a platform is not going away. Google ads as a platform is not going away, they're only going to get better. And MT better is maybe not the right word. They're going to get bigger over time there. Yeah, there's there's going to be different channels and avenues and everything. And if you have a good ad account with years, literally years worth of positive signal data, I can't imagine that you're going to be better off every time there's a new change or a new regulation or something that comes through, you're probably going to not have a dip or a hiccup in your ads as much if you have this long term of production
Greg Marshall 27:08 data. So So yeah, so I think we should we should circle back with some testing. In fact, I'm going to I'm going to do a call with a client right now, that I believe will be very interested in testing this out because she's very open minded and looking for ways to always improve. Yeah, so she would be a great account to test. Yeah, so absolutely.
Blake Beus 27:34 All right. Well, you know, everybody go try this out for yourself. Yes. Know what you think.
Greg Marshall 27:39 Yes. And until next week, you guys have a good one and talk to you guys later. All right.
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:00 All right, so we just, you know, talk before we put the hit record by a lot about a topic that I think is is more important than most businesses, I believe think, which is, when you're running ads or your marketing, no matter what you're doing, you're sending them to some level of a website. Yeah. But no one's ever really thinking about well, when they get to the website. Yeah, it should be a good experience. So one of the questions that I was asking before we hit record was, what is what's the most important thing when it comes to user experience? And tell me a little bit about why we should be paying attention to this?
Blake Beus 0:44 Yeah. Well, I mean, we literally talked about this for over an hour I hitting the record button, we should we should hit record earlier. But yeah, a lot of a lot of people don't think about page speed. I mean, I mean, they think about it a little bit, but they don't think about it. In the terms that having a slower Page Speed actually cost you money, especially if you're running ads, or you're putting efforts into to to writing content for SEO purposes or whatever. PageSpeed is an extremely important thing.
Greg Marshall 1:16 And let me ask you this, it says you said, yeah, if you're running ads, yeah, because this is something that I think, would really be helpful to know. Let's do a comparison. Okay, so let's say one website, loads significantly faster than another, right? Yeah. And that, but every other variable is the same. They're both running the same exact ads, with the same wording everything creatives, the offer, everything's the same except one page is loading significantly faster. What would you predict is the difference in revenue between one versus the other, if everything else was the same, except one was way faster than the other?
Blake Beus 2:01 I mean, I've seen, I've seen some campaigns and things that I've worked on, see a 20 to 50% lift in conversions, just by increasing the Page Speed, which, which is kind of this positive feedback loop if you want to think about right, so. So I'm Sam running, running some ads. One of the indicators that Google or Facebook is looking for is how many conversions that ad is getting, by getting more conversions than Google and Facebook will say to themselves, algorithmically, hey, that's a good app, it's working for people and people seem to really like it. Let's give more high quality traffic to that ad. And it makes you more competitive over other ads, or whatever. So like I said, 30 50%. And if your page speed is really, really, really slow, you're you're just not going to get any conversions, because people are going to think your site is broken, which effectively it is if your page is slow. And so you know, as far as how big of a lift we're going to get if we speed up a page, it could be massive, if you're not getting any conversions, because it's that slow. Got it.
Greg Marshall 3:11 So and even if you are getting conversions, if it's a really slow website, you can get a 50% lift. So if you're getting let's say you're getting 10 conversions, for every 1000 people that go to your site, then if you can get a 50% lift, and you will get what 15 Yeah, so if if you're getting five more conversions, and let's say your average order value is you know, 50 bucks, you would be getting an additional $250 That you're essentially missing out on Yeah, because your site is slower. Absolutely. And if that's every day, yeah, then that starts to compound. So then you're talking about 1000s of the house dollars per month.
Blake Beus 3:53 And like I said, it's a it's a positive feedback loop. Because then Google, even if it's just search engine optimization, or SEO, or whatever, Google and Facebook, or they know, you've got their tracking codes on their site, they know what's going on. And they say, Well, this site's doing really well. There's the the page pages are loading fast, people seem to really enjoy the content and they're converting, so let's make that let's bump them up in the search engine list. Let's let's put them you know, from from ninth place to second place, and then you get more high quality traffic, right because from the top three results down the the drop off of click through rates in search engines is huge. Yes, massive. And it's the same thing with ads. If you're if you're running search ads on Google, you know, you're you're above those top three results if if you're competing properly against the other people. Many people want to compete with budget, but they need to realize that another currency they can compete with is PageSpeed. You can actually be in the number one spot and be paying less for that traffic and less per click than the number two spot if your page is running fast.
Greg Marshall 4:56 So one of the things we did some analysis on a couple pages before we hit the Record mode. We, you know, there was some valuable things that you mentioned, it looks like to me, correct me if I'm wrong looks like the biggest thing that slows the website speed down, is the size of the picture? Or having video?
Blake Beus 5:18 Yes, yeah, there's the top three, I would say the size of the picture, video. And tracking scripts like Facebook, pixel, Google tracking scripts, or whatever. And so you, there's always this trade off, right? Like, you need to have the tools in place you need for marketing. But it's, it's like you said earlier, if we wanted a page that would have a fastest page load speed, perfect scores across the board, we would have a page with, you know, maybe a sentence of text and nothing else on there. And we will get perfect scores on all these tracking tools. But you're not going to convert with that, you've got to have this push and pull. You need things like tracking scripts and stuff. But you need to not go nuts with the tracking scripts. A lot of people especially if your site's been around for a long time, you're tracking scripts, you could have all of these old scripts from way back when when you try to marketing strategy and installed this script. And maybe it's maybe something like ad roll memory. That was that was dead. Yeah, longtime they're still around, but but you might have this ad roll script on your page, you're not doing anything with it, just pull that off, right? image sizes, you can reduce the image sizes and, and a lot of times people will snap a picture with their phone and upload it to the site and not realize that your phone these high quality cameras on your phone, they take pictures that are 13 megabytes large, which is huge for a webpage. And you just don't don't need that. So you need to compress them down or resize them or crop them down to the right size. And then as far as, as video goes, if you're a technical person, you can actually write some code so that after the whole page loads, then you load the video. Or you've probably seen some people, when you go to their site, they have a video, you click on it takes a second, then the video loads, and then you got to click on it again, actually hit play. Yes, that's a speedy strategy out there delaying the load of the video until you actually show interest. And so there's these strategies. But the easiest one for most people that are non technical is images. Got it, look at your image sizes. Use use use the tool to compress it squish dot app, squish that as a web web app that I use a lot for my clients super easy to compress images and things that way
Greg Marshall 7:31 exclu style app? And what about like, you know, we also talked about the Google is correct and run Google amp? Yo, is there any reason to try to utilize this as part of a strategy? And in my mind, I'm thinking, Could an e commerce Store? You know, I've got a lot of e commerce Store clients. Could they use something like this? And I remember you said there's a trade off of like, you can't track as well, using pixels. But if you use Google ads or Google Analytics, explain that a little bit. Yeah. So
Blake Beus 8:06 um, let me give people a little bit of a rundown on what amp is. So So Google amp is a service that Google offers for free. And what it does is it scrapes your page, makes a optimized version of it, and then hosts it on Google's actual servers. And then when you search to it from Google, you know, webs the search engine, it will load that version of your page instead of your site, because it will load way, way, way faster. But as part of optimizing it, they, they will sometimes strip out scripts, unless you write them in a way to tell Google amp, hey, we need this. We need this JavaScript in there. So oftentimes, I mean, when it first launched, the Facebook pixel didn't work. I think that's been fixed. And they feel that over Google Analytics will work because it's a Google property. But some of you've written any custom scripts or things like that, they may not load because you're loading this optimized version. So there is a little bit of a trade off there. The but the pages load insanely fast. And you do rise up in search engine results if you do turn on amp. So there's there's this kind of give and take there. If you're if you're running some, some custom code to split test something on your page, or you have some custom interactivity on your site or something like that, that may not work on Google Apps. So you just got to know
Greg Marshall 9:35 what about Okay, so let me ask you this, because this is something that what if you don't really, what if you don't care as much from the pixel inside. You just want to be able to make sure you're ranking better and that people have a better user experience. Granted that you're tracking all your other metrics on the back end, right? then would it be beneficial to use it?
Blake Beus 10:03 Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like anything you can test it out. Got it? You can turn it on and try it.
Greg Marshall 10:10 So you can't turn it on. And ah, yeah. Okay, so I wasn't sure I didn't know if he had like, completely go all in like making an app. So now
Blake Beus 10:21 you can turn it off. But yeah, you can test it out and see, right? Well, one of the things a lot of people have run into is, this is seems like less of a model now than it used to be. But it still is a model. But where people have a blog that we get lots and lots and lots of hits, and one of the ways they would monetize that blog is they would have ads on the blog, right, and they will get paid by people clicking on those ads. If you expand beyond Google Display Network, which honestly for a content creator in this way, doesn't pay out that great and you expand all of these other ad networks that exist out there that you've probably never heard of. Yep, that pay out better. Those ads may not run got it
Unknown Speaker 11:05 for for you actually experienced that. Yeah. Yeah. And so you,
Blake Beus 11:09 you have to know, the ins and outs. And you have to understand and so if your business model relies on that type of monetization strategy, amps not not going to work for you got it. Got it.
Greg Marshall 11:23 Right. And that's maybe why initially, the company I was working with those client, they were running into the issue where they're trying to use the new app. But the ads, the ads at the top, didn't work. Yeah. And they're using another not Google Display Network, but another ad network to monetize it. And so with, so what about this does it have? Can you still use Google Analytics and Google and yeah, absolutely. So that Google fire shoot
Unknown Speaker 11:52 themselves with the flow? Okay.
Greg Marshall 11:54 And, you know, really that question, is, there's two reasons why I'm asking that question. It's like, in my mind, I have it as what can an E commerce client use? And then what can a service based business use? Right? And so far, it sounds like a service based business could really benefit from using app if it does help you speed things up? Yeah,
Blake Beus 12:18 definitely. And I mean, you really just, you and I talked about this all the time, you need to think about your monetization model. If if you have a service that pays out big Yeah, right, then you can be a lot more loosey goosey, and not have your stuff all together. Because if every time you get a client that is $50,000 revenue, then it doesn't matter. If you aren't optimized, and you have to spend $1,000 to get that client, it doesn't matter because you still made $49,000 As your ad spend, right. But if you're doing something like e commerce or whatever, then your margins are a lot tighter, because your product costs you have shipping costs and everything like that. But with E commerce, I mean, Google, Google and Facebook, they both love ecommerce companies. And Google has Google Shopping. Facebook has its its shopping platform as well, we can both you can import products into both of those and everything. So, and I don't have experience with this specifically myself. But I highly doubt using amp for an E commerce site is going to have any negative impacts. I would bet that they've got that figured out by now, amps been around for five or six years now. So it's not new.
Greg Marshall 13:27 It's not new news. Just it's just another way because in my mind, I think from a strategy standpoint, most people that are trying to be found to be found at Google. Yeah. So it makes the most sense to use all of their products. Yep. Because they're probably going to reward you. I know, they probably wouldn't say that. But they're probably gonna reward you for using everything they own. Right? Yeah.
Blake Beus 13:50 Yeah, I think, in my opinion, you're totally right. But also you shouldn't have all your eggs in one basket, right? Yep. And Google's Google is actually pretty good about, you know, if you have all your eggs in their basket, they they're pretty good enough. accidentally or intentionally screwing you over Facebook on the other hand, yeah, I mean, I would I would if you're using all their products using Google Shopping, you're using Google amp you're using analytics. You're using Google ads. There's definitely some synergy there. But I would also have products listed in other places got you maybe list your your ecommerce products in in you know Amazon or Newegg where people don't know you can list product, your own products on Newegg. You can list them on eBay, you can list them, you know, on Facebook, all of these different places and I would have presence, you know, as many places as is feasible. Yep. Because there's obviously some complexities when you have coxless got it all places.
Greg Marshall 14:49 So and it sounds like for the biggest thing that you want is to pay attention to the speed. Right the speed is probably the key He outside of like laying your side? Yeah, the speed is really what's going to impact the user experience. Yeah, if you, because I'm
Blake Beus 15:11 technical, and you, you probably approach this problem differently, because you come at it from an advertising marketing side. But whenever I'm helping a client with ads, and we see a significant dip in performance, my first thought is, did the PageSpeed get affected somehow? Yeah, it's someone upload a massive image. Yes, accidentally, and drive our PageSpeed down. And that's the first thing I always look at. You probably I mean, I'm curious, what do you look at? When you see a dip in performance? What's the first thing you look at?
Greg Marshall 15:38 I mean, because I've been around you for so long. It really is that, isn't it? Yeah. It really is, like, Oh, something must have changed on here. First, is it speed? And then second? Did we change the words on the offer, right, because this happens often with clients will be actually running ads, and then they'll change what the landing page says, without letting me know. And then all of a sudden, it'll be like, the page converting to 3% 2.5 or whatever. And then all of a sudden is at point five, eight. And you're like, what just happened? It just like, completely dip, then I'll say the first thing is, did you change anything on the page? Did you add anything just to track them? So yeah, I mean, because like I said, because I've been around you? I think about the speed. Yeah. But probably before that, it would be did you change anything on that wire? Right? What have you had to have changed the experience on the phone? Yeah. So that's, that's my thought. But I just never really, I think the regular business owner is not thinking about know any of this. So I think we just assume all websites are equal like it no matter where you build it, no matter what you put on there, they all operate exactly the same. And then when we take a deeper dive into clients, websites, we always find, oh, this link is broken. No, this is not loading fast. There's typically issues that are hurting them. And one thing that I do know as an advertiser, and this is why I started to pay attention to it more. When I would run ads, I've seen clients almost do that experiment I treasure where they're targeting the same audiences. Ad Copies almost exactly the same. The Crazy Ones Exactly. But one person's ad costs is literally 567 times more than the others. Yeah. And it's because of the load speed. Yeah. It's at least that was my assumption, because that was the only thing different Yeah, about what was going on.
Blake Beus 17:43 Yeah, it's, it's a big deal. And honestly, it's one of those things that you can forget about, right? You can hear this podcast and think, Okay, I'm gonna keep an eye on this. And then six months down the road, you get you're busy with other things, and you didn't realize it's, it's, it's like that mate, you need to have that constant maintenance, constant touch ups, like changing the oil in your in your car, right? You need to maybe throw something in your calendar, once, once a quarter or something like that, if not more, for my clients, I look at it once a week, usually, and just to do some quick tests, but throw for reminder to just look at it, check on those things and make sure that nothing happens because websites are these living, breathing, growing, things are constantly changing, and they need to be maintained. But But first, yeah, but for some reason why people think well, let's set it and forget why I made the website, I built the website. And that comes across in how people pay for websites, too. Oftentimes, they're like, well, I need a website built. So who's gonna build me a website for the give me the best value, you know, the best website for the lowest cost, lowest cost? And then once it's done, they pay for it and think, okay, my website's done, tick that markup. But it's that's not how that's not how they work. They constantly need to be updated. You constantly just swap out content. And it's easy to let websites get stale at night, that happens to me on my own website.
Greg Marshall 18:56 I know, I know, for sure it's happened to me. And because getting more educated about this, I don't think I would have even bothered to look into learning about this. Until I noticed that some ad accounts were getting dinged for this. Yeah, I was like, wow, that. So this means more now than just like, Yeah, well, if it's slow, who cares? My Products good enough to those waiting for? But it's like, you know, Facebook and Google are going to charge you more. Yeah, for a bad experience, which now that gets my attention.
Blake Beus 19:27 Cost you actual money? Yeah, actual money. So I mean, I think we can dive into some of the specifics. Like what so so you're on board, you want your website to be fast, and what can you do to help identify it? So let me give you two different tools you can you can dive into the first one is called Google PageSpeed Insights, just do a Google search for that. And it will it will pull up a tool you can put in a URL you can put in for a specific page, and it will go through and give you two different scores based on the mobile experience. And based on the desktop experience. Now your desktop experience will almost always be higher, but it'll be useful. From zero to 100. Any, you want to try to do your best to make your score as high as possible, while still having the things on your page that you need? What's an acceptable business? Right?
Greg Marshall 20:11 Well acceptable? Like, I know there's a trade off, what would you say? 70?
Blake Beus 20:17 I would say 70 Is is, you're in the top, maybe 5%, you have a 70, on mobile or better.
Greg Marshall 20:27 So there'll be at least a number to kind of shoot for that. Yeah. Is it impossible to get 100? Yeah. So it is possible? I don't even I would think there would be no way you can get 100. So it is possible, it is possible,
Blake Beus 20:39 it is possible. And how you do that is you have a page that's mobile responsive, you have a page that is mostly text, all the images on your page are very optimized. You maybe have Google Analytics, and that's it. No other tracking codes. And you don't have any videos. Got it? Yeah, I mean, you could you could, you could get up the end. And you probably need to be on a fast server. So you could do all of those things. But if you're hosting somewhere that you don't own the server, you still might not get 100, because then you might need to, you know, do that extra layer. And for me, that's what I know how to do. But most people don't know how to do that. So it's reasonable that you don't worry about Yeah,
Greg Marshall 21:18 you know, one thing that I'm learning, and I'm sorry, did you have a second? Yes, yes, I'm sorry, GT metrics.
Blake Beus 21:23 And you can just go to GT metrics with an X at the end.com. And you can put your URL in there, they'll give you different speeds or whatever. But they'll also tell you if you have large images, if you have a lot of scripts on your page, and you can just kind of tick those things off the list and keep testing to try to get your grade up.
Greg Marshall 21:45 Got it. And you know, one thing that I've learned from because I consider myself a learn, I'd like to learn from people who know things that I don't know, right, yeah. And one thing that I'm learning from, you know, working in the E commerce space, which I did not start off, and by the way, and then spending more time with you, there's two growth strategies that people do not think about. So an example would be in the marketing space, increasing lifetime value of a customer, you know, trying to lower your cost per acquisition, repeat buyers, all that those are growth strategies and of itself. But then when you talk about there's two strategies that I think almost no one talks about, right, which is website speed. Is it gross? Right? It is, right? Yeah. And the second one that almost no one talks about is inventory. Meaning if you can get the inventory cheaper, faster and more readily available, you could beat your competition, with just those two sides alone, better inventory and faster website. And those are two things that I would never in a million years guess could be a competitive advantage. Yeah, that really, you can speed up the growth of your business by focusing on the counterintuitive. Hmm.
Blake Beus 23:05 That's a good point. I'm glad you um, you know, I'm glad you brought that up. Because it is true. There's these girls strategies that happen behind the scenes just making you more operationally efficient. Yep. And and, you know, with inventory that makes sense. One of my clients runs a software that helps people list, ecommerce on Amazon, Newegg, all of these different places, right. And that's where I kind of started learning about a little, a little bit of this stuff. But you know, having that additional operational efficiency isn't something that people think about, but it does make you more competitive. Yep. And is the growth strategy in and of itself?
Greg Marshall 23:41 Yeah. And I think that's, it's, it's remarkable, because I was thinking about that, recently, where I just thought, you know, there's so much talk about what you call, you know, the top and top line front end optimizations. And there's very little being talked about, like, some of the companies there's there's one company in general that Alize t shirt companies follow that they're always trying to figure out, how are they making as much money as are making? And the more I started looking into it, the more I realize is because it's not the front end strategy. Yeah. Right. They have a competitive advantage. I'm not gonna say it because people were there. But they have a competitive advantage on the operational side. Yeah, that allows them to do what they do. The other stores can't Yeah, and they're not going to share that. But they're going to tell you, the you're going to try to follow them, but you're following them only partially. Yeah. When it comes to the strategy, and you're not seeing the bot, which everything they're doing is legit. It's a super good strategy. Yeah. But it's just one of those things where it's a strategy just like speeding up your website, and inventory that you don't think of off the top of your head that that could be a growth strategy to take your business to the next level. So all this stuff, you know, on the back end, operationally, I think there should be a heavier emphasis on the website stuff. And so all these tips that you're given, I think, if you're serious about growing your business, and you want to take things to the next level, you should be following all these tips that Blake is sharing. Because this could be the difference between you getting the business or your competition. And if you're in a competitive space, this you really have to pay attention just because it is, you know, it's almost like the Olympics, right? The people who are winning are not 510 seconds faster. The second third place, they're they're like, a 10th of a second faster, and sometimes less than that. Yeah. So it's like, it's that little bit that allows you to win. So if you're in a highly competitive industry, these are things that you haven't pay attention to.
Blake Beus 25:56 Yeah, absolutely. And it's, I mean, this just goes back to what we talked about time and time and time again, but it's, it's holistic marketing, basically, looking at the whole, the whole of everything, the all inclusive part, your your messaging, your ad strategy, your site speed, all of these things, looking at all of those channels, and making sure everything's lined up or, you know, properly aligned in that. And honestly, it's, it's hard. It's not, it's not easy. There's a reason, like people reach out to you and mean, Greg, because it's, if you're a business owner, or whatever, you're executing all of these other strategies, delivering for your existing clients, making sure they're happy. But now you've got to learn how to make websites faster. Yeah, right. Like that's not, that's not in the realm and that's fine. That's part of delegation and outsourcing or whatever. Border strategy, it's part of the strategy is part of your competitiveness.
Greg Marshall 26:45 So you have to constantly adapt. And what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, or today. And that's kind of the beauty of all is you have to just constantly looking for ways to get better. And at least for me, I tend to get bored easy, which is why this is a great energy for me, because I know they're never gonna make it easy for me.
Blake Beus 27:11 Well, well, Greg, let's let's, let's wrap this up. How can people reach out to you? Oh, great,
Greg Marshall 27:16 Marshall. CO and if you want to book a strategy session, just go on there and it's your information. And what about you?
Blake Beus 27:23 Just Blake peace calm and you can just reach out to me there, see what my current offers are there.
Greg Marshall 27:30 So while this is a very useful pockets, I think I think people will get a lot of value from it. So I guess, until next time, we'll talk to you guys later.
Blake Beus 27:39 Okay, we'll catch you later. Bye.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:01 Are Greg, you want to talk about counterintuitive marketing? What do you mean by that?
Greg Marshall 0:06 counter to of marketing is essentially doing things that maybe you feel like is the opposite of what everyone else is doing? Or maybe you think it wouldn't work, but it does work. Okay. One of my first examples of this was early on, when Facebook ads first started, I was in the fitness gym industry. And you know, this sounds absolutely crazy now, but back then no one in the gym and fitness, particularly brick and mortar gyms would even come close to doing social media marketing, Facebook ads, or even just posting on social, because they just thought, you know, it was either dumb, or waste of time, or it was just too early, and no one else was doing it, which is the number one reason why I wanted to do it. Because no one else was doing right. If there's no one there, you have a higher likelihood of winning, right. And so that's kind of my first experience on like counterintuitive marketing, which is doing things that maybe you would think wouldn't grow the business, but it ends up growing it because it's kind of thinking outside the box and doing things differently than what your competitors, and everyone else in the market is doing. Interesting. And so that's that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today is how to put yourself in that mindset to see different opportunities. So like, for example, a drill that you could do is you could sit down, research your competitors, and see, what are they all doing right now to market their product? And then push yourself to go, how can I do the exact opposite of what. And when I say the exact opposite. I'm not saying changing the message or anything, I'm talking literally the exact opposite, be where they are not right. And I think this is a useful drill, whether you decide to do these marketing tactics or not. I think it's worth doing to just challenge yourself to try to come up with some different ideas, because marketing is also a creative act. And this is where you should, especially if you're someone who likes to be creative or wants to be in a creative space, this is the time to do how to do things differently than what everyone else is doing.
Blake Beus 2:25 Okay. Okay, so. So what are some examples? I mean, you talked about you talked about social media, back in the day with gyms and everything, and and I'm gonna guess many people when they heard you say that the first thing they were saying they they thought of was probably something like, no one in my industry is running tick tock ads I've ever run tick tock ads, right. But that feels a little bit like chasing a shiny new object as opposed to zagging when everybody else is Zig? Yep. What do you think? Yeah, so
Greg Marshall 2:57 there's definitely a level of shiny new object. But the first thing you have to think about is, is my market there, right? So that's probably where you should start. So like, if a platform is purely teenagers, and you sell to 50 year old adults, then it's not the right fit. But this is why you want to brainstorm to think, is there is my Market. And this is where you have to truly understand who you're going after? Is my market, actually, on these platforms? Or where they're at? Right? Does that make sense? Yeah. So what you want to be thinking about is like, first understand your market and then go, where are some places that they are at that my competitors are not? Right, or they're not thinking about? Mm hmm, you see what I mean? And so if you do that, what'll end up happening is, you're basically playing a game with no competition. And then your goal is to as quickly as possible on that real estate, because the competitors will show up. As soon as people see anyone making money at anything, there will be competitors, breaking the doors down to go in and do the same exact thing. And so anytime you find a strategy that you have to move quick. Okay. So that's that's kind of how I look at is like, instead of chasing the shiny new object, First understand is your market actually there? And like, in the Facebook instance, I knew, well, I'm staring at 3040 50 year olds that are my target market, women and at the time, Facebook was more popular than Instagram. Instagram was like, still brand new. Yeah. So they were already on Facebook, using it like they're using Instagram today. Right? But no one was really doing anything to target them. Right. And that's when organic reach was huge. That's when Facebook ad costs really low. It was a big opportunity. So I went in and capitalized. Yeah. And that's that's what I mean is to be thinking about places that your market is at, that other people just aren't thinking about, because there was no In the gym world, it's all about billboards, and TV ads and direct mail. Right? And that's what every gym was doing. Yeah, and door hangers and all that. And so I said, Well, the same people are online. But the gyms, my competitors are not marketing. They're so therefore I can get in cheaper and faster, right. easier and and appear to be the only business in town. Yeah. Because that was at the moment, right, just on that platform.
Blake Beus 5:30 Okay. Okay. That's interesting. So, I mean, obviously, this can be applied to a wide range of businesses. I think one of the things that comes to my mind when you're talking about this is the first, the very first thing comes to my mind is, this is oftentimes a little bit harder than it sounds in that it's new territory, or if people aren't there, you can't just look at someone else's strategy and basically duplicate a strategy, which is what a lot of marketers do. Yeah. I mean, I've done that in the past, as well. And that's, it's fine. If you you can learn from what's working, then then run with that. But finding a new area that isn't completely saturated, and diving into that. I will say is going to be a little more frustrating and take a little bit more time than someone might expect.
Greg Marshall 6:20 Yeah, yeah. Well, I think you almost have to look like this. Number one, the mindset has to be you're willing to test and willing to fail if it doesn't work out, right? Without without taking massive discouragement from it not working. But understanding you're really a phrase I heard one time I can't member who said it, but you're you're drilling for oil. Hmm. So most of your stuff that you're gonna try is not going to work. But when you do find one that works, it's going to be well worth the failed experiments in the past, right? And so yes, it is a little bit more difficult to find these places. But it's, it's definitely worth it. And you just have to like, think about how can can I use and view things slightly different? So if you're looking at, for example, like digital marketing, right, everyone's on digital, everyone's on Instagram, Facebook, whatever. And all the competitors are on there. But a different way to look at it too, though, is there are some industries that don't use digital as much. So digital still can be a place to do it. Right. Right. Like, you know, you see a lot of insurance agents there. I don't see very many insurance agents, doing social media, right? Especially when it comes to using paid ads, right? Or like attorneys or so there's so it's industry based, it's what your competitors are doing. If you're in like a mass market, like a fitness or dating or making money opportunities, most of these digital places are going to be flooded with people, right pushing this stuff, right. But if you're anything else outside of those industries, they're pretty much it's still wide open, right? Because most of the competitors are not investing because they're still doing only the traditional strategy. Billboards, direct mail, TV.
Blake Beus 8:08 Yeah, well, I would, I would say two. Most local businesses really don't do a very good job with digital marketing. And local traffic is cheap. Yes. Like you can you can saturate a city. On the cheap, if you want to get a video out there or something like that, it'd be known as the place to go to for XYZ services. You can get that video out there. And And honestly, it works even better if you're in a boring industry, right? I've had people come to me say, Oh, my industry is boring at a title company. It's boring. Well, I got what do I how do I and we talked about some things. But title companies make a lot of money. They have a lot of money to put towards advertising, which can easily translate into a very, very high ROI. And it's a wide open field. Yep. No one in the title industries doing a good job on digital ads. No,
Greg Marshall 9:07 it's because what you just said, it's counterintuitive. Every single title company is thinking the same thing. We're so boring. How do we promote our title company? Yeah. So therefore they don't even try? Yeah.
Blake Beus 9:21 Yeah. And I mean, this is where my brain gets going. Because I love brainstorming. I love sitting down with the client brainstorming. And if if if we have anybody in the title company listening to this, this is where my brain goes. I'm like, Okay, fine. You think your industry is boring. Lean into that. record some videos that are the most boring videos and just own up the boringness be like, hey, just another boring title company video and tell a story or whatever we like. We'd love to have you come in Yep. We'll make it super boring because no one likes an exciting title experience they want calm, boring. Yep, everything put together and just make this whole series of boring videos, that's something that would go nuts
Greg Marshall 10:02 online. Well, and that's something that no one's really trying. Because like we said, the assumption within that industry is that, well, we can do social media cuz we don't have anything fun to post. So that's, that's counterintuitive marketing, because everyone else is intuitively thinking, we have to do direct mail and the other traditional ways, because that's the only way. That's how we've always done it. And sometimes it's good to try to break through and find new ways to do it, because that's where a lot of the opportunity is going to be. And so I think, like, I actually saw an ad yesterday, that was that that I liked a lot. And it's a local comp, it's, I could tell they were locally targeting. It was actually Top Golf. Okay. And it was on tick tock, okay. And I said, Wow, see, they get it because traffic costs right now, tick tock, particularly local marketing is basically free. And so you can reach a ton of people for a very low amount of money. And the fact that they're doing it and they got creative with it, I can assure you, that campaign is performing well, based off of dollars invested to dollars return, because when you're in, when you're in a less competitive platform, or you're not, you know, you're not everyone's going after the same people. That dollar, even if it's not as effective, like the conversion rate isn't great. It's still great, because it's so cheap, that if you convert one out of 1000, but you're paying $2, to reset 1000 It makes Yeah, economic sense. And so that's kind of and you can build a brand that way. Because you're you are bringing up clinical branding yourself while still doing direct response. So I just feel like doing things where it almost feels, I don't know, for lack of better word dumb, or scary or almost irresponsible to do, right. Like, you almost feel a response I'm going to run tic tock ads for for like a grown up business. But, you know, it's it's always worth a try. Because you don't know, and we don't want to make the assumption that we do know. Right. Right. And that's, that's something that I find a lot of businesses, business owners make is breaking the golden rule of assuming everyone consumes and purchases exactly like you. That's not true. Everyone, these platforms wouldn't exist, unless there was a demand. Right. Right. And so people behave differently.
Blake Beus 12:30 Yeah. Yeah. And I've also seen a lot of people I've talked with several people that have said, you know, tick tock is just for younger, younger audiences. Yeah, whatever. And it's not there's there's a wide range of people on there. And honestly, not a lot of people on Tik Tok are monetizing their followings here well, at all, in fact, most of them aren't. Yeah. And so there definitely is some opportunity there to to make some moves, you just have to think about and think it through. And like, like you said, maybe Zig when everybody else is zagging along those lines. But I'd like to talk about one of the one of the things and this is old school marketing, but I feel like so many companies leave it and we talk about all the time, but it's email marketing. Oh, yeah. It really is this wide open field. And, and it is a place that a lot of businesses just aren't leveraging they, I can't tell you how many people have have told me recently that, well, email marketing is dead. I said that, yeah, 12 years ago,
Greg Marshall 13:36 it still will probably gonna say it's only
Blake Beus 13:41 it's the marketing channel that just won't die. And you need to use is one of the cheapest marketing channels to, but it very well could be part of the unintuitive marketing.
Greg Marshall 13:52 Well, if I see where you're going, yes, sometimes counter to have does not mean brand new. Right? counter to can be well, intuitively, we should all do Instagram. Well, everyone's thinking that right? So the counter to it was, well, why don't we lean on email, right? Since now, no one's doing that. Right. You see what I mean? So like, I'm happy brought that up just because I don't want to confuse be one of the thinking. counterintuitive means brand new unknown, some secret, you know, treasure chest hidden. This is just thinking the opposite of where your competitors and so sorry to cut you off. I just want
Blake Beus 14:33 to know that's the exact point I was trying to make is it doesn't it doesn't have to be the shiny new social media platform. Everybody thinks about social media as the next new thing. I mean, I see people hopping on clubhouse the audio only when I tried that for a little bit. I was just like, This is not my fair. It's not gonna work. I'm not for me. I'm sure it'll work for somebody. But then I also saw like four or five direct tick tock competitors that have cropped up in The last six or so months, especially when President Trump said he was going to ban tick tock knighted states, all these, like startups piling up. And, and some of those emerged and I got an invite to one of those and you know, everybody's trying to find the next new shiny object and that's fine. Try it out. But sometimes the old school stuff is what's going to convert sometimes just those old school principals, because everybody else has moved on. Yep. Unless left this, you know, void of, of, you know,
Greg Marshall 15:31 yeah, channel that that basically used to be the Facebook, and Instagram, right of marketing, which was, in the past, it was all about direct mail and Billboard, and then email came along, and that was this, like, wow, you can just send free messages without having to pay for postage or anything. And then, you know, everyone started doing that. And then, you know, Google Ads came out, and now is the thing, and then Facebook ads came out. And there's always gonna be a new thing. You could go back to things that used to work because everyone's left, but they still have huge saturation, because and when I say saturation, not with businesses, but with consumers, like consumers haven't changed as far as we still use Google, for the most part, right? Or if we don't, it's a giant percentage of people who do. And the same thing with, we still all use email, right? Like, we're like that hasn't, it's not like, because email marketing, the open rates have lower, that doesn't mean that the consumer has stopped using email, it's just that you have to change how you're doing it. But that's just, you know, counter to market is all about thinking about your business, and just how can you be different? And how can you do things that can give yourself a competitive advantage, because there always is a way to give your business a competitive advantage, with the assumption that the market actually wants what you have. Right, right.
Blake Beus 16:54 Yeah. So so I kind of want to do dive into a couple of specifics. I know we have some listeners that are in software as a service companies, right. So that's a company that provides an online service, you pay monthly subscription to a lot of times they're very tech forward and quite progressive, because they're in the tech kind of area. Tell me some ways you think they could explore some uncharted territory?
Greg Marshall 17:30 Well, you think about first, who are they going after? Right? So give me an example of Mark it will we think about?
Blake Beus 17:40 Let's, let's say it would be, let's let's just come up with something like a b2b service that helps them sell e commerce.
Greg Marshall 17:51 Alright, so a b2b service that helps them sell e commerce. So one of the things that you can think about is like, the first step I would take is go, who's, who's my competitor, or who's doing some similar to what I'm doing? And then I would write down all their strategies, whatever, whatever they're doing maybe Google search campaigns, YouTube campaigns, social media, and then whatever angle that they're not attacking, I would say, all right, almost like you would take an inventory of every channel that's available to you. And then say, you go one by one, and you would say, All right, so are these guys on Tik Tok? Are these guys on forums? Are these guys using? You know, email lists, partner email is with other influencers? Or people who have that audience? Is there some conferences that I can speak at? And is my competitors doing any of that? And if not find where those channels that converts really well. So you'd want to test each channel? Yeah, as as cost effectively as possible. Don't put yourself out of business, but test each channel and then see, can I gain some traction on any of these channels, and then whatever one of those channels are, go all in on that channel as quickly as humanly possible. Because like I said, the competitors will figure out what you're doing, and then they'll start doing it. And so I would say, look into whatever channels that are available, that are not being tapped into. And if they have your market, start testing those and then see which one of those gives you the most traction. And then once you find one, go heavy in on it all and put all your resources in it, and just try to basically extract as much ROI as you possibly can before the rest.
Blake Beus 19:32 Well, the good thing about that with with software as a service companies with that strategy is they make money over time, right? It's a subscription service. So as long as they're, you know, their churn rates are low and they're providing a good service. All the new customers they sign up even if someone else figures out what what they're doing, tries to tries to steal some of that market share. You know, they've got customers for life essentially. Yeah, and
Greg Marshall 19:54 I think the the subscription model is really popular cheap because you can pay a little bit more to acquire cash Summer, just because you know, the, you know, the lifetime value is typically much higher than like a one time purchase, right? And so you don't have to, like keep selling them. But yeah, I would, you know, if I was a SaaS company and I was trying to grow, I would probably look heavily into places that the competition almost like, puts their nose up and say, we would never do that. Because then you have an even more competitive advantage, because their egos will get in the way of them trying this technique, if it's working for you, right, which gives you buys you more time to be able to do it, because most people they don't want to be wrong. And so if they say this will never work, they want to make sure that right, and so therefore they won't do it. And so it gives you a huge time advantage to just go horrible. They're never going to enter. So yeah, let's Let's speed this up even more. So by the time someone on their team, or their you know, their board members tell him you better get on here. It's too late. You've already acquired.
Blake Beus 21:02 Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about shift gears just a little bit. And and talk about a strategy. I've seen work in this regards. So we've talked about channels, right? Where it like there's some some uncharted territory channels. But one of the things a lot of people don't realize is, you know, this is your business, or you're working at this business here. Maybe the uncharted territory is a new product or new idea, you can create that. So if you see an opportunity for a different angle, on on on the people, so you're not directly competing with Yeah, with whatever. Even if it's maybe a first ask company, maybe it's a lower priced yet tier that addresses a very specific need that people have right before they're ready for your a higher priced tier. Or, you know, if your local business that does, I don't know, I don't know something. Instead of having direct competition with other local businesses, you can shift that model just a little bit. You don't have to abandon your old model, but you shift your model and offer something new. And that could be your uncharted territory. And I feel like a lot of people get really stuck in the eye, no, this product or service is going to work. Yeah, it needs to work. It's worked for 10 years, it's going to continue to work for 10 more years. And I'm not saying that's not gonna work, but I'm saying maybe people maybe we need to market to people that aren't quite ready for that. And we need to sell them a product or service that gets them ready for your core product or offer. Absolutely. And that could be the the uncharted territory that that you lean into as well.
Greg Marshall 22:33 Well, I think Do you know who? The fact that you said that reminds me of Dino Peter Thiel is, so Peter Thiel was the first investor, or one of the early investors of Facebook, okay. And he was also involved, I believe, with PayPal, okay. And he's a huge Silicon Valley. I mean, I'm pretty sure this guy's a billionaire. But anyways, you probably say This guy knows a little bit about adopting or going with the flow and how you talk about successful coaching. And I read his book, I can't remember the name of the book, but he had a book where he said, you can get a competitive advantage, even just by the sales channel or strategy that you have. Right, and that and basically, what you're saying is coming up with a new offer, or a new product, new service, or just rebranding the same thing, a different way, can really give you a competitive advantage. And even if you look at certain times, because the market changes, the demands are different in different stages, so it's safe to say right now, if you had an offer, right, you know, the make money online, you know, offer right now, or, you know, social media ads, you know, that was that was a big one, too. The new offer would be going in and saying, Hey, are you scared to death, about iOS 14 tracking, and the cookieless feature that we're, you know, about to start participating in, and I have a solution for them, that will help you, you know, quote, unquote, fix that and know exactly how your sales go. That product or service right there will sell like crazy now, that service might exist? I don't know. But I know that offer will attract a lot of people. Yeah. Because you're you're banking on what people have lost. So right now people feel like they've been stripped of their privileges have been taken away. A lot of marketers feel right. So if you can tell them that you can give them their privileges back and you're the only one you're going to get sales. Right. And that so that would be a strategy of counterintuitive if they can, well, why would I sell these people ads? When the real concern is not? I need to, you know, put together ads. The real concern is, I don't know what ads are working. Right. Right. So now that's the new offer. That's the new product. And what what's his name Alex Becker with Hi ROAs he would see, I bet you he's doing fantastic because he came out with his product. About a few months, I believe, before iOS started getting talked about right. And so he was pretty much ready to go with a great offer, knowing that people will be scared to death. Yep, let's iOS hit. And I bet you there's so many people hopped onto the service.
Blake Beus 25:21 Oh, totally. If people don't know what we're talking about, he launched a product called Hieros, which helps, quote unquote, fix attribution between as channels due to losing that when iOS 14 started blocking tracking cookies and things like that.
Greg Marshall 25:38 You're smart enough to know any of this even. So, could you say a little bit about what you think is happening?
Blake Beus 25:44 Yeah, well, essentially, what they're doing is they're they're using some different kind of metrics and things to generate. profiles, and then match those profiles back up. The thing that's interesting is based on tests I've done and some other people have done. It performs about as good as having a good Google Ads strategy and setting up those reports. But sitting those reports is a pain in Google ads, or I'm sorry, Google Analytics and Google Analytics. Because Google Analytics does a pretty good job of tracking some of that stuff. The second thing they do is actually import some of that back into your ads manager, which Google Analytics doesn't do back into Facebook ads. Yeah. But the thing I want to Yeah, the thing I want people to understand is when when he launched this product, it wasn't perfect. Yeah, it had some bugs, it had some things, it's much better. Now. There's other products out there that solve this problem as well. But he was just really positioned, positioned nicely from a timing perspective and everything. So what I'm getting at is, you don't necessarily have to have a perfect solution. Sure. Right. What you need to have is a solution, then get feedback and perfect that over time. And if there are any bugs or issues, you can take care of that in, in the customer support and Long Term Support area. Yeah, right. Because a lot of people have, a lot of businesses have an opportunity to lean into like a new product or offer. But they stress out about not being good enough or whatever, and you don't, you don't need to worry about that stuff quite so much. You kind of need to get it out there. And then perfect as you go, it just works for local businesses, this doesn't have to be like a tech business or whatever. One great example, of of a pivot is, I work in a creative studio, having an office and I'm surrounded by lots of artists, and things like that. And a lot of them were teaching, you know, workshops or selling things. And that's kind of a pretty standard model for an artist, then they'll have some workshops where they teach their skills, and their craft, and then they'll sell their, their pieces or whatever. And then they'll have commissions, right, where someone pays them to make something specific for whatever, right a mural or a painting for an area or a statue for a hotel or something like that. When the pandemic hit, you know, through all all of that kind of out the window, the sales channel got taken away, he got taken away. And so a lot of people leaned into, like zoom classes, and that what that did is it expanded their audience from just a local business to now they could teach anybody, anywhere in the world, right? As long as the time zones matched up, and they were teaching. And, you know, so that was opportunity, but had a lot of those people leaned into that. In 2019, they could have had, there was a lot of opportunity there for these online classes. In 2020. A lot of people leaned into that, and it works. But everybody in their dog was adding into that at that time, because that was like the only way. Right. And so. So that's that's one of those those things to think about, you know how to handle timing or whatever, but it can work for local businesses. It could work for big businesses. Yeah. I mean, all the time. You see it all the time. You see it all over the place. I oftentimes because I do marketing, I think about this stuff when I go to the grocery store. Oh, yeah. I have four kids. And we're there all the time. We're shopping all the time. And unless
Greg Marshall 29:11 you bill I'm sure.
Blake Beus 29:15 It is. But you go to the grocery store, and you got to realize all of the packaging is marketing. Yep. And you see you'll, you'll see all these you'll see changes. You'll see people tweaking things you'll see. See Oreo. Yeah, Oreos is one of my favorites. Yeah. Because they're constantly leaning into all of these new different flavors. Yeah. And that doesn't hurt them to try out a flavor. That doesn't work. Yep. But then they do try to flavor they're like sweet that works. But then what do they do? They pull it off the shelves and then launch it again in four months. Yep. And you know what my kids do? Ah, Dad, we can't get the they have. They have the Star Spangled Banner, ones that have rocked I've had this am I kids every year now need them. They need that. They need they need them. Right. But they found I mean, it's a cook. It's a cookie. Yeah. But they found Uncharted Terry territory in an industry that's been selling cookies for?
Greg Marshall 30:16 I don't know. Yeah, how many different ways to really make
Blake Beus 30:19 out, but they found some ways. Yeah. And you can do that with by by switching up your product offerings as well.
Greg Marshall 30:25 Well, and that's, you know, you bring up the point. And that's really why I brought up that whole Hieros thing is, here's the interesting, so I knew that Alex, you know, cuz I consume a lot of his content. I like his stuff. He was a YouTube ads guy, right. But to give you a good example, he was all about YouTube ads. I was like, forget about Facebook, it's too expensive because of at the time what he was selling. It was too competitive, like meaning not that he couldn't sell it there. Set the prices were too high. Right. So he was all about YouTube ads. But here's the interesting thing. Now I see him I never see him on YouTube. Now I ever see him is on Facebook. But guess why? Because he knows his offering is different. And he's in the space where everyone is panicking, which Facebook advertisers are on Facebook, panicking, Santa. So looking at this, so he's placing this beautifully crafted offer of I can solve your fear right now. And we just click right here and book a call right on Facebook, which is brilliant. I didn't. So I think it's a great stretch so that I brought that up, because that's basically what you're saying about counter to marketing can also be the change of the offer. It doesn't have to be location or platform based.
Blake Beus 31:41 And when you change the offer, the channel might change as well. Correct. Right. And, and all of those are things you can test. And I really hope we're not kind of overwhelming people with a lot of with a lot of this stuff. It doesn't have to be overwhelming. What we're trying to do is speak in general terms, because we have a broad, yeah, listener base in all sorts of different areas. But in your area in your industry, you don't have to think super crazy about a lot of this stuff. Think about what are some ways that can change some things up? What would be the craziest thing and a lot of people, I do this with a lot of my clients, I schedule a split, I book out of time and say we are going to do nothing, we're not going to launch ads, or I'm talking about whatever, we're just going to brainstorm. Yep. And if we come if we write down 100 different angles, or ideas or areas of the site that we feel like need improvement or something, and one of them is good, that our has a huge ROI. Yep. But a lot of people don't don't take the time to just like, throw out ideas if they're crazy or not. Right. And it's, it needs to happen. I think I will
Greg Marshall 32:43 I agree with that. And I think, you know, when you when you talk about that, really the you know how I love Dan Kennedy. He has a saying where he talks about most business owners do random acts of marketing, versus thinking about what they're trying to do. And, and I've been guilty of this before many, many times, which is just doing the activity versus strategically doing two different things. And sitting down and investing an hour where you do nothing but brainstorm, come up with a strategy will give you a much higher ROI than just randomly doing stuff in a panic mode. Right. Right.
Blake Beus 33:28 Right. And I would say when you do that our I don't want you to look at any competitor ideas, nothing. I want you to just sit down and trust, like your intuition and your knowledge of your customers. And just throw out some crazy ideas. Yeah, throw out some crazy stuff.
Greg Marshall 33:45 be a kid again. Right? And you know, I think, you know, I remember I'm big on quotes, because I like to read and I remember reading this, this lady, I think she was like 104 years old, like she was she was up there. Right. And they someone asked her what's the secret to, you know, aging so well, because I guess she still had like a lot of energy. And she was still, you know, very talkative as well. And she said, Well, the secret is to understand adults ruin everything. And to just live your whole life like a kid. Yeah. And I thought that was so impactful. And you know, I think she said it. That's not the exact phrase, but that's how I received it was it's true. When you become an adult, all of your creativity seems I get zapped out of you because you're so you're quote unquote, doing what you're supposed to do. But take some of these times to think about fewer kids again, with no responsibilities, no concerns about what other people think about you or they're gonna think you're a moron for doing this. And just take the hour it's within yourself anyway, so no one's gonna know. Yeah, and just allow yourself to be kidding and say there are no limits to what I I can try. Because what I have found we've worked with some people during brainstorming sessions is they still say, Yeah, but, but that would have worked, but But you have to look at it more like, we don't know if it'll work or not. We're just going to try it. Right. And so that's where I think brainstorming the biggest value is to get yourself in the mindset of like, pretend anything you say will work. And that it's impossible for it not to work. Yeah, just for the sake of allowing yourself because if you don't do that, you're going to give like, kind of, I don't know, boxed in ideas in your brainstorm versus just like, Yeah, let's just try some while and see what happens.
Blake Beus 35:40 And it works. I've seen brands build their entire strategy around doing doing stuff like that. Well, one of my favorites, and you'll probably hear me bring them up over and over and over again, because I love how they market. It's a swim suit company for men called Chevy's. Chevy's. Yeah, never heard of No. Oh, man. Yeah, everyone should go to Instagram and check it out. Okay. But essentially, they've really leaned in hard to the the dad bod, and bring back the short shorts that are really out there. Yeah. And so a lot of their content is, is stuff from like the 80s and 90s. With like, go guys with Molex super short cut off jeans, not 1970s and 80s. And they're like, Well, you know, we need to bring the short shorts. Yeah, yeah. And they're their whole line is these just outrageously colored? swim trunks for men? Yep. And, and their ads, their social media is hilarious. Li their whole brand is centered around this ridiculous notion of short shorts. short shorts aren't going to be for everybody. They get that but they leaned in hard to the short shorts for Dad bonds. Yeah. And it's a it's a great brand and a thermal strategy. Well,
Greg Marshall 36:50 I think it's a great angle. And I think, you know, one of the people, I don't know if people like or dislike this, this gentleman, but Richard Branson, to me, markets, his business, like a kid, and he does it differently, right? All this the publicity stunts and things that he does, it's like you would obviously he is not holding back when it comes to creativity and thinking like, this is not possible. But you can learn a lot from a marker like that, because, you know, he's a billionaire. And he's, he's doing things outside the box, that work. That's still within reason, right? So like, he knows, well, if I go on a hot air balloon across, you know, an ocean, people are probably gonna watch that, right? Because it's, it's out there. But you notice on his balloon, he has his brand version, right? It's one of the SARS techniques to carry T eyeballs. And, and, and the other thing is, you remember, you're like, Man, that's crazy. I can't believe he even a tip. What kind of a maniac would try that. But that's kind of the goal is he's thinking like a kid, like, you know, a six year old kid will think of an idea that and actually try to do it with no, yeah, but nothing holding them back. But you know, you try to get one of us, you know, late 30s, early 40s 50 year old, we won't even think at all to try that. And so that's where I think there's a lot of value into trying to have almost like, no, what, no inhibitions when it comes to you think about your marketing, and what you can do to actually see where the good ideas are at.
Blake Beus 38:31 I love it a lot. All right, well, we'll wrap this one up, Greg, tell tell everyone how they can get in touch with who they want.
Greg Marshall 38:37 Yeah. Just go to my website, Greg marshall.co. And that's dot CEO. And if you want to book a free strategy session, just go ahead and leave your information there. And what about you how they get in touch with you?
Blake Beus 38:48 Just like the stock calm, and I basically have all my info right there.
Greg Marshall 38:51 Great. Well, thanks for listening to us today. Hopefully, you came up with some good ideas. And we'll see you next week. All right.
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Transcript
Blake Beus 0:00 But we're recording. Right? All right. Oh,
Greg Marshall 0:06 Blake, what do you think? So you've got the topic of the day, you said this to me yesterday. And I thought, interesting timing, because I've been seeing some of these things and the ad accounts, and I've Yeah, my theories, and I have yours,
Blake Beus 0:20 we're gonna talk about this. And a lot, a lot of people have a lot of crazy theories about how, you know, the algorithm, or all of these different things work. And some of those could be true, some of them might not be true, but I'm gonna read this actually word for words, so we can pick it apart, because there's been lots of discussion about what's actually going on here. So Facebook, came out with this announcement, starting today. I'm quoting, starting today, if someone does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in accounts center, we will consider those accounts as separate people for ads planning and measurement. A lot of advertisers are reading into what this might mean. And first and foremost, you might be listening to this thinking, what is account center? Yeah, and I'll be honest, I'm in Instagram, Facebook all the time. I didn't know what a cat senator was either. Yeah, I didn't even know it was a thing.
Greg Marshall 1:17 Well, I've heard of it. And I also don't really know, what their meaning by Account Center, and the structuring of that. And so just hearing that makes you wonder, well, if I'm in it all day, and urine all day, how does my mom now or you know, someone who barely uses social media?
Blake Beus 1:40 Exactly. And so what they're saying is, if the accounts, if your Instagram or Facebook account aren't LinkedIn account center, then they're going to count those as two separate people for reach and estimated audience size and all of these things. And based on just some loose data, I'm going to guess nearly everyone does not have those accounts, Leah, and so you might start seeing potential reach numbers go up, which would cause your CPMs to go down? Even though not really you're only reaching the same person just on different platforms, if you're running ads on both Facebook and Instagram.
Greg Marshall 2:21 Well, one one thing now that you say that one thing that maybe test is when you run your ads, do more manual placement. Yeah, so actually say, Show this ad on Facebook only? And show this ad on Instagram? Oh, yeah. And just compare the reach, and then test them both together and see if they're somewhat similar. Because one of the things we talked about yesterday, the potential issue with this, I guess, from an advertiser standpoint, you know, I'm running a lot of ads. I know you run a lot of ads. You know, the CPM is one of the numbers, the CPMs, which is the cost for the traffic has gone up. I also find it conveniently coincidental that it's happening during the most expensive time of the year. Yeah. Which is the fourth quarter Hmm. Which makes me think advertisers must be either leaving the platform or panicking about the cost of the traffic that they're getting. Yeah, that maybe they're the there's a change to make it to make us advertisers possibly feel slightly better about what we're spending, right. And I I get both sides do not want to make it sound like everything is always bad on one side. And we're the you know, the good side versus the bad, but more of what is what are the incentives? What should we be paying attention to? And just kind of like the episode, we just did control what we can control? Yeah. And try to make the best of what's available to us. So that's, that's kind of my thoughts. But what are your thoughts about that? That's my first thought is, if they want to drive CPMs down, and it's the fourth quarter. It's just coincidental that this change is happening right now.
Blake Beus 4:08 Yeah, well, I think, I don't know some people read into things and think this is could be nefarious or whatever, I don't know, maybe, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the fact of the matter is, is businesses all the time try to present their products and services in the best light. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I mean, I go to the grocery store, and I see I see, you know, now with 20%, more or whatever I like, there's all of these triggers. And I don't go to the grocery store and think, oh my gosh, I'm being manipulated everything. For a long, long, long time. Facebook has been known amongst the world of marketers as, as a platform, you can get really cheap reach, right for a long time and a lot of advertisers over the years because of that have almost all their experience on Facebook only and haven't explored other platforms. Google, I will tell you right now, every every campaign I've ever run on Google, the CPMs are higher than they have been on Facebook. But now that Facebook CPMs are going up and up and up. Facebook might be thinking their advertisers are looking at other platforms like Google or, or LinkedIn, or Tik Tok or something like that, and and exploring those platforms and, and Facebook is maybe saying, Okay, well, we're going to maybe make these numbers look look a little bit better, whatever. I don't know, I love your idea of running traffic to other each platform, right? Because the reality is, is that while these numbers might mean something slightly different than what you think they mean, the or they meant in the past. As a good and non lazy marketer, you should be testing things anyway. Yeah, and so go ahead and test this out. And honestly, we change brings opportunity, we literally recorded a podcast about this, which you probably are going to listen to him out of order anyway. Because of published dates, but the this, this change is yet another chance for opportunity. And if you're testing a specific ad account, you might have an ad account that performs significantly better with the change, you might have an ad account that that performs worse with this change. Or you might have an ad account that this change doesn't impact hardly at all. Yeah, but you won't know that unless you do some testing, you test on either platform to see what's going on there. And really, that's what we want people to do, you want to be data driven, because there's no hard and fast rules about any of this stuff. It all really depends on your account, the data in your account, the offer, the language, and the wording and everything. And, and that just goes to show and we ought to probably take a step back and talk about that. We talk about it a lot. But this is another opportunity to maybe reevaluate your offer, maybe re evaluate your hook, maybe evaluate your image or the video or some of those strategies or your strategies, right, take a chance to look at the psychology side of things. And and maybe peel back away from the numbers just a little bit. Focus on some of those, the messaging and the hook and all that stuff.
Greg Marshall 7:10 Well, I think you're right on when it comes to change. This is how you hit the harder I guess, you know, the harder quote unquote, tracking becomes, the harder everything becomes because we've had it made for the last few years that it's like, we're like spoiled children. Now we've got everything we've ever wanted. And now it's being taken away from us, and how dare they but I think it's a good thing, because the opportunities will, will pretty much present themselves. Because if things get harder, that means more people quit. That means more people try to move to other things, more of the people that maybe are taking up all of the space and the oxygen and the ad inventory. We'll try something else. Yeah. Just because it's not as easy. And if you're if you're, I guess you could if you consider yourself a professional, and whatever it is you do, then you have to be committed to learning adjusting, even when it hurts to get better at whatever it is that you know is in front of you and things are going to constantly change. This is not the last change, we're going to see, we're always going to see constant change. And so I think, mindset wise, we should be thinking about how can we take advantage of these changes that are happening? And what can we do to separate ourselves from everyone else? Because usually, people become more successful when these types of changes happen. When there's opportunities where people see what does that quote, opportunity is worth disguise or whatever. You know, I'm talking about, I actually haven't heard that. There's a quote, and I don't even know if it's really said by Henry Ford, but I think so put it up, which is like, opportunity is disguised as hard work. Right? And I think this is one of these scenarios where you're going to see more marketers kind of panic, leave or get upset, because it's not like it used to be right. But the opportunity is in understanding, well, this is great. There's probably not a new opportunity because these changes have happened.
Blake Beus 9:16 Right? Right. And this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. And I don't even know who said this. And but it's lazy marketers make lazy money. Yep. And this is an opportunity to to really take a step back and evaluate things. So if I were to if I had a client come to me, they showed me this article, and they said, Hey, what should I do? What should I do? I have a couple of ideas. And I would love to pick your brain? Well, the first thing I would say is use this as an opportunity, opportunity to diversify your strategy. If you're not using YouTube ads, let's use some YouTube ads. If you're not using LinkedIn ads, let's try out some LinkedIn ads. And that would be the that's where my mind goes first and foremost. But Greg, if you had a client that came to you and said, I'm sorry freaking out about this this is Facebook being shady whatever, well, what would you say to them? How we should proceed to move forward?
Greg Marshall 10:06 Well, the first thing I would say is, remember, your business is your business. And these are just traffic sources. And so if they make a change our job or your job as the business owner is to adjust your strategy, and what you need to do in order to move forward right and project out. So So the answer would be, well, if the tracking, isn't there, what does that tracking mean? Anyways, because if you're using ultra precise tracking, and overly relying on that, and not thinking about building a full system, a full marketing system that happens all the time, then your business is actually probably more flawed than the traffic source. And the problem there. Right? That makes sense? Because if if, let's say, if I started a business, where I'm just like, Well, I'm just gonna only leverage the algorithm of these platforms. Well, if that's the case, I don't have a true business, because I'm only relying on that source of traffic, right? I'm not actually building a business, which is systems and people and processes and procedures, focus on the fundamentals, anytime you see changes that happen with traffic sources, or whatever it is that we're all accustomed to using. And we don't want to change. Always go back to what are the fundamentals? Right? What is my business? What is? How do I serve the customer? And just think, well, how can I get because all these platforms really are our messaging platforms? How do I get a message to get in front of someone that I want to do business with? Yeah, so if you just look at it that way, and just go, alright, well, if I can't get my message out this way, what's a different way that I can get my message out, you just have to be you got to be flexible, agile, and you just have to move and go, This don't work today. I guess I have to try something.
Blake Beus 11:56 Right. And, and it's, it can be an opportunity to really, really think differently about this. One of my favorite examples of this is actually talked about this briefly on another podcast. But there's this guy in the tech space in the marketing space. And he noticed that a lot of his ideal and perfect clients were using WordPress as a yes, website platform. And they were using a specific plugin for WordPress. And he's like, okay, so I have I have some money, where do I invest this? This plugin hadn't really had a lot of updates in a while. So we just contacted the developer and said, Can I buy the rights to this plugin for it? Can I buy it from you and maintain it myself with my team and everything? And they they struck a deal, and I don't know how much they paid for that deal. But they struck a deal. And now this guy's plug in on the next update. He updated it fixed a few bugs and everything. But now he's got a little link in there that says, you know, hey, this plugin is brought to you by, you know, I think his name's Noah Keegan. Okay, again, yeah, the guy. Okay, dork is website. This plug is brought to you by Noah Kagan. You know, contact me if you want to chat or whatever, just like a super soft call to action. And I don't know how much that traffic he got out of that. But that plug in right there probably got in front of, you know, 10 or 20,000 of his ideal clients, innovative market. That's innovative marketing. And there's lots of different ways you can be innovative like that, another innovative way that literally anyone can do because you might be thinking, Okay, well, I don't have a team of developers. And I don't know what platform people use, and I can't maintain a plugin. Another innovative idea is this is old school. But you just contact another business that's in a related field, or even a business that might be a direct alternative to your business, and say, Hey, let's do some sort of combined promotion, let's because I know you have your customers, I have mine, there's plenty of pie out there for everyone. If you have a bigger slice, that doesn't mean I have a smaller slice, let's be collaborative. And let's let's put together some sort of collaborative promotion. And we'll email both of our lists or we'll post it on both of our socials or something
Greg Marshall 14:05 elaborations I couldn't agree with you more like, we're gonna go I like I use the term old school, right, which is essentially a different way of saying, getting back to work. Yeah. Right. So instead of letting everything else do the work for us, we have to get back to work, which is Dan Kennedy. And you know, this, I say this all the time is my absolute favorite marketer of all time, because I think he calls it how it is. And his principles are just fundamentals. Right. And so, one of the things that I learned from listening to his programs for years is he had like this drawing of how in the center of your business, right, like the center is your business, and then almost like, like car tire spokes, you have all these different sources of traffic and ways to generate leads and your job as the business owner. To continuously build that wheel, because you never want to make yourself susceptible to one way of getting business, right, right. And so that's why if you're doing the fundamentals and always remembering that we are borrowing these platforms, and that we do not own them, that we need to be grateful that they're available to us, but also be aware that they can be taken away from us as well. So our job is not faceless job, or YouTube's job to make sure that Greg feels comfortable every day that he can grow his business. Right, right. It's Greg's job to figure out if this traffic source isn't available, what would happen if this got canceled, or that or this wasn't available, and you and your job is to keep building that wheel? And that's how that for whatever reason that always stuck with me is like, that makes sense. Because we've all had, you know, times in our lives where you overly rely on one thing, and then it's gone. You panic. Yeah. And you're like, Oh, my now what my whole thing is built on that. Right.
Blake Beus 16:02 Right. Well, and it also, one of the thoughts that came to my mind when you were talking about this wheel, because I love that visualization is, is some spokes of that wheel are only going to reach certain types of people. Correct. But you could have and probably do, I think every business does, has a large, large, large audience out there, that isn't on that particular spot exactly. Or isn't participating in a way that where they would even show up on that particular spoke, right. And a great example of this, I think, is upper level management. If you have a product or a service that is geared towards someone in an upper level management position, think VP, CEO of a medium sized company, I'll be honest, guys, they're not on Facebook. Yep, most of those people don't even have social media, especially if they, if they're a larger company, because their trend, they're probably trending a little bit older in age or whatever. And they just don't have the time for Facebook or Instagram, right? Or they just don't value or they just don't care. Yeah, they don't care about there. They're doing completely different things. And so you need to get a little bit more creative. They might be hanging out on LinkedIn, but they might, they might not be using any social media platform. So you might be thinking, Okay, how do I, how do I get in touch with these people, and that's where maybe you go to trade shows or conventions or, or you go to events that are related to what you're offering, and try to meet some people face to face. There's there's a lot of ways to think about it. But you might be spending time focused on one spoke and spending money focused on one spoke and leaving out all of these other opportunities Anyway,
Greg Marshall 17:42 well, and that that actually you bring up another Dan Kennedy point, which this is why I believe in this strategy, he says, he says, well, people say newspaper advertising or direct mail, or whoever platform it is that's considered old school is dead. And he says, not if you're trying to talk to older people with money, what if you're trying to talk to a six year old, that needs to spend a lot of money? Yeah, they're not going to be on any of these other platforms, they're only going to be able to be reached through newspaper, or direct mail, or any of the things that are, quote unquote, out of style, right. And that put a light bulb in my head, because that makes you understand, you have to keep building these spokes. And each spoke is an asset that's valuable to you. And even if it's only short term, that's okay. Because your job is to continuously build the spokes. And so one of the ways that I like to think about because I'm considered b2b A lot, right? So I'm looking for the CEO, upper level management person. And one of the ways that I understand is, I'm not going to find that person on Facebook, I know that, or Instagram, or even sometimes LinkedIn, or Google or YouTube ads. I'm going to find that person through a presentation. So old school chamber of commerce, trade shows, find a way to speak in front of an audience. It usually consists of those types of people, and you'll be able to pick up those clients and that's a spoke. Yeah, public speaking is a spoke. Yeah. tradeshows. That's another sort of podcasting. That's another one. So you have to keep building the spokes or else you're putting your business and your livelihood in jeopardy because you're you're you're pretty much very vulnerable if you don't have these because you can break down at any moment. If you're only using one or two.
Blake Beus 19:35 Yeah, yeah. I think I think it's worth pointing out to you have fast spokes and slow Yes, yes. So I'm laughing over here cuz that sounds like Slowpoke and yeah, for some reason that just really started. Yeah, yes. But, and, and the other thing to think about too, is on any one of those spokes, you you have people that are willing to buy right now versus people that are willing to buy buy later down the road. And we talked, we talked about this. I mean, one of the things I've been playing around with my email list, my email list is full of nothing but buyers. Yeah, for the most part. Yeah. And people that have bought from me in the past, and I've been playing around with different ways to market to that list. I've sent out very direct messages saying, hey, sign up for my new program, which is the new offer the offer? I'm kind of promoting right now sign up for my SM three program. And I will get signups. Yep. And then I sent out this last week of last couple weeks have been sending out basically very soft offers saying hey, here's this free training. And it's literally just a training that I'm just telling you how to do something, it's not a sales video disguised as a training, it's literally a training. And at the very end, I just say, Hey, if you want to chat further about this, or whatever, click the link below. And it's a link to my sales pitch. And I get signups those people also saw my first emails but didn't take action. But then they saw this training and then did take action. And so it's it's like even though you have a particular channel, email, marketing, Facebook, whatever, you need to understand that people are gonna respond in different ways to different types of messaging, those channels and different in different times and everything. And so you really want to have, we've talked about all the time, more holistic approach, and you really want to be in addition to paid advertising channels, you really want to be marketing in channels where you can't measure the success. Yeah, because that's where oftentimes a lot of the real gold is is in those channels. And that's honestly one of the reasons we're doing podcaster podcasting is one of those platforms, we see the number of downloads, yep, sort of, because because of how, how podcasting works, some platforms will pull in and consume your podcast hosted on their servers, and then you might get 10,000 downloads on that server. And that never gets reported back to our dashboard, we have no idea we really have no idea how many views we're getting, or downloads we're getting on this. And we don't know if people are clicking on the links in the in it are going to whatever, it's there's not a lot of visibility there. But it is a very profitable channel, if done, right. Yeah. And there's other channels like
Greg Marshall 22:13 that? Well, and the thing about channels is this, the measuring part will be more and more challenging as we move forward, especially if you're using digital. And that's why if you use a full system, you want to just look at the return on your system. Because the system is the biggest asset. It's kind of like if you look at as a car, you could say, well, what's more important the wheel that you're steering or the wheels on the ground? Or the engine? Well, it's kind of all of them, right? Like we can't like limit one or the other to try to quote unquote, optimize you need at all. And so one of the, you know, these channels where you have to look at it as if you're investing and more and more channels, one channel, could we could do a podcast, we can get one sale, it can make us $25,000 each year. Yeah. With a contract, that channel has now become profitable, right? Well, we got one purchase, right? But it's worth Yeah, right. But we never would have got it unless we invested in the channel. Right? And so that's why each channel you have to look at is there's potential to make a return and many different ways. And just the instant today, which is what everyone's after the that I need the return today. And that's it.
Blake Beus 23:28 Yeah. And really, what you want is kind of a mix of the of the boat in the cash infusion today. Yep. But then long, longer term strategies to help build and grow over time. And I'll be very transparent and blunt, one of the biggest issues I had early on with my business was I was focusing just on the very immediate cash return types of types of work, and not so much on the longer term, you know, types of marketing channels, and it made it made 2020 really suck.
Greg Marshall 24:02 Yeah, and I think and once they use the word that's important balance, yeah. Because being overly one or the other, can get you in trouble. So if you're overly cash flow today, only then you're you're sacrificing the future. Right? If you're only the future, you got nothing today. Yeah. Right. And so you have to have a balance of like, how do I make returns now? While also thinking about how do I make returns in the future? And that's, that's like the million dollar question, right? How do you set that up? And I believe it's building out your wheel getting all your traffic sources and and really committing to building a marketing system. And not just like a system and every other aspect but the marketing right or the sales but really taking it just as serious like the marketing and the sales is like the car is just you know the wheel that you're steering is just as important as the wheels on the ground. And everything needs to be paid attention to you can't ignore half the car or whatever, if you want the car to actually work. And so that's how you want to look at your entire businesses. Not only customer management, process man assistance, man, but also sales and marketing management. How do we get all of these to work together? So the car can last 20 3040 years instead of it work? Yeah, a works today, I took this one tire off, and I drove a little faster for 10 miles. But then the problem was, I couldn't go anywhere, right? Where I'm driving the car too fast. And it burns out and I got to go to the shop. So that's just kind of my thought process about balancing today. Yeah. And the futures it you have to have a balance. And it's a continuous thing, because sometimes we can all get overly seduced by you know, the gambling aspect of making money today. Yeah. And forgetting about oh, yeah, well, what about 10 years from now? Yeah. Are the diseases are making trade and
Blake Beus 26:04 hurt 10 years? Yeah. And it, it reminds me, it reminds me of this. Well, I see it all the time, I see people chasing the shiny new object, right? One One, quote, shiny new object I've heard and it's just new to me, is this concept. And we'll probably do something on this in the future. Because I think it's an interesting subject, I'd like to pick your brain on it. But it's this concept called Dark funnels, or dark social and, and it's a cool name that I'm super jealous of, because Nina was hard, right? Like, but, um, the concept is, is this essentially social media marketing efforts that you can't track you have visibility into and so that things like, you know, commenting in LinkedIn groups, or Facebook groups, or something like this, and one of the guys is pushing this really hard, his messages. If I were to start my business all over right now, I would focus on nothing but dark, whatever. And I'm like, that's, that's great.
Greg Marshall 26:57 I guess that's probably a little too extreme. But anyway,
Blake Beus 27:01 it is I'm like, I, this is where we start talking about balance. And I know why he's doing it, because that's what his consulting company does, right. And it's so much easier to talk about and push one specific concept and idea than it is to talk about things holistically. But things are aren't just, here's the one solution, everything. And marketers love to do that, like, this is a one way one fix this will fix everything. But the reality is is, is if you focus just on those things, you'll probably get a sale here and there. And your growth will be super slow, especially if you're starting out. In fact, that's probably not sustainable at all, if you're just starting out. Yeah. And so I feel like a lot of this, this is the journey I feel like a lot of businesses has, especially if they're kind of like in my core area where someone is there, they do the solar entrepreneur and start growing some things, they, they oftentimes will start off with this. Nothing but organic growth, I don't want to spend any money on ads, nothing more, but organic growth. And so they focus on posting and all of these things, and that's great. But their growth is slow. And then they are they start realizing well, you know, let's run some ads to push to an offer, and they start getting that immediate cash and like, sweet, I'm gonna do nothing. But as I focus all my time on ads, and that's great. And that can get you to a point and you start getting all these different followers and everything. But then when your your, you know, business overhead starts to increase, sometimes that model is less sustainable. So you need to hire on some additional staff or something like that. Now you're not as profitable as you once were, because you have this built in overhead. And and then they get to the point where they think, Okay, now what do I do, and this is where the wheel comes in. If you can focus on these wheel, the wheel and the spokes and think about things from a more holistic standpoint, then then you'll be better off as you go. And the one thing I want people to understand is, you don't need to feel overwhelmed about this, you feel like you need to have 5050 spokes on your wheel right now. And And honestly, this is what both you and I talk with a lot of our clients about and why we get hired by is we can help them focus on Okay, let's focus on these two spokes right now. And then in three, four months, we'll add these other two or three spots. And so you're not overwhelmed. Because you can only do so much. Yeah, there are ways to prioritize what you're working on, and how to focus on that. And honestly, I mean, if anybody has any questions about your specific thing, feel free to reach out to us as well. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 29:19 I mean, I think to one of the, the big. I consider myself one of the boringness marketers on the planet. And the reason why I say that is because I feel like the a lot of the ideas and concepts that I try to push are not what people really want to hear. Right. Just like exercise that we talked about with content creation. A lot of these things are, you know, we're talking about building systems. That doesn't sound very fun. We're building sustainability, long term growth. None of that sounds fun for anyone because we want it today, right? But I think it's the best method to growing things because if you can get your mindset into thinking about focus on a few things at a time, get it strong, like you're building a house, right? And get it strong, and then put the next piece of the house on. Right, make sure that's strong and then put it and before you know you've got a whole house. Yeah. And it's built very firm. You know, it's not, the house of cars is not going to just fall down because everything was built, you know, either inefficiently or not thought through, or you just didn't put the time and effort you tried to. You're too impatient, try to rush through it. Right, right. And I've run into that before. So I'm speaking from experience, not from I just woke up one day and knew this. In fact, I got burned by thinking the opposite way, which is why this is pushed me really hard into this strategy. And I just know that it's, it works. And you do have to pay attention to all this, folks. You have to be intentional. You have to be focused and discipline. All of those words, I just use I know you don't want to hear but, but it's true. And it's needed. If you want to have a successful business where you're marketing, and you can sustain it.
Blake Beus 31:08 Yeah, absolutely. Well, in closing, Greg, how can people reach out to you if you can
Greg Marshall 31:13 just go to our website, Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy call go over any market ideas, and we're by
Blake Beus 31:21 Yeah, just blink, be calm and reach out to me there. You can sign up on my email list. I have a couple of cool freebies. And you can even read about more about the membership program. I haven't called SM three. But yeah, we'll check. We'll check you guys later. All right, thanks.
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Transcript Blake Beus 0:02 Okay, we're recording right recording. So, Greg, before before we hit the record button, we do this too many times we were talking about yes, search engine optimization or SEO, but specifically YouTube, SEO. And we both have a ton of thoughts on this you've actually been experimenting with with your own YouTube content on this. So, so tell people what you've been kind of experimenting on. And we will hash out some other ideas and plans and some things.
Greg Marshall 0:27 Yeah. So I mean, one of the things is, I've been creating video content for a very long time for years now. And but one of the things that I have lacked is an actual SEO strategy, right? So I use my video content in very specific way to attract, you know, my audience and generate business. But one thing that I haven't paid attention to is the is Search, YouTube search, and how to actually maximize that. And so recently, I've been testing and you've inspired me to do this, this, so I'm going to give you credit for that. I want to make sure everyone knows that Blake actually inspired me to do this. But recently, I've been testing different strategies for YouTube search. And right now I've been doing what they call like newsjacking, which is whatever is the trend right now. Right? For example, we just had a big boxing fight on Saturday. And, you know, Tyson fury and Deontay Wilder was was the fight. So I utilized their event, basically, and then created a video that's related to so that it could pop up in the search. And I've done that a couple times. I've also done it with my team, the Baltimore Ravens, Lamar Jackson. And I've noticed that the search traffic on my channel daily has increased and it's in it's starting to increase more and impact other videos. And so that's just something that I'm seeing that's working. And I'm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on like, yeah, search engine strategy, what you should be doing, and just in general, what should people be doing?
Blake Beus 1:57 Yeah, yeah, I love the term newsjacking. It's one I actually haven't heard for a long time. A lot of people don't know, when I first started in the tech world, my very first job was Search Engine Optimization. For an E commerce brand based out of here, Utah, that is no longer around. But it was back in the day when we went to rank well, you had to have like 20 different websites with all the contents. We're managing content for all these different websites. But I'm glad that's gone. Quick story right along newsjacking when you guys remember when the Tesla truck was announced, and Elon, yes, did this thing. And he's like the the windows are bulletproof and has some holidays. And it breaks a window. One One marketer I saw and I was so jealous, I didn't come up with this idea. But he came out he dropped a video that was essentially titled, The real reason the Tesla truck window broke and talked about how, how, in his opinion, the window broke on purpose, because it generated a ton of news stories. And one thing that Elon Musk is insanely good at is generating buzz. And he knows he knows that a lot of people like to make fun of wealthy billionaires failing on stage. Yep. But he also knows that that will come back to him in money long term in Tesla truck sales, because there'll be able to say, well, we got it fixed, guys. I don't know if that's the exact reason why I broke but I wouldn't put it past Elon Musk to do something like that, that that's definitely something that I could see him do. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, um, so yeah, I mean, let's just talk about SEO and YouTube, SEO. So YouTube, SEO has been gaining popularity for years, you know? And there's, there's a few different reasons. First of all, there's so much content to SEO competition in the Google search engine. But Google, I don't know exactly when they did this is probably a couple of years ago, started showing relevant videos up above every single other search, search result out there. And so you can kind of shortcut your search engine results if you have good video content. And you've nailed your YouTube SEO, because then Google will say, Hey, this is a relevant video for these types of searches. We're going to bump this up above every other content out there. So if you're trying to compete against 1000s of different bullet bloggers, not all those people are creating videos because it's so it's more work. It's more intimidating. Like I get that it. But Google tends to reward you for that value content, and you can get get all the way up there. Not only that, YouTube in and of itself. A lot of people think of it as a video platform. Well, honestly, first and foremost is a search engine. Yes. That's how most people interact with YouTube these days. They don't go into YouTube and hit their subscription list and just start watching videos in there. They go to YouTube, and they're searching for answers to a question that they have. And while YouTube is massive, Google search engine is 1000 times larger. Yep. And so it's easier to rank and get good traffic, high quality traffic by nailing your YouTube SEO.
Greg Marshall 4:55 Yes. And you know what, I have a very specific question because we talked about right for the record button went on. So I wanted to make sure that we touched. So you mentioned that I create, let's say, I have hundreds of videos on my channel, right? And some of them have done well, and some of them don't have as many views. My thought is, it's probably the title and the description, like it's just not optimized. Is there any value to going back and changing these titles? And are there any like do's and don'ts?
Blake Beus 5:28 Yeah, absolutely. Go back and change those titles. It's not gonna hurt anything. If it's a video, that's, that's got good content, but it's not seeing the views you think you think you should be getting? Go ahead and change those titles? It seems I don't have any super, you know, concrete evidence of this. But it seems like if you go into your backlog of videos and give it a little bit of a refresher with some new thumbnails, and some new description, text and a new title, that YouTube seems to toss that into, like a more recent algorithm, gossan, whatever, and see if those those edits can generate some, but if they do, you can, you can actually get quite quite a bit more traffic. The the one thing that's very interesting about YouTube content, I mean, some content is gets stale pretty quick, but a lot of YouTube content, you can have high views on that year after year after year. If it's if it's the right kind of content, and so you can take a video that's two years old, swap out the thumbnail, swap out the title text to give it a better, you know, SEO SEO position, improve the description and see a big bump in that one of the people I've seen, and I'm so bad at remembering names, but the guy that runs a website, that's okay, dork doc. Oh, yeah. No, I
Unknown Speaker 6:45 think it's Noah. Noah Kagan. Yeah. Yeah, someday, yeah. Yah, yah.
Blake Beus 6:50 He has a bunch of YouTube content out there and everything. And I remember listening to an interview of him a year or so ago. And one of the strategies he was experimenting with was going back and changing the old titles. And every single time he got a big boost, he
Greg Marshall 7:07 got a boost interest is that, and I've seen, I've watched this cause I think he has great content. And I hope I'm saying his name, right, Noah Kagan or something like that. But he's, I know, he's he's legit. Mark. I know, you started. Facebook. I think it was his first.
Blake Beus 7:22 Yeah, he started Facebook. And then he I think he runs app Sumo. Yes. Right now and has has, you know, bought some WordPress plugins to mean, you know, keep them maintained properly and a few other things. And yeah, he's got his hands in in quite a few different buckets right
Greg Marshall 7:40 now. Well, he's definitely a smart marketer. That's for sure. So alright, so So you're talking about YouTube search? What about what's the impact of descriptions? Like? Is there any value into having a short description, long description, does it matter?
Blake Beus 7:58 It definitely matters less than the title, the title and the thumbnail are what make people click. In fact, there's a lot of YouTubers right now, that will, if their bigger channel, right, they'll they'll drop their new video, and then they'll watch it for the first hour or so. And after 30 minutes, and it gets maybe 10,000 views or whatever, they'll swap out the title and the thumbnail and see if they get a bump in views. If so, that's how they split test their title down now. Got it. Descriptions are probably less important. But you definitely need to have some sort of good description, if people are interested in your content, they're going to be dropping into the descriptions. I don't know about your browsing behavior. But when I'm on YouTube, I almost always if it's an interesting video, almost always hop in the description to to check out some additional FEMA saying
Greg Marshall 8:44 I do the same and just to see what it's about, or if there's any additional links to you know, go to the website and learn more. So I think so that's, that's very interesting. So there's no I guess, negative really to changing the titles. If it's not getting the it almost to me, it makes more sense to optimize. Yeah, more than anything, right. Yeah, absolutely.
Blake Beus 9:05 Absolutely. I mean, we talk about algorithms, everybody talks about algorithms all the time, and a lot of people get it wrong, but algorithms do kind of define a big portion of content consumers lives mine as well. I consume a lot of content also. And you have to keep that in mind when you're changing titles and things to try to give the algorithm the indicators that might might help it determine what types of people that content is valuable for and you got to realize too, you're dealing with the viewers are not just numbers, they're actual people. And so this is where I happen to the you know, behavioral economics or psychological sales or whatever. You you've got to kind of figure out when someone sees that what makes them click Yes on on the video and you know, I actually dove in deep on this a little bit because YouTube SEO is is super good. but it's not technically SEO. I mean, I guess it is. But the thumbnail is super, super, super important you want the thumbnail to be to to incentivize people to click data. And so you see a lot of strategies and patterns out there of like the face, you see like the surprise face, you see this surprise face, maybe you'll see like an arrow pointing to something that you can't quite see you want to click on it, or something circled that you're like you can't see or, or, you know, something along those lines. Obviously, some of them feel a bit more click Beatty than others, but you can do it in a in a good way that promotes value. And everything that will get someone to click in the thumbnail is one of the best ways to do that's a very visual platform.
Greg Marshall 10:47 Do you know any statistics on what is considered a good click through rate on YouTube? Like a good click through rate on a YouTube thumbnail? That's something I think I know click through rates on ads and everything else but I don't actually know the the click the click through rate number that you should be trying striving to achieve on YouTube. Yeah, you
Blake Beus 11:10 know what, that's gonna be one of those things. I'm gonna have to go look up. I don't I don't know if that information is given to you in the YouTube creation platform. I mean, if you pay for YouTube ads, yeah, you get that number. But I don't know. I don't know if YouTube in their analytics for just a regular video. Give you the impressions and the click throughs. You can occasionally
Greg Marshall 11:32 you know what? I don't know. Maybe they've had it forever. But I have seen it. Really? Yeah. And I and it does show like impressions the click through rate. But I don't know what is considered a good click through rate gotcha for YouTube. I just know, like if I base off ads, but ads are different, because you're essentially forcing it
Blake Beus 11:51 and you're targeting targeting people. Yeah, you know,
Greg Marshall 11:56 like the most likely you're gonna like, hit your target. But this is more like a wide net that's been cast. So yeah, maybe that's something we look up. And
Blake Beus 12:04 yeah, we gotta we got to look that up and circle back, I will say, more is better.
Greg Marshall 12:08 Yeah, absolutely. The higher the number, the better, right. So
Blake Beus 12:12 even if you don't know that for your channel, or whatever, just look at kind of what the average is for your channel and start playing around with things and see what you can get, you can get to beat to be better on
Greg Marshall 12:22 that can almost be like a video game. Right? You're trying to gamify it? Yeah,
Blake Beus 12:26 I mean, it's, uh, gamifying things is super important to help keep keeping people motivated. So that's one of those things you could look at and say, Okay, we're just going to kind of play this game. So you will get that click through rate to be up to. And the reality is, like industry standards and things, it's going to vary widely. So sometimes you just need to go figure out your own damn data.
Greg Marshall 12:45 Yep. You know, yeah, well, I think the the other thing question I had is, is there anything that negatively impacts you in the algorithm? Like, if it's to click Beatty? Like, do you ever do you know, people get penalized for that at all? Or? Or does it matter?
Blake Beus 13:00 I can, I can see if that's not happening. Now. I can see that happening in the future. Okay, but the one thing you got to realize is, YouTube knows a lot about your video. They they it's not like the video itself is this black hole? Right? Yeah, the algorithm can actually see what the content is on your video and make some intelligent guesses. First, the frequent transcription isn't for your benefit, Greg, or my benefit is for the algorithms benefit got it right. And so they know what you're talking about in the video, they know all of the content inside the video from a text perspective that can then be used for searching or whatever got. The second thing is, is they they do have some basic image detection that they can determine inside of a video kind of what the content is got. So if you're talking about I don't know how to make potatoes, you know, big potatoes or something, and your video is about bananas. You don't know it'll know that, that you have nothing.
Unknown Speaker 13:58 Right? Like
Blake Beus 14:00 and so but if it's like a talking head style video, that doesn't matter quite so much because you're not you're not showing images of the things right there. The other thing they they know too is they know they use indicators a lot. So are people watching the whole video? Are they watching this part of the video are they click on the video in the first 10 seconds, they're bouncing? They know that even if all the SEO aspects are good, if the engagement in that area isn't good, then they'll demote the video got it so you'll notice a and this is a standard storytelling pattern but you'll notice the videos that do really really well I'm talking the videos that consistently have from creators that consistently have you know, millions of views each video you'll notice that they always start the story in the middle Yeah, right. And and tease the the end results but not tell you the NBL or they always start with some sort of a surprise that's that happens in the middle of the story. And then they then they go back to the story they tell the whole story and you see literally the exact same content that you saw in the first five seconds, but it happens that maybe minute five or six or something like that. And then they take that through to conclusion. That's a very standard storytelling pattern. You see this in movies all the time, you see this everywhere. And you can very easily do it on short form videos like YouTube shorts, or tick tock videos, or Instagram reels. And you can do it on a little bit longer form videos, like a longer form, you know, 10 minute YouTube video or something like that. But you know, if you're talking about your, your ravens, yep, that that one, and you're talking about how that ties to marketing, you know, you could start in the middle of the story, some something talking about how how this, this unbelievable thing happened right before the end of the fourth quarter that send it into overtime, and you were blown away and couldn't believe and it made you not be able to sleep at night. And then you go back to the first of the story, you talk about how that story got set up and everything. And then the second half of the story. You talk about after the this incredible thing that happened, you talk about how that ties into marketing. Boom, you've got this very addictive. Yeah, storytelling that is, is interesting and valuable, and will get a large watch through right,
Greg Marshall 16:07 you know, you bring up storytelling to you. I think one of the indirect benefits of doing video marketing, especially if you're trying to improve your results on the search is it's actually practice for public speaking, for communication for different ways for people to actually share their message, because I've noticed the more videos that I've done over time, it's helped me communicate better because it helps you with figuring out what you should be talking about what's the most important etc, etc. So second indirect benefit to really trying to get higher watching rates.
Blake Beus 16:43 Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's just about getting confident on camera, getting confident front of people, and you get better at a lot of these things. I I read somewhere that one of the biggest determining factors for high level executives, as to how high they will go in a company once they hit like the upper middle management is how good they are a public speaking or how good they are at present, presenting like a story and storytelling and everything. We're we're very enamored as humans by people that can tell a good story that has some sort of principles that we can we can take away. I mean, it's you see that theme over and over and over throughout the whole history of humanity. Yep. The the people that are good at storytelling are the are the people that we kind of look up to? Yeah. And if you look at anybody, some of the some of the big players out there, you've got, you know, Tony Robbins, yeah, the guy tells stories like nobody's business you got Gary Vee is always telling stories, even if it's a very short form story. You know, I remember once see, he had this very short video about supporting the original hustle. And yes, it starts by this lemonade stand. And then you know, buys, buys them out talks with them, whether they're business or whatever. And it's like the super short story with a bunch of, you know, context surrounding literally everybody's thought about sorry, yes.
Greg Marshall 18:00 I still think about,
Blake Beus 18:03 sometimes I feel like thrown in my hand. But yeah, storytelling is a super important one. And that's very vital for, you know, YouTube, SEO
Greg Marshall 18:13 for data. So with YouTube, SEO, pretty much like a good recap is work on your titles. Do you know if a longer shorter title is better or worse,
Blake Beus 18:26 it doesn't really matter, as long as it's catchy. But if it's too long, it'll get it'll get cut off, and you won't be able to see it in certain views. So that's the only thing I would say, to keep in mind.
Greg Marshall 18:35 Got it. And then description and make sure you have somewhat of a description, to at least tell YouTube what the video is about, even though it can read your video probably more information for the algorithm the better. And what about tags, tags?
Blake Beus 18:51 You know, tags are basically like hashtags in other places. And that's actually something I haven't delved into a ton. If I had to guess, I would guess that YouTube cares a whole lot, a whole lot more about your title and your thumbnail. And then the indicators, meaning watch through rate and click through rate. And those things than they do about the tags tags are, are too easy to just like throw in there. And then it's almost almost every content platform out there. They start with tags, and then they kind of deprioritize how important those are. And you see that right now with Instagram, hashtags. They're they're very much D. D. D, prioritizing.
Greg Marshall 19:31 Yes.
Blake Beus 19:32 How much reach you get from your hashtags right
Greg Marshall 19:34 now, back in the day used to be able to get a lot of blogs, and then, you know, over the years, probably because everything always gets abused eventually. Right? Well,
Blake Beus 19:43 and that's a very easy thing to abuse. You can sit down there and think about all these hashtags, related hashtags and take five minutes and you've got all these hashtags, but that was that was easy, right? You want to do the harder thing you want to do the thing that takes a little bit more effort because everybody in their dog can do the easy thing. Yep. The people that are putting Just a tiny bit more effort, we'll see significant
Greg Marshall 20:02 more data word. Got it? And what about like with? Do you think there's any influence on what about outside reach? Meaning? Let's say you have a YouTube video is getting watching pretty well. But it's getting shared a lot on websites like places outside of YouTube. Do you think that impacts search in any way? Does it give it more value?
Blake Beus 20:26 I would, I would say absolutely. Because that's another, you know, behavioral indicator. If if people are taking your video and embedding it on their own website, because it's highly valuable. That took a lot of effort, right? That's not just smashing the thumbs up. That's, oh, I want to copy this embed code. I want to go to my website, I'm gonna write a quick blog post about it. I'm going to throw it up there. That's a lot more effort than hitting than hitting even hitting subscribe or hitting the like button. Got it? So that will definitely have an impact. How much of an impact? I don't know, I would assume quite a bit. Because even the highly popular videos I can't imagine they're getting more than Yeah. You embed Yeah, total. So it's you're working with pretty small numbers there. But it can definitely have an impact for sure.
Greg Marshall 21:15 Got it. So I think yeah, I think to recap, that pretty much tells us everything that we probably need to know as far as YouTube search and what to be working on.
Blake Beus 21:25 Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I would just say, I would just say keep at it, I want one of my favorite quotes about creators or whatever it is. To make your to make really good videos, you have to make 100 or 1000 really shitty videos, yes, to get there. And just make sure the next one's better. And if you're a person like me, my perfectionism gets in the way of creating content a lot of the time. And because I want each piece to be super great. Yeah. So one of the things I do to kind of shift that is say, Okay, I'm drawing a line in the sand. This is done. Yep. All of the things I wish I did a little bit better on this piece of content. I'm going to carry those over into my next the next one. Yep. Right. But I'm going to draw a line in the sand say this is done. And the same thing happens with, you know, artists, or painters or people like that. Eventually, you have to say this painting is done. Yes. And move on to the next painting and take what you want to learn and move that forward.
Greg Marshall 22:19 Yeah. So yes, I think, Blake, do you have anything else as far as YouTube search and what we should be doing? No, no,
Blake Beus 22:26 I don't have anything there. But let's just let's just wrap this up and talk about, you know, how can people reach out to you Greg,
Greg Marshall 22:33 yeah. So people if you want to reach out I do a free marketing consultation, helping your business, whether that's ads, even more anything to basically grow your business and the market strategy. You can see me at Greg marshall.co is my website to go and book that call.
Blake Beus 22:49 Awesome. Awesome. And then for me, just blink, be calm. I have a few different offers on there. And you know, you can actually reach out and contact me on there, contact me on social media, whatever. But yeah, that's it.
Greg Marshall 23:00 All right. Well, I guess until next time, appreciate it, guys.
Blake Beus 23:04 Okay, we'll talk to you guys later. All right.
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Transcript Blake Beus 0:06 Okay, we're good. Let's do this. Greg, you're telling me about this great marketing strategy that I heard, basically, how to get sales with zero costs.
Greg Marshall 0:19 Yes,
Blake Beus 0:20 this really cool.
Greg Marshall 0:21 The the deal of prom is, is it's not legal. So basically, that's kind of the segue into the story that we were talking about before we hit the record button, which was I had a client last week. And I've seen this on other accounts to even you know, like bigger, you know, influencers or businesses that this happened to where a hacker gets into their account. And they actually set up an ad campaign. But using your money, and then creating rules on when you turn the ads off, it automatic turns back on. And on top of that, they remove the admins of the business manager, and then use very large budget. So the way they kind of did it, I think,
Blake Beus 1:08 how you hurt, like, tell us how you discovered it, like, so. And then yeah, well, how it happens and everything
Greg Marshall 1:15 and what to do about it. So basically, the way I discovered it was I really did it, outside of my client asked me who has a pretty good aspect per day. And so it's not like, they're not used to spending money on the platform. And so what she ended up reaching out to me and just say, hey, you know, I've been hit with a couple of charges of $1,500. And we increased, you know, my daily ad budget. And I was like, Well, I know, we haven't increased it to 1500 $3,000 a day. I know that. So I just thought, Oh, well, maybe there's, you know, Facebook did something or maybe it's a carryover from the previous month or so. So I didn't really think anything of it. And then I went to the ad account and I noticed I saw a campaign that the budget was set at $50,000 a day. And it was it wasn't per day it was 50,000 lifetime lifetime. Okay, over just a few days of oh really Yeah. And when I went there and saw that I was like wow, this I've seen these types of hacks on like pages where they you know, they're putting kind of spam posts of like buy this product is weight loss product or whatever. And you see it on a page and you know, their page got hacked, you just got to go ahead and recover I've never seen that actually an ad account business manager no and this way and what they did was they basically replaced they used my clients budget credit card and created this very big campaign but put their business information in as far as like optimizing for purchase their pixel their business page, their own ad everything so basically just went in and said I want to use their money instead of mine. And I'm gonna try to use $50,000 worth of pickup sales. Crazy thing was they were generating sales. Really? Yeah, so they were getting an average purchase about $80 a purchase. Oh, really? Yeah.
Blake Beus 3:07 When what was like the order what would be like an order value?
Greg Marshall 3:11 You know, I did not click the link because I didn't want to have any issue with it. But it was a it was a chainsaw. A chainsaw. Yeah. And your maybe wasn't just one of those, you know, the saws that cut the wood. You know, like when you're in a garage you basically cut the wood in half
Blake Beus 3:28 how okay like a table song? Yes, that table so those those like, low end table saws probably about 150 to $200 that high end one could be like $1,500
Greg Marshall 3:37 I'm not gonna lie. I saw the video like it was probably get brought. So I saw and
Blake Beus 3:44 it's like, it's it sounds like that was a legitimate company. Yes,
Greg Marshall 3:48 it very much. So look, I mean, they had their pixel they had everything connected to so I was just the pays look legit, everything looked legit. So I was just like, what's crazy was what I've how this is what I discovered how they did it, not from how they access but what their way of essentially deceiving you is they labeled one of the campaigns the exact same name is a current campaign. So you wouldn't notice then what they did was probably to see if you are noticing the charges. They started with a really low budget, real lifetime budget of only a couple pennies, and then a couple dollars, and then you know $20 To see if you catch on to these charges being hit right. And then then I'm sure there's something else too like trying to train the Facebook algorithm to think this is real right so that they can increase their budget right. So then what they do is they created rules on anytime you turn off the ad. It automatic comes back on. And so I kept noticing that every time I would turn it off. It will come back on over and over and over again. And I was just like, oh, man, this. I don't even remember how I figured out that that's the rule. But somehow I clicked on something. And it brought me to the rule section. And then I saw they had all these rules. And I was like, Well, these guys obviously must do this a lot, because they have built this out perfectly interesting to where someone like myself, who's in Facebook ads all the time, still took a while to figure out how they were doing this. And so I just thought, wow, that's, that's crazy, because you would think you think it'd be tighter measures on that? Yeah, it comes to people's accounts. Yeah. Because people have their banking information on there. And you could easily if someone was account that maybe was spending about that amount per day, they could probably easily steal 1000s and 1000s. Without you ever really known.
Blake Beus 5:55 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it, some of the big accounts, like big accounts, I'm thinking like, nationwide brands, like 10,000 100,000 a day. Yeah, 100,000 a day, there are accounts spending $100,000 a day. And so an extra five 610 $1,000 A day could go unnoticed. Yep. For a long time. Yep. And even even so, because a lot of those companies are using external tools to manage their facebook ads account. Yep. And so so anything set directly in the Facebook Ads account may not be pulled over into those external tool report? Yep.
Greg Marshall 6:30 as well. Wow. Where are these? These? I'm sure these guys know all the ins and outs of how not to be seen. So I just, I think a good topic to go over today would be obviously, no one is known as is 100%. safer, because you even see big brands kit. Yeah, breach of security. Yep, pretty regularly. And so this is something that is most likely, if it hasn't happened to you yet, will in some instance, happen to you. I've had it happen to me, not from ads manager, but disabled accounts and reports of people trying to get into your pages and your biz. I've had that happen with a bunch of different stuff. And so I've tried my best for security purposes, but by no means do I think or know that I can 100% prevent that. There's very smart people out there that can do whatever they want. If they want me right, and so what are what are some of your suggestions on how to keep things safe? as safe as possible?
Blake Beus 7:41 Yeah, yeah. So, um, so yeah, a big portion of my corporate career was in the financial industry, the banking industry. And so we had a lot of training. Plus my final project when I graduated from school, was I show people how to hack some websites. So I love this area. And my degree was actually an information security that specifically that was my emphasis. So so let's talk about a few things. The very, very first thing is humans, people are always the weakest link. Yeah. So no matter how secure are protected as system, if you can trick a human into giving you your they're giving you a password. Yep, that's the easiest way to get into any system ever. Yeah. And so there are some things you can do from like a security standpoint. But there's also you have to understand you, you yourself are the easiest durability target to that. And this has happened to some very smart people can get tricked as well. One of my favorite YouTube channels is a channel called the spiffing Brit. And he actually hacks things if hacks, video games and stuff. He got hacked by a spam email. And he did a whole report on how it was him. And he's like, he's a software guys a security guy. And he got tricked. Yep, recently, and he did this whole his whole YouTube channel with like, 5 million subscribers got deleted. Ooh. And so it can happen, everybody. But let's let's talk about the technical things, then we'll talk about some other things. So So absolutely, very first thing is if you're running ads, what you need to do is you you need to turn on what's called multi factor authentication, or two factor authentication. It's sometimes abbreviated, abbreviated with a to FA. And what that is, if you're not familiar with that you have you have one factor of authentication, which is your username and password, right, but then you have a second authentication which exists outside of that, where they will either text your phone number or a one time code to use or you can use an app on your phone called Google Authenticator, or there's a few others out there. Google Authenticator is the biggest one. And what those apps do is they generate a six digit code that changes every 30 seconds. Yeah, based on you know, an encryption key that put in and very first, that the server knows what that code is every 30 seconds, and your phone knows what that code is every 30 seconds. But no one else knows anywhere. So even if you have all your passwords in a password database, and someone tricks you out of that, and they steal all of your passwords, they still can't log in unless they have access to your phone, or that app on your phone. So that right there will cut down on most hacking attempts, simply because hackers are going to go after the lowest hanging fruit. And if you have that turned on, they're like, Well, I'm worth going after this account. There's a 10,000 other people that don't have this turnout, I'm not even going to worry about trying to attack this account. Yep. Right. And so that right there, just having that turned on for that reason alone will probably protect you because it's simply just not worth their time. Yeah. Right. So that would be the first thing I do. Facebook has this, you can turn on that multi factor authentication, they'll walk you through the process of that, definitely do that. Google, Google will do this for you, you can do this for your Gmail accounts or your email accounts, which is another good thing because another hacking strategy a lot of people have is they'll try to get your email password. And then from your email password, they'll try to submit like a password, reset to Facebook or whatever. And then that will get sent to your email account, which they have access to reset the password. And now you're locked out. And they're in. Yeah, right. So you can turn on the multi factor authentication, or the two factor authentication for that. It sounds super hairy, it's really not. Yeah, it's it's a very easy process. They'll walk you through what to do, they'll even give you some backup codes that you can write down on a piece of paper putting like a safe in case you lose your phone or something, you can use one of those. So those will be the first things.
If you've done that, you'll 90% not have to worry about this, if you're just not going to be a big target. The next thing you got to think about is sometimes people will try to trick you into doing this, one of the ways they'll do that is they will send an email that looks like an official email, yeah, Facebook or something saying I've had this app, hey, there's been an issue with your account log in here to resolve it. Yeah, the and this is where it gets tricky. And this is where it's hard, even for a security expert to figure it out. Because if you click on that link, it could take you to a website that looks exactly like Facebook, but the URL might be a little bit different. It might be like Facebook with an extra URL to KS or something like that Facebook, or Facebook, or it could be like Facebook dot, you know, secure data.com, which is not owned by Facebook at all. Yep. And so if you get an email like that, that says, hey, there's something wrong with your account, the best thing to do is to not click on a link to those emails. But actually go to Facebook outside of your email, log in and see if you have any official messages from Facebook inside of there. If you don't, you can just delete that email and disregard it. But you don't want to click on any links in those emails, because they'll try to trick you. And that's how the the the YouTube channel talking about that's how they got hacked. Got it. And so, so it's hard. And the email can even come from an official source. Like this guy on YouTube got hacked, he got an email from a google.com email address. And it's because emails like that can be spoofed. I can, if you know what you're doing, you can send an email that has whatever email address in it you want. So So those are the types of things you want to look at. The other thing you have to look at is look at putting in from like a bank perspective. Yeah, daily limits on your cards. Yep. Right. So that happens completely outside of Facebook or any ad platform form. But you can tell your, your banking platform, this card is just for Facebook ads, and I'm never going to spend more than $3,000 a day on this card. Even though my limit might be way higher business cards can have really high limits, you can just say I'm never going to spend more than x amount on that. And you can call in and get that updated if you need to, or go into a branch get the updated if you're scaling up your ad spend. But you know, something like that will give you at least a safety net. Yep. To to make sure that you're not spending $50,000 You only get you only get screwed over for $3,000 which is a huge difference, right?
Greg Marshall 14:16 And it's probably a lot easier to talk to your bank after and say well I put this for a reason. Yeah. And this if you know charging this much then it's obviously someone's just trying to take the money versus me using it for business. Yep. So
Blake Beus 14:32 yeah, so I mean, that's kind of a long spiel. But if you do those things and keep an eye on what messages people are sending you, Facebook should never email you saying hey, we need your password. Yeah, no one should ever text you saying hey, can you give me that three digit code that just that you just got texted? Never Never do that? Yep. And they can make it sound official. They can make it feel official, of course.
Greg Marshall 14:52 Well, that's what that's what the best do. Yeah. Does that make it seem official? And they probably practice on So many accounts, they've got it down to a science. Yeah. And so just trying to have the, I guess, the best security measures that you possibly can, with the understanding that, you know, if this happens, it's very possible. And it can happen to anyone. I've had accounts where I'm managing pages of, you know, several million followers, and their page gets completely taken away and hacked, and they're posting crazy stuff on their pay. And it's just, and you can get everything back, I guess, most of the time, nine times out of 10, at least, my experience, you can get everything back, you're just gonna have to, you know, go through the process of sending your actual, you know, driver's license, like all of your information. But yeah, this is probably a new prime. You know, we talked about this last week, you know, this, this is just with, you know, the world's changing, it changes fast. And there's just always a, you know, there's hackers out there always a step ahead. Right. And so, yeah, it's just, you just got to try your best, but I think having those security measures, and probably the number one thing, I would say, this goes back to, don't rely on one piece of traffic source of traffic, right, this client is using for total, so she pretty much never really panicked. Yeah, she just was like, Ah, man, you know, so she went and picked Facebook, while we're still running ads on the other platform, which is totally fine. But the other thing really is the end of the day. I think the biggest fear would just be, you know, people hack your stuff. You don't want to take all your money. Yeah. Right. I mean, because that's your livelihood. So maybe working with your banks to make sure that those are in order to make sure that if something like this does happen, which I feel like it's gonna happen to everyone, it's happened to me, I don't know how many times you're able to, like recover from and you're not putting yourself in like, huge danger. Yeah. And like I said, You just try the best you can, because even some of the biggest brands in the world have had data breaches. And we're talking about billion dollar industries. You just, you just got to keep keep your head on a swivel. That's all you can do.
Blake Beus 17:15 Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I don't know if you've tried this, but Facebook should refund the money that was stolen. And I don't know, it's probably a hard process. But that's looking into, because it's clear that that was that was a hack.
Greg Marshall 17:32 Right? Yeah. Which, which is one of the reasons why initially when I went in, I took pictures, but I didn't want to delete the campaign. Yeah, because I knew that the hacker would probably at least eventually delete me off, which they did, and try to delete that account, which they did as well. But at least we have all the information to show. Yeah, I even took a video of everything that happened. Yeah, I still had access. Yeah. So we have all this documentation. So yeah, at least say, you know, Give us our money back. I mean, that hackers probably gonna get away clean, but at least give us our money back.
Blake Beus 18:08 Yeah, yeah. I mean, Facebook's a multi multi billion dollar business. And they, they know that fraud happens on their platform, and I'm sure they have, I don't know, might, they might have enough profits to be able to refund. Maybe, I don't know, things are probably pretty tight. For Zuckerberg.
Greg Marshall 18:25 They are a lean startup.
Blake Beus 18:29 Probably shopping at Costco these days to save money dollar store, because things are really tight for him. Right? Well,
Greg Marshall 18:35 I think, you know, and with, also with thinking about security, you know, follow same measures for your pages, things like that. But I think the best thing to do, at least in my experience, because I've run into this, you know, this happens, at least for me four or five times a year, really where someone is trying to hack my page or, or do something. And well, the first time it happened, I remember like, oh, man, this is this is not good. And almost feeling panic, but you never make good decisions when you're panicked. Yeah. So the first step, I think, is to just like, take a deep breath, and just go yes, it feels like you've been alienated or taken advantage of, but you most likely if you think clearly can work your way out of it in some capacity. And it's not like 100% the end of the world. And if you're forced to have to use other strategies of platforms and you know, maybe it's a blessing, right, so but yeah, these these things kind of happen, especially, you know, in the internet world, and it's just, it's probably going to continue to that's probably gonna be the next big industry is people that are able to have lockdown security solutions, where it's very, very difficult to get in. But yeah, I mean, my already exists.
Blake Beus 20:00 that stuff already exists. But the trade off is it's much more difficult for you to get in. Right. And so there's always this balance between security and convenience. Because if it takes you, you know, 30 minutes, 30 minutes to get into an account to make a couple of tweaks, yeah, most people aren't going to do that. Right. Most people are going to take that time. And so there's always this the balance. So I think I mean, really simple things like using a password database like LastPass, or one password or something. Those are legitimate secure solutions for storing your all your logins, creating logins that that are randomized characters, so they're not the same password for every everything, using multi factor or two factor authentication. And then making sure not to click on links, asking for passwords and stuff like that. You'll be in a pretty good spot,
Greg Marshall 20:48 you know, I got a question for it. Security. Why? Because this is actually one way that gave me prompts. When you use different wi Fi's Are you more susceptible to getting your information taken, even if you have security measures, for example, I had my accounts, this is almost 10 years ago, but I have my accounts, you know, assuming they were like somewhat decently tight, and I traveled to Australia, and I went on their Wi Fi, and I just remember getting like, all these random notifications and stuff like that. And that's actually one of the times where the account got, you know, hacked or whatever. And so, does that have more to do with just Wi Fi? People hacking your Wi Fi? Or does that have to do with location? Or what is that? Mostly? Like? How do you because this client travels a lot? Yeah. Okay. So they're going from, you know, the south to the north to the East Coast. And so for clients who travel a lot, what do you do there? What are the best? Yeah,
Blake Beus 21:59 I'm actually glad you brought that up. Because that does give, you know, there are some things you can do. So the short answer is, yes, technically, other wi Fi's could be less secure, and could lead to something. It's not as likely as it was maybe five or 10 years ago, because of how secure websites now it's much more prominent that HTTPS means it's encrypted between your your computer, and you know, the outside network. But there are some ways around that and not not to get too technical. But one of them is called the man in the middle where someone could have something also on the network that acts like a legitimate device, then sniffs all of your traffic. It used to be back in the day with open Wi Fi networks and stuff. You could people could sniff what you were typing and stuff like that. And that still technically can happen. I'm sure there's networks that are set up like that. So what do you do, one of the best things you can do is sign up for a VPN service. There's tons of them out there. There's Nord VPN, there's, I actually have a service called Tor guard that I use quite regularly for different things. And what a VPN service does is it encrypts all traffic on your computer, not just each webpage, but literally every network traffic, and tunnels it through securely, through whatever network you're on to a server somewhere else. And most of these VPN services, you can choose where you want your endpoint to be, you can choose to make it look like you're from Germany or Canada, you know, Utah, or whatever. But that will if you're ever on an open network that will encrypt everything, so no one can see what you're doing. And these services are super cheap. I mean, the one I pay for Tor guard is I think it's like 30 bucks a year. Yeah, yeah, or something like that. It's super cheap, and they're totally worth it. And as a side bonus, you can log in as if you're in Europe, and you can see what Netflix looks like. Because I have different licensing deals, you can stream stream from live,
Greg Marshall 24:03 that makes sense, because my brother, he's, he's in cybersecurity. And I remember a long time ago, I thought, Are people really gonna waste that much time wanting to like hack your stuff or whatever, but it wasn't. So I got heavy into, you know, having access to clients, where you have to really think this through, like, you have to trust me as safe as you can. Because, you know, these are people that you're servicing. And so, my brother, I remember when he first told me about a VPN, I just thought, like, oh, man, maybe that's only accessible for like, you know, legit military kind of normal person. And what why would a normal person have that, but it wasn't until my eyes started to get open. I think that trip to Australia helped me really think about it because I was like, wow, that's interesting. Like, all of a sudden I got here and everything is like it's just all over the place. I'm trying to live against my client stuff. It's now it's locking me out and redirect me here. And I was in a hotel. Yeah. And so it just made me think through like, what other measures can you take in order to get as safe as you can? So there's nothing 100% But at least where it's like something where you're not, you know, concerned, all man, this class page is now compromised. I got to get it back. Yes, like I said, you nine times out of 10 you can get it figured out. But it really is like a huge time suck because it'll take like a whole day. Sometimes it takes a week, two weeks. Yeah. And we've had we run into this with memory, your ad account, where we got like, shut down for who knows what reason. Do you remember that? And we were like, we were running. And they were very profitable campaigns. Yeah, all of a sudden, we had to go through Fado. You know.
Blake Beus 25:53 And it was it was it was brutal. We were spending about two grand a day on my videos. And it was it was it was crushing. It was doing four to 5k a day in sales. And then the ad account kept getting banned. And for just crazy reasons. And we had to work through through with Facebook and all these
Greg Marshall 26:09 time sucks. It just takes you you know, you're learning and money. Yeah, it was
Blake Beus 26:12 because we were profitable one day, and then the next day would get shut down. So then we'd have to spin it back up, and we lose money for the first two or three days or bills back, or builds. Yeah, backup the data and
Greg Marshall 26:24 all these things. You know, like I said, there's there's no real reason to like, panic, but you can solve it. So that's that would be my advice, but it's just it is a big time. So it's a huge inconvenience. Especially if you're a very busy person, you got a lot of stuff going on. You know, you don't want to spend eight hours 10 hours a week
Blake Beus 26:44 dealing with this? Well, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's like anything, you know, five minutes of preventative saves you 100 hours of fixing problems later. Absolutely. And so when it comes to like VPN, you want to just have this concept of trusted networks and untrusted networks, if you're at your house. Yeah. And you know that that's your router right over there. And the internet service provider is, is wired directly in your house, like you can send us a trusted network. And I don't need to use a VPN. I still use it from time to time because I do some stuff with location based data tracking. So I need to check to see how a website will look sure if I'm in a specific location. But you don't necessarily need a VPN at that point. Because you know, things are set up. Yeah, an untrusted network would be something like a hotel like a star. I don't know what Yes, Starbucks McDonald's. Air for the airport. I don't know. I don't know what's going on there. I don't know what measures they've taken. I don't know probably very mad. Oh, no. In the thing is, is people can set up their own wireless access points that look like yeah, the Starbucks Starbucks, right? Like, that's one of the ways if I wanted to go, yeah, hack someone's account, I would bring in a little wireless access point, I'd make it look like Starbucks. Yep. And then they would connect to mine. And I could look at all the traffic they have. But if I'm on a VPN, if I'm on a VPN, once I connect to that VPN, even if you're connected to my device can't couldn't see any of that true. Well, and I and I'm sure, I guess, to
Greg Marshall 28:16 kind of wrap this up, as far as security is concerned. Just make sure, like Blake, recommend five minutes of preventative work, which saves you hundreds of hours, and at least minimize your chances of getting hacked. Or having any, like massive dam fall place. And so this reminds me a lot of insurance. And when you think of insurance, it's not the most exciting topic of like, Man, I sure can't wait to pay my health insurance. And my car insurance, right? Because most of the time, you're not going to be dealing with this. But you sure do love it. When you do have this thing happen. Yep. And it's in place. You're like, thank goodness, I did that. And so these are things that aren't as exciting as the new you know, Facebook marketing trick or the new tick tock ad, but it's something that you absolutely must take, you know, take into consideration and make it a priority because this stuff does actually impact your business. Yeah,
Blake Beus 29:23 well, I think I mean, we talk about this a lot of the time it's the the boring details tend to be the things that actually push a business civil right. And I know we have gurus out there we kind of hammer on gurus even though we're kind of loving gurus our podcasts are so yeah, we are but the reality is a lot of them because marketing marketing one solution that fixes all your problems is much easier than saying, well it's actually pretty complicated. That's why a lot of the marketing messages we get out there on on biz, from business consultants and everything is like is like here's the super simple trick that will help you out And it's because it works because it's it's easy to explain that concept than the complexities. But that's why we do this podcast, we can dive in deeper on the complexity for the people that are interested in that. But yeah, pay attention those boring details. Yeah. And if you if you guys have, you know, you can you can contact both Greg or me if you have any questions surrounding just something like this,
Greg Marshall 30:21 especially security, I recommend you reach out to Blake, just because he understands his house a lot better than I do. And this is your your field, basically,
Blake Beus 30:31 basically. Yeah. And if you guys want us to cover more security related marketing topics, we can definitely do that. Just Just let us know. But Greg, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall 30:41 Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session with me. Okay, and what about E? Blake beus.com.
Blake Beus 30:47 You can kind of get to the several different things I do on that site and contact me there.
Greg Marshall 30:54 Great. Well see you guys next week. And hopefully you enjoyed this this pocket. Alright, we'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.
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Greg Marshall 0:00 All right, we are recording. All right. Well, Blake, what's your thoughts on it? Let's get right into it. So Facebook has changed, you know its name. Well, not the properties that owns I guess, but just the parent company comm meta, meta, meta? Yeah. Meta. What do you what are your thoughts? Was this mean? Oh, I don't know. I mean, they've been they've they've been beat up a lot in the press lately over a ton of things.
Blake Beus 0:27 Maybe that sparked why they decided to make that change right now. A lot of people are talking about this concept called the metaverse if you've ever watched Ready Player One, or read the book Ready Player, one of you know, okay, okay. It's all centered around this
online universe called the oasis. And, and it's very, it's like a dystopian future. Most people don't like living in the real world. So we hop into the this virtual reality and spending also time in there. And the whole economies and everything happening virtually, contest jobs, like people can log into their job and work all day in VR at an office of VR office and everything. And Metaverse is the kind of generic term for something like that. Yeah. A lot of people are speculating, I mean, not just name speculation, they literally said that this is what they wanted to do. But they wanted to take this whole concept and encapsulate it and make it a thing because I feel like in 1020 30 years, that's going to be the new way we operate kind of kind of a bigger reality. So they already own the Oculus VR headsets. So I don't know, we'll we'll just see. I mean, it's nothing's gonna change right now, we might see facebook.com change to a different domain name sometime in the future. But I mean, it's worth talking about, but it's all kind of up in the air right now. And I don't know how, how it's all gonna play out.
Greg Marshall 1:56 Yeah, I guess my question would be, you know, I think sometimes we all forget, these are all businesses. So to make a business decision, that's what how do you think this benefits Facebook business wise?
Blake Beus 2:12 Well, it's all about I mean, to use the the words, engagement or whatever, but it's taking engagement tank kind of to the next level. So imagine if, if a large percentage of the population their entire work day happened inside of this virtual reality. You could sell virtual billboard, you could sell virtual all sorts of virtual things, they could have their own virtual currency. And that currency could rival a currency of like a government. I mean, Facebook has one and a quarter billion people logging into it every month. Yeah. I think if they launched their own cryptocurrency, which they said they're going to do, yeah. Right. They they could have a currency that is, I don't know, more stable, more universal than the US dollar, potentially, eventually. Because you know, how many of you live in the United States? 330 million, something like that. Facebook has a larger audience than that. Yeah. So I don't know if they can get people to be fully immersive in their platform in their system. The sky's the limit for ways they can monetize and all of that.
Greg Marshall 3:21 So basically, what it sounds like, it's, it's allowing them because I have noticed now obviously, this is a Marketing podcast. And so we talk a lot about, you know, marketing strategies. And I've noticed more placements in the Facebook ad account where you can place ads. Oh, really? Yes. recently. And I don't know if it's on every account. Maybe it's just on some because, you know, as you go, I noticed on different client accounts. They have a seems like different, I guess features. Yeah, right. Yeah. And one that I just saw, actually, this morning was the reels, not only the real placement, but then a real overlay placement, which is slightly different, I think, because it's so new. I don't know. So I'm making a speculation. I would guess it's similar to like, you know, the banner ads that are on YouTube. Okay, YouTube videos on the bottom. I think that's what that is. Interesting. I'm not 100% Sure. But I do know that there's a lot more ad placement. So
Blake Beus 4:20 you're talking to the little banner that sits on top of the video kind of in the bottom center? Yes. I think that's what you're saying. There's like a lot of screen real estate on reels already.
Greg Marshall 4:32 So that's why I said I don't I could be wrong. But my initial thought is because in the ads platform that actually says like reels and inferences as overlays. And so my only thought would be well, what's an overlay to me, would be some type of writing across the real. I led my reading. I
Blake Beus 4:54 think that makes sense. So it'll have to be something we test out for sure. That It's interesting, I didn't know they were rolling out specific placements for that,
Greg Marshall 5:05 and it seems like it just feels like there's more and more placements, you know, like they added the Facebook search, right? That was a placement that was new, it just seems like that placement list is growing. And so that's my thought is they're probably, you know, with, with meta, they're looking to expand, because there's so many people advertising in the Facebook newsfeed. And they probably want to have more control on data that they own. Yeah, so that they can't be blocked again, July things like iOS, or
Blake Beus 5:37 Well, yeah, and that's the thing, that's what a lot of people don't realize is like inside the Facebook app, Facebook still knows all the things you're doing. And so the more they can, can control your entire online experience or controls probably the wrong word, the more they can own and have your entire online experience happen inside their platform. They were all of any any of their platforms, the more they're going to know about, you know you what you're doing, because that's all first party data, meaning data they're collecting directly from you heard their terms and conditions, because they're choosing to use their properties in their apps and everything like that. But it's like, you know, I, I think of advertising and real estate as the same quite a bit. You know, how do you how do you sell more homes? Will you open up some more real estate for sale? Right? And this the same thing with ads? How do you sell more ads, if it's a pretty congested marketplace, and costs are going up and people are ditching because costs are too high? You You You launch some more real estate, you give them more places to to put the ads and now you have more real estate to sell. And the thing with virtual digital real estate is the more digital real estate to sell, the more you can sell, right? Well, and
Greg Marshall 6:51 if you're the first in the market, you can eat up, you know, which is the strategy that all these giant businesses use. If you're first to market. Yeah, you can eat up most of the real estate, therefore allowing you to be in control of the virtual real estate.
Blake Beus 7:07 Yep. And if you if you can eat up so much, it's hard for anybody else to come in and make a dent every now and again. You'll see something make a dent but then company like Facebook, their plays usually just buy that company out. That's why they own Instagram. Yeah. Right. Instagram was knocking their socks off. I don't know, seven, eight years ago. It's been a while since they've and so they and they thought they couldn't compete. So they just bought Instagram.
Greg Marshall 7:32 It's tick tock tick tock, right. Yeah, let's set a scene reels everywhere on Facebook.
Blake Beus 7:35 You're seeing reels all over the place. And I think I think Facebook would be more than happy to buy Tik Tok right now, I think but I think the price tags is is too high. Or you know, I mean, it's owned by Chinese companies. So I don't know it. And
Greg Marshall 7:51 here's my question. I'm happy brought that up, because my next question was actually going to be so did it tick tock did they sell? I remember hearing like Microsoft and Walmart bought either parts of Tic Toc, or maybe most of it or all of it? Did you do remember that there was a part where something was sold? Yeah, from tic toc. And I just remember Walmart and because it stood out to me like, wow, that's interesting. I wouldn't expect a Walmart or Microsoft to be involved with the TIC tock but I didn't wrong, but I just want to hurt someone.
Blake Beus 8:27 I do remember hearing something like that. And I don't know the specifics. I mean, I could we could look it up and clarify in our next episode or whatever.
Greg Marshall 8:34 But the I say that because how, how do you think that would impact the difference on if it's Chinese ownership versus American ownership?
Blake Beus 8:44 Okay, so now we're gonna start, we're gonna, we're gonna dive into like data privacy and everything like that. So so the the concern, the concern is, and I get concerned, would that be dangerous, I get this concern, I get this concern. So so let's say I'm a government and I want to do some mass surveillance on my on a country that we have some okay ties with, but not the greatest ties with, if I could have a social media platform that everybody hopping on, I can collect any data on anybody I want to whatsoever. And early versions of Tik Tok sent a lot of data directly to servers that were hosted in China. And so security researchers brought that up, and that's one of the reasons what was it 2019, maybe 2020. Trump said he was going to ban tic toc from the United States. That was that was part of the reason why that whole conversation started happening. So one of the things that was discussed and I don't know how this fell out was that well, if if the parts of tic toc that operated in the United States could be owned by a US company, then President Trump said he would allow them to continue to operate and I don't know how all that fell out. There was there was some like there was a hole probably legal battle and everything going on with something there. And I don't know how that all fell out. But the reality is, is that a lot of these companies have lots of different investors. So when you say, well, Walmart bottom out, they may have invested in it, they but we don't know if they have a controlling, you know, stake and stake in it or whatever. That's what I was curious. Yeah. And so and I know, I know, Oracle, they're a big database company. They were looking they were there were one of the names that popped up Walmart, some of these others. I don't know how all that felt. I don't know what's going on. But it is a conversation worth having from a, you know, governmental standpoint about who privacy privacy of people and who owns that data. And these are all conversations that are that are going to be going on for the next 10 or 20 years as laws try to catch up with how fast technology has has outpaced
Greg Marshall 10:52 Yeah, I definitely would say there's probably going to be a need for adjustment.
Blake Beus 10:59 Absolutely.
Greg Marshall 11:01 You know, before a lot of our loss feels like they were built previous knowledge, right, and they worked for that world. But now this is the new world when it comes to technology and what's being offered. And so I knows I would not want to be a lawmaker. This stuff is moving so quickly
Blake Beus 11:21 that I mean, and not to get too political. Yeah, but more people should pay attention to how people vote surrounding technology and vote for candidates that put in or have a good understanding of technology, and how you want that to proceed. Because most politicians have no clue. When it comes to technology, and a lot there's been a lot of conversation about cryptocurrencies, lately with politics, and I don't want to go down this path. Yeah. But the reality is, is nearly everything politicians are saying about cryptocurrencies is is incorrect. It's inaccurate. Yeah. And what they're claiming is happening a lot claiming is going on. It's, it's incorrect. And, I mean, I'll tell you why. I'm been a software engineer for a long, long, long time, and I have never felt as dumb as I feel when I try to understand the technology behind cryptocurrencies and blockchain. It's insanely complicated. So if you have someone coming to you that's been like researching, you know, Blockchain technologies and things for a few weeks, or even a few months. And they're like, Hey, guys, I got a great handle on this, I promise you, they do not, it's insanely complicated. And there's a lot of implications there and a lot of moving pieces. And it's, it's not reasonable to expect our politicians per se, to understand the complexities of that. So most politicians should probably be saying something like, you know, this is really complicated, we should maybe put together a panel of experts to help guide us on lawmaking. Because this stuff is complicated. And you'd have to dedicate five years or so to your life to fully understand it. And that's not reasonable to expect our politicians to be experts in that kind of a way.
Greg Marshall 13:13 Well, and you can see, you know, the kind of the road, we're gone down right here is the importance of data, and understanding how things are moving and changing. And so I think, you know, when it comes to your marketing, and how to guess, project in the future, one of the things that I think is important is to go, if you think almost like an investor, right? You have your own, you have your small business inside of the metaverse, right? And these big, you know, new atmospheres that we're operating under, you almost have to think like an investment thing. Have some foresight on what do you think is going to be the next places to essentially invest? And one of those things that at least a Mayan, I like to hear your and something that I would think that you'd really want to start investing in now would be different types of content that you can use? And how you would structure that content? And what's the new asset within these structures? When it comes to growing your business? Right. In the past, before technology, it was you can buy lists from companies that were getting this day, I mean, nothing's really changed, right? It's just the delivery of it, because I used to be able to get data from people who were buying magazines or whatever, from other companies, but it was just no one knew that you could do that. And it was kind of more hand to hand right? Like, right, these are the most recent magazine buyers, whatever. And so then the assets were Can you buy these lists? Can you get these names, these phone numbers, these emails, their buying history, and everything was kind of more name, phone number email, but moving forward, it might turn into Something different, right? It might be people watching stuff or people hanging out in some of these virtual arenas, right. And so I would think, in my opinion, investing for the future is to really understand what types of content and how people will consume the content moving forward, because then that's where you can start to invest your time and energy and money. Yeah.
Blake Beus 15:25 Yeah. And I think, I think it's a super valid point. And we might get some people listening to this and saying, Oh, great, now there's more things they're gonna keep an eye on. But I asked someone who loves technology, and unlike involved in all sorts of areas of technology, at the end of the day, we're communicating with people and working on the behavioral side of sales, your angle, your messaging, how to provide that value, how to monetize that value, how to create content, that means means something to someone, and, and, but just maybe keep an eye on some of these new areas. But the reality is, is, you know, a written word is going to be around for a long, long, long, like it's never going away. Video is going to be around for a long, long, long time. So whether that's video delivered inside some sort of Zuckerberg Metaverse, or video delivered in some other way, it's going to be video. Yep. Right? Photos are going to be around the imagery or audio. Right. That's right, in so it's, in fact,
Greg Marshall 16:33 let me let me cut you off really quick to ask you a question about this. Because you said podcasts. So I've noticed Facebook has increased. I'm seeing some of these other marketers uploading their podcast, a Facebook. Yeah. Have you had any experience with that? And, and or what are your thoughts on that? Generally?
Blake Beus 16:53 I mean, the reality is, is the more places you can get your content, the better. It's such an easy thing to do to upload your entire podcast, especially a lot of you know, a lot of people have a, you know, virtual system or whatever. So they just send over the podcast and say, okay, upload it to all these places, that whatever, right, and it's just part of their normal content creation process. And throwing it on Facebook is great. I mean, Facebook might eventually launched a podcast version, you know, like an audio only version of something, I wouldn't be one bit surprised. The reality is those most people aren't going to Facebook to listen to a full podcast. So you might get a little bit of reach out of it. But there's no harm in throwing it up there. We have this podcast listed in you know, Spotify and Stitcher and Apple podcasts and Google podcasts. Because when people open up those apps that's there, they're there to listen to a podcast. And, and so it's just kind of how they consume it. But that, you know, there's no harm in throwing that up on YouTube on Facebook. Yep. IG TV will let you upload something up to 60 minutes. Yeah. You could cut it up and upload some snippets onto Tik Tok or whatever. You can do all those things.
Greg Marshall 18:10 So really the the, and I will admit, I actually did consume my first and full long form podcast on Facebook. Really? Last was it last week, their nose two weeks ago? Mostly because I wanted to see how it operated. But also I thought the podcast was good. It was one of the I always say his name wrong. But I could see his face. But the Facebook guy Jon Loomer, Loomer. Yes. So it was it was his and his podcast is I think it was something named like, you know, beer and something. So his angle was he would have the podcast while having a beer with you. Right. And I thought it was kind of a cool idea. But yeah, I can see my first long form pieces. I hope I'm not the only you know, I actually had a good experience like it was pretty smooth. And I didn't have to like there. Were very little Kingson, how to consume it.
Blake Beus 19:10 So was it a video? No,
Greg Marshall 19:11 it was an audio only straight up audio just like if you were on the Apple podcast app or interested or anything else, I just click play. It looks exactly the same. It was playing even when I think I even when I got off of Facebook for a second. So I got a text message. It was still playing. And so that's like a feature that I think is kind of important because I've noticed, like YouTube is doing the same and some of these other app platforms where they're still keeping the screen. Even if it's not video, they're still keeping the audio screen available. So it could keep playing while Yeah, doing other stuff. So I don't know but I enjoyed it and I thought the experience is pretty good.
Blake Beus 19:53 Interesting. Yeah, that's definitely something to keep an eye on then because I mean, the more places you can kind of have it. I typically don't listen to anything too long on Facebook mostly because, you know, I listen to podcasts and things while I'm doing something else. That's like, that's why I love podcasts so much. And and when I open it up in a browser window on my computer or something like that I don't usually listen to I don't open Facebook a whole lot on my phone. Got it. But if I close that tab, or whatever, yeah, it quits. And I can't go back to where it was. And so I just get frustrated. Yeah, stop. But no, that's super interesting. And like, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if we have a dedicated podcast section in the Facebook app, or the metaverse app or whatever. Why other what that's
Greg Marshall 20:41 telling me those a lot of the Platt, a lot of what Facebook seems to invest in, are exactly the things that they they don't want their competitors getting a full head of steam like a tick tock. And as you know, podcasts are getting bigger and bigger feels like by the day. Yeah, it's it's something that a lot of people consume now. Whereas maybe, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, there wasn't as much consumption of podcasts outside of like maybe Joe Rogan or something. And I think like, you know, that gives you an idea of, I think, where things are moving, it's almost like you can look at Facebook, to see what the biggest trends are, when you start to see them investing more, and certain delivery platforms, and podcasting, and the reels, in my opinion, seems like that's the new way all of us consumers are consuming content. Yeah. So therefore, Facebook is investing heavily in that because there's other players that are providing
Blake Beus 21:42 Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've to take to take a step back and just look at all of this. I've heard a lot of marketers, and even people in various different media spaces talk about, you know, attention. Yeah. And if you think about it, everybody has
Greg Marshall 22:00 branded that. Yeah.
Blake Beus 22:03 Yeah, that goes everywhere. We all have 24 hours in a day, right? And when we're watching TV, yeah, we're oftentimes on our phone as well. And that's about as much multitasking as we can do. But people like to try to do more than something more than one thing at a time. And podcasts audio only or audio books. Like that is the single easiest way to multitask. I don't I don't know about you, but I am always listening to something that's not music when I'm driving in my car. It's a podcast. It's an audiobook. It's something because I, I while I love music. Yeah. I like to, like have mental stimulation or whatever, while I'm driving. So Facebook is probably thinking, Okay, well, here's another way, if we can have a big chunk of podcasting, we can inject our own ads, we can start, we can start hosting audio ads,
Greg Marshall 23:01 which, you know, just like all these other plans, Spotify has got the ads. You know, YouTube's got everyone's got the ads. I mean, everything is about ads, right. At the end of the day, it's about because we want whoever's gonna buy our stuff to see and hear us. Yeah. And so the way all these companies make money, is they have access to a way of knowing these people are watching this and seeing this or consuming that clicking this engaging on them. So I think yeah, I think the biggest thing that that I'm seeing right now is really have the foresight for investing in the future, which is understanding when I say investment, future, meaning even taking the time to understand how these other platforms are doing things, and most importantly, how people are actually using it. Yeah, because that's how you can come up with your ideas on really, at the end of day marketing is all about just getting in front of the person that may want your product or service. Yep. Right in its simplest form is you can't sell anything that you can't get the product in front of them. And so that's what these these platforms allow you to do is to get this is the new way how we are. Yes, stuff we used to read newspaper now it's on our phones.
Blake Beus 24:17 Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you can see how things kind of transform. The oldest new Punk has been around for a long time, but Facebook's seems to start be starting to get into getting into those. And it's like, I mean, so they've kind of reinvented this thing to go out there. Yeah, newspapers, you know, they were the thing for the longest time. And now we get our news from our phone. And now we can actually sign up for lists that will send us aggregated news related to what we're interested in. So we don't have to try to filter through all the news ourselves, right, but it's still basically a newspaper.
Greg Marshall 24:56 I use Twitter. Yeah. What's interesting is I tweet very seldomly. But I use Twitter a lot. Actually, I, but I go and consume news that I want to see. Yeah. And usually I feel like Twitter is the best platform to know what's going on right now. Like if something's going on, like, for example, if Facebook goes down, you go on Twitter, Facebook, not work, and you go on Twitter and beauty is already gone. So it seems like Twitter never goes down. You know, but it's probably because it's simpler. ISIS only words. So that would be my thought. I don't know if that's easier to manage. I don't know. But Twitter is my main source. Like if sporting events going on. If you know, big news is happening. I go on Twitter to see like the latest update. Let's go and see what's going on. You know, I don't know. That's how I like to consume my news base. Yeah.
Blake Beus 25:52 Yeah, I get I get my from Reddit from Reddit.
Greg Marshall 25:55 I've used Reddit, here and there. But I've got a lot of friends that yeah, like Reddit what? So why do you like Reddit? Better is Reddit better than Twitter. For information.
Blake Beus 26:08 It's a personal it's, it's just a personal difference on how I consume news. So with with Twitter, you follow specific accounts. With Reddit, you follow subreddits, which can have hundreds or millions of members in there. It's like a sub community got it. And then people can upvote and downvote. And then you can look at what's hot today. And those are the things that are most uploaded. What I like about it is I tend to get exposed to two news stories and things that I wouldn't normally see if I were following a specific person. Right? So things tend to bubble up to the top a little slower than they do in Twitter. But you tend to get a more diverse set of things bubbling up to the top. I mean, literally could be the number one thing on Reddit today could be. This was yesterday, actually. And I sent it to my wife because we send each other stuff all the time. But yeah, the number one thing on Reddit yesterday, for a good portion of the day was was this. Puppy and duck got that we're like buddies. Yeah, that was number one thing. But the day before, it was a new story about, you know, some some sort of global policy or something, right? And so, so you get exposed to a wider variety of what you
Greg Marshall 27:26 say it's a little bit less algorithm based, which is why you like it.
Blake Beus 27:33 It's less algorithm based, maybe,
Greg Marshall 27:36 like, it doesn't keep you in that what do they call it the echo chamber?
Blake Beus 27:38 It's definitely less echo chamber, but it does lean a little bit more like from a political standpoint, it does lean a little bit more like center or a little bit left of center from like an American politics standpoint. But you'll see, you'll see stuff on both sides. Right. So there's less echo chamber, but voting manipulation totally happens. I mean, there's Russian farms that that have 10s of 1000s of bots that, so that totally happens. And that happens with that. So
Greg Marshall 28:07 is, you know, I've always had the when I look at each social media platform, I think of them differently, right. And so I've always viewed Twitter is also an angry place. Is that the same? Where's more angry? Because I've heard Reddit can get pretty can get pretty brutal as well. Yeah. So what would you rate more anger? Reddit or Twitter?
Blake Beus 28:35 I think it depends on which, which parts of each platform you get on. Yeah, the thing with Reddit is it's pseudo anonymous. So you don't normally know who's saying, got it. Right, because it's just usernames, and some people
Greg Marshall 28:48 are more honest, they're
Blake Beus 28:51 more honest, or more critical, or whatever. So there is some garbage on there. I mean, there's a lot of people on there. I think on Twitter, while there's a lot of trash, people tend to maybe pull their punches a little bit because it's almost always associated with their name or whatever. So it kind of it kind of depends. I mean, there's whole subreddits dedicated to like wholesomeness God, and there's nothing but like positive things on.
Greg Marshall 29:15 Well, I can tell you this, I don't think there's something like that on Twitter. I see on Twitter. I follow mostly sports stuff. And, you know, you can see some pretty nasty stuff being said, Yeah, but I think, you know, when it comes to marketing, right, the new wave is these are the new channels just like they were on TV. They're new, you know, every platform attracts a different type of person, mentally meaning, where they're just how they're using a platform, right, like there to consume or contribute with some kind of content. So that's where I think all the marketing goes is understanding how can you plug your business in these forms? forums where it makes sense, right? Because if you do it wrong, trust me, he will pay you that your ad accounts get banned, or people bash you so bad that you're never going to want to go back on. And so you have to kind of learn and study. It's it's probably in your best interest to learn, study and invest in knowing who who's on these channels. And what are the best practice? Yeah,
Blake Beus 30:22 right. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing I'll tell you right now, I mean, Reddit has its own advertising platform and everything like that. It's, I've never had a ton of success with it, read it. Read it as is, is a very different beast, because the community is very different. But if you want to reach people that hate Facebook, go on Reddit go right. Nearly everybody on Reddit hates Facebook. So if you're like, Man, my audience just isn't on Facebook. Yeah. Try out Reddit. Probably hanging out on Reddit, on I
Greg Marshall 30:49 heard, you know, I've heard quite quite a bit about Reddit doesn't like not Reddit, the company, but the users do not like ads at all? Correct. I've heard that if you even put an ad on there, you just get absolutely demolished. I've never done it. I've just heard that that's how the, I guess the ad culture is on. on that platform?
Blake Beus 31:13 I would definitely say there's a significant portion of people on Reddit that are more privacy focused. And online ads platforms are one of the biggest offenders to privacy in their eyes, the opposite. And and, and so and so yeah. But look, if you want to do some organic marketing, and get involved in a community, which we've talked about, like dark funnels, shark, social or whatever, this is one of those places, if you have some sort of a niche product or service or something like that, hop into these communities. And, you know, you can create, you can create a profile named your business, that's fine. Most people don't care or B, or just set your profile as like the founder or owner or VP at a specific business. And hop in there and genuinely be helpful. Yeah. Without being salesy. Yep. And you can get a ton of exposure. I mean, there's this concept called the, the Reddit hug of death. Okay. And and what it is, is essentially, if, if a story bubbles up to the top and hits the actual front page of the entire Reddit, yep, that site is going to get 10s of millions of views that day. Wow. And so there's a lot of times if it's like a smaller site, or a smaller company, they hit the front page of reddit, and everybody's going to look at it and the site goes down, because it's not set up to scale. Maybe they don't have a good infrastructure or whatever. And so in the comments, it'll be like, Oh, shit, guys, we have the site. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 32:40 Well, that's I've never heard that. That's, that's kind of cool.
Blake Beus 32:46 Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, it's a, it's an interesting way to do it. And there's, there's lots of different ways to do it. One, one person I saw that has done an excellent job of marketing on Reddit in Reddit has like this weird, ironic kind of witty humor thing. So if you can leverage that, you'll do really well. One guy, he's big on tick tock now, but he got big on Reddit first, and I can't remember his name, but he makes products that are useless. Okay. And then and then you can buy those as like gag gifts for your friends got it. So So what one of those Oh, shoot, I'm gonna botch it now. Anyway, they're products that are hilarious, but you just, they aren't useful at all. And then he has this store where you can buy them. But I'll have to put a link to that there. But they're, they're just these hilarious products. But he makes he makes these really funny videos about about them on. Oh, one was, here's one I actually just remember. Yeah. Okay, so he created this this product that you could put two rolls of toilet paper on. Okay, as you know, how there's this debate about whether toilet paper should be put on with the less coming out front versus the back. So he made this product where you could flip it, so that whatever your preference was, you could have you could have, you know, the tutorial toilet paper on there, and you could like flip this thing. Yeah. And, and he his video talks about how it would save marriages and that's right. So it's those kinds of products that are kind of funny and yeah, I got a huge on Reddit, like massive on Reddit, which which he used that to cross pollinate his YouTube audience and then he used it to cross pollinate on Tik Tok got it and the guy now has an entire store. I think he just started without selling anything. But now he has an entire like E commerce platform where you can buy these products. And every time he puts out a new video, which is about once a month if he gets on the front page, which equals probably 10 million views that day. And so that's, I'm sure the guy makes pretty great money, making these silly products with these silly ladies
Greg Marshall 34:58 having fun too, and he's having a A lot of fun. Yeah, that's I think that's important. So, I think yeah, so so so to wrap it up, you know, we talked a lot about data a lot about the changes. But you know, that's, I've heard that, you know, data is is more valuable now than oil. Which I think is true, since there wasn't valuable, there wouldn't be all these privacy concerns of James Right. Yeah. So I think to wrap it up base, what you want to do is, learn more about different platforms, utilize, you know, different strategies, with growing your business and understanding that things are always changing. And so you must as a business, if you want to survive, you have to adapt, you know, the things that work yesterday, they're not gonna work today. And you just have to constantly be changing your approach and your strategy. And that's what makes us you know, fun and exciting is you're never gonna get bored because things are never gonna stay the same in this space, right? No, no. So I think you know, if you ever need help with any of your marketing strategy or your your, your messaging or things of that nature, you can always go to my website, Greg marshall.co book a free call. And then Blake, how do they get ahold of you
Blake Beus 36:13 not just go to Blake calm and you can see all the different ways to interact with me there. There's some you know, some freebies, I have a membership on there. And yeah, you can reach out to me that way. All
Greg Marshall 36:26 right. Well, hopefully you guys enjoyed this podcast and we'll talk to you guys soon. Okay. Later.
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:01 Alright, so we are we're on and one of the things I will talk about something I've noticed that, you know, I can't confirm because this isn't my, you know, area of expertise, this is more your area of expertise is it seems like so when I, when I run pay traffic, something similar to what I've had happen to me with email marketing, which is it seems like there's certain platforms that for whatever reason, the, I guess the partners, right, so you will say like Facebook, Instagram, or maybe Google ads or whatever pay traffic partner using, they don't seem to like or favor certain software's, right. So for example, I've used Shopify Click Funnels WordPress launch car, I mean, I've used I feel like I've used not all but a lot of right, Wix. And I can see there's a difference, there's a certain platform, okay, and I'm gonna say the name, I don't want to just completely shade anyone, it just seems like Facebook may not love this platform. So I love to hear your take on it. But yeah, click funnels, it seems like, for whatever reason, and myself included, actually have a Clickfunnels account. But it seems like for whatever reason, any client that's using Click Funnels doesn't get the same almost it's like the same offerings. But if they're on different platforms, it almost seems like they don't like Click Funnels or that they're Yeah, anti. I don't know, is Yeah. So is there any truth to that? And if so, why?
Blake Beus 1:36 Yeah, so, alright, so let me just first say, there's going to be a lot of speculation here, but I think it's relatively accurate speculation, or also wouldn't be making it. So this, this reminds me of, I like to think this like a bad neighbor. Right. Okay. So, you know, if you're, if you're in a neighborhood or whatever, and you have a home value, that's I don't know, $500,000. And you have someone move in next door, and they just trash their house in their yard and everything, your value of your house goes down. And it's very much the same out on the internet. Now, typically, I would see this and this is a known thing with the cheap, say WordPress web hosts. The shared hosting that it's like two or three bucks a month, you could get placed on a shared server with someone and if one of the websites on that server was breaking the rules or doing something bad or, or cheating Google and SEO or whatever, your site would be associated with that, and your search engine rankings would go down, we associate your guilty by association, right. And that's the biggest problem with say a shared host is is you you bump into that kind of stuff. The same thing with with platforms, right. So Shopify, they have their whole infrastructure built out and everything. Shopify has been around for a long time. They're a good player. They're the biggest e commerce platform out there, I believe, aren't they? I think so. I mean, other than like Amazon, and that doesn't count. But like for people that want to run shop, want to run ecommerce, so the biggest platform out there, and they've got things dialed in now, now click funnels comes in. It's run by a marketer. Yep. And marketers like to play kind of loose and fast. Yeah. And push push tournaments. It's very true. And they've built out an infrastructure that has been buggy in the past and had some other issues. But in my opinion, if you do a Google search right now for for Clickfunnels, versus whatever, Clickfunnels vs. Kajabi, whatever, you're going to have page after page after page of articles that are spammy, that are just trying to get people to click on a Click Funnels affiliate link and sign up with Clickfunnels. I didn't even know Yeah, everything. If you research Clickfunnels, you're going to see nothing but articles talking about the pros and cons and then ultimately, they're going to recommend Click Funnels. And the reason is, because they have one of the most profitable affiliate commission payouts out of any platform out there right now. And that's a big part of their marketing strategy. But it means that a lot of people have in the past been pretty scammy and spammy with trying to promote the platform so there's this double edged sword got it and use in the past this isn't such a big deal now but in the past you would see this on websites like JVZoo and ClickBank those old affiliate marketplaces are also old school right. And they're still around.
Greg Marshall 4:23 Yeah. It's still successful, right? Yes. Not as successful as in the past
Blake Beus 4:28 not or they basically don't know they're still around and they're still big but it's almost like it's a different part of the internet. Yeah, and they operate in different different areas and a whole nother whole nother world, right. That's a totally different conversation but but with so so what you have have happened is you have Click Funnels being kind of associated with this negative thing. Google's whole entire job, Facebook's whole entire job is to give people a pleasant experience. They stay on their platforms. And if you have people taking advantage of that are skirting, the rules are playing a little bit loose and loose and fast. Their algorithms are set up to kind of penalize people based on certain certain metrics. So, if you have a large percentage of people going to click on all sites and have a bad experience on that site, they're going to start saying, Well, maybe it's not the site, maybe it's the platform and algorithms gonna start D prioritizing that. What that does is it means you get lower rankings on search engine results, you get higher cost per clicks, you have lower click through rates. And
Greg Marshall 5:28 I've seen that in you know, I've seen that. Yeah. No doubt about I've actually tested same message on different platforms. Yeah, totally different save is a very, totally different experience.
Blake Beus 5:39 Yeah. Yeah. And so and so that's, that's my my guess. Right? Is that that, that that's the case. Now, I was on the Click Funnels Facebook group, which is massive, you know, cuz I used to use Click Funnels as well, I moved away from them. And I feel like a big part of their ecosystem is relatively toxic and spammy and scammy. If you post any question, you're going to get and get nothing but DM saying, hey, I can help you with this, or hey, I can get out of this, or hey, sign up with my link or whatever. And Facebook sees all of that stuff. Got it, right. And so they start to think, Okay, this is a, we're going to let you guys still play in your sandbox, you're going to still have your Facebook group, you're going to still have all of that stuff. But behind the scenes, we're going to prioritize websites and platforms that give people a pleasant experience when you're paying for ads.
Greg Marshall 6:26 Got it. So well, what do you recommend? For you know, not only my clients, but even for someone like myself that has Click Funnels? Yeah. What do you suggest? Do you suggest moving everything away? Or going to another platform? Or how do you fix this?
Blake Beus 6:43 Yeah. So ultimately, the answer is, it depends. It really depends on people's individual situations. So let me put it this way, if you're running an offer, or whatever, and you're profitable, things are working, and you're on Click Funnels, and you're happy with the numbers, you're happy with the percentages, you're happy with everything. It's probably not worth it to switch. But it might be worth to just kind of look at some options. So you know that if you ever get to a certain point, you ever hit a certain thing, it might be worth it to switch because there's a huge cost in switching just from time and energy, everything like it's, it's a lot of work, and you're gonna lose a lot of business when you switch for someone like you, you're your main offer on the site is yours is basically just a website, you're asking people to get in touch with you and book a phone call. Yeah, like you don't, you're not selling anything. And you don't have a huge ask once people are on the phone with you. They get to know how authentic and real you are, and people just like that. And so it's probably not a huge impact on you unless you wanted to start ramping up your ad spend. And well, it wasn't working. The numbers weren't working out again, at that point.
Greg Marshall 7:49 Yeah. And I can see that. And so that that's pretty good advice. Because one of the things I do notice is compared to other Clickfunnels clients that I have, my click through rates aren't bad. And it might just be because the offer and like what they're seeing, but the ones that are actually like selling courses, they tend to see pretty low, like, I mean, sick. And I actually saw recently, I ran a test and saw $100 CPM, which is unbelievable. That's insanely high on Facebook traffic of Facebook traffic, and that was sanely high. It was not keywords. It was not I mean, very generic broad audience. Yeah. $100 CPM. That's nuts. So obviously that ad is turned off. But I just you know it to me, it proves a point because most of my clients, especially ones that are using Shopify and even WordPress, their CPMs are typically around 20 or less. So think about that's five times more expensive.
Blake Beus 8:58 Yeah, and for people that um, you probably know what CPM is cost per 1000 impressions impressions. But that's the metric that you're charged by. Right? So the cost per click is just a calculation based on what your CPM is. And so if you have a CPM that's $100 versus a CPM, that's $20. The CPM is $20 Gets you five times the traffic for the same ads yet which means your cost per clicks are going to be lower your click through rates are going to be lower your your cost per conversion, all of that's going to be lower because the thing you're actually charged out charged for the CPM is significantly lower.
Greg Marshall 9:36 Yep. So yeah, it very interesting. I've tested it multiple different times. And it just seems like maybe those two platforms don't love each other. Maybe they're moving in the direction of how much Facebook loves that. Yeah, yeah.
Blake Beus 9:52 So So I mean, here's some other vices so some people might be thinking, okay, it's fine for Greg to stay on there, but I'm struggling my business might be struggling, or whatever, because I'm on click funnels. And I think I might need to switch like what what are some options? Again, it really depends if if you want to go with the kind of D Do It Yourself route, you can go with something like WordPress. And you can get a decent hosts don't go with like a $3 host like Hostmonster or Bluehost or whatever, you're going to get off on a shared server and you might run into a problem. You can even run into a problem where someone else's site on your shared server is hacked. And so all sites on that that happened and it's nothing that you did wrong. But get on to a decent host like WP Engine or flywheel they're going to start at about $30 a month.
Greg Marshall 10:45 Basically what you're saying is invest. Yeah, invest like actually like, because I see this with people that are trying to and I get it because they're just starting out. They're trying to do it on their own. So they get the cheapest host cheap is everything. But this is probably some actually I'm not even say probably this is something you should not try to be cheaper. This is actually something you should invest, you know, as much as you possibly can for your budget to get the best, you know, because it's like, good real estate, right? If you could have a great store, but if you have it in a very low traffic mall, or a place where people don't want to go because they're scared or it's not very safe or has a bad reputation, versus getting your store in a place that's high traffic people, you know, view is very safe, and very user friendly, you're probably going to get more business and have a more successful business going there. Even though it costs more.
Blake Beus 11:41 Yeah, yeah. And and in the grand scheme of things, $30 a month for hosting versus $3 a month for hosting, you should be able to make up the extra $27 in some way, shape, or form. Yeah, right. I get it, I get it. Things can be tight. But that's a very good additional $27 A month investment and most salons or something if you have to. Yeah.
Greg Marshall 12:03 And I think that's that that's very important. Because over time, what I've learned is, there's a big trade off. So if you are going cheap on certain things, they end up being more expensive became more expensive. If you get what D listed, or D platformed. Or you're getting associated with other people that are really damaging you even though you have no affiliation with the, you know, you can lose out on days, weeks on sales. Having your business it's almost like if you had a storefront, and just randomly they just closed it for no reason for three weeks. It's like
Blake Beus 12:42 you cheaped out on the front door locks. And one day, one day the door locks couldn't be opened. Yeah. And so you have customers outside, and they're just walking past because they can't come in the door. And you're literally losing money because of that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so that that'd be a way I'd go if you're going to go something like WordPress, if you want to do if you like drag and drop builders, WordPress has several of them. My favorite is one called Elementor. They have a free version and a paid version, the free version is usually good enough for most people to get started. And so you don't even need to know code or whatever. And you can you can install that plug in and and just get just get going with drag and drop building. It's all mobile responsive, it's relatively fast page load speeds. So you should be pretty good there. If you're ecommerce, you should really be on a platform like Shopify, I think there's a few others a few others out there, but Shopify is the best. One of the reasons you you don't see these problems Shopify is I'm guessing that they have an internal team dedicated and relationships with Google and relationships with Facebook, to make sure that their platform is compliant. Because the risk of Shopify not being compliant impacts 10s of 1000s of ecommerce businesses. And so they're dedicated to making sure that they have a good relationship with both of those platforms. And that if there's any issues with ads, or anything like that, they're resolved as quickly as possible. And so they're dedicated to success. You would think Click Funnels would would want to do that as well. And I'm sure right now there are people at Clickfunnels saying, hey, we need to do this. They're just not a big enough player. Yeah, to get to get Google to care that much about having that those relationships, and maybe they're working on it, they probably are. They also have a lot of, they probably cut a lot of corners and a code code end of things early on to get the product launched, which everybody does, it's fine. If but as a product matures, if you get a good dev team in there, they start fixing those those infrastructure issues and themes. But it takes time. And I'm sure Clickfunnels has extremely talented developers, and I'm sure a lot of the developers they're like, Okay, I know exactly what we need. And we're working on it, but it just takes a lot of time because you're working on a platform that is huge millions and millions of clicks a day. And so you can't just make these large sweeping changes because it could impact a lot of different things. So just take the time
Greg Marshall 14:58 impact of negatively and I think You know, to give a level of sympathy tourism, it's probably same thing that we talked about with Facebook, right? Where, if you're very good, this is a problem to have. And sometimes you think it's it, it couldn't be a problem, but it can, which is if you have a very strong marketing, very strong sales, and you have a good growth plan, and that plan is executed well, on the front end on the top end, yeah, the product delivery sometimes can be very challenging to keep up with that level of demand. And so with that comes these types of problems. Yeah, right. Where it's like, you're cutting corners, you're because you're growing so fast, you're just constantly putting band aids. Mm hmm. And that may be what's what's going on here is it's just band aid after band aid, but eventually, you know, that scab gonna get pretty big. We gotta, we gotta, you know, stitch it
Blake Beus 15:54 up. Yeah, yeah. Yep. And, and, look, I'm confident that Clickfunnels sticks with it, they'll probably get there, and then get to the point where they're pretty solid TerraForm. But I would say for for many, many people, if you feel like this is an issue that's impacting you. There's some other alternatives out there. I mean, WordPress is great, Shopify is great. If you want an extremely simple page builder, you don't have anything too complicated and you want a cheap one. There's this one out there that more people need to know about. It's called card.co. Okay, it's CA, rr de.co, I believe it might have two Ds, it's either two hours or one of the two. But it's a little drag and drop builder with extremely fast loading pages, that will let you put a contact form and embed maybe a Calendly link or something like that, and it looks nice, it's mobile responsive, and it loads super fast. Got it. And I think they're only like 20 bucks a year got a thing like that. So if you need like two or three pages, and that's it, and you're trying to bootstrap something quick, that that will be a good one. And they they don't, again, they're small company, they don't have an interface with Google or whatever. But from a code perspective, they're doing things right the pages load faster, mobile responsive, you have proper SEO tags you can put in place. And and there's they don't have this issue with the potentially toxic affiliate scammy spammy kind of thing happening. And, and they tend to rank really, really well. So that might be an option for people. They don't have like a, a membership portal and all of these other things, but it's simple website, you need a contact form, you need a good looking site. That's a good way to go.
Greg Marshall 17:34 Got it. Got it? Well, I think, you know, for the most part, with platforms and how they integrate with other platforms, you know, we all got to be good neighbors to each other. Yeah. Right. And we all you know, everyone has their their own, quote, unquote, house rules, right? Someone else's house, you got to follow the rules, or you get kicked out the house.
Blake Beus 17:57 I like that. That's a good, that's a good way to put it. And I mean, some of the rules might seem super arbitrary and silly. I mean, for the longest time, Facebook had this 20% text rule. Yeah. Which was the bane of any advertisers. Yes. And that's been gone, thankfully. But they do have a few other arbitrary rules. They have a few good best practice rules, as well. Just like having your terms and conditions in the footer of your landing page, a few things like that. So you just got to make sure you're playing by those rules. And make sure you got good neighbors.
Greg Marshall 18:29 Yeah, yeah. Be and make sure to be a good neighbor, you know, yeah, don't, you know, don't exploit or do anything against their terms, obviously, we all know, we try to do the best we can to give all of us the best advantage. But you know, you got to play with the house rules, because usually, short term gains will give you long term pain, that's a way that I like to look at it. So anytime you try to take shortcuts, like you're talking about, you know, it might be able to make you feel good today, but it'll cause a lot of problems in the future. So, so just think of think of everything as a long term play. Try to, you know, follow every person's house rules. And yeah, we can't be you know, too, too entitled to these people's homes, right, because they are offering their homes to us at a very low cost. But, you know, with that being said, we just we all got to try our best and you know, and we also have to be aware that if sometimes if your neighbor is maybe even unintentionally behaving wrong, sometimes we just need to take a little break. Right. And find maybe another circle to go Yeah, so yeah,
Blake Beus 19:41 before we wrap it up, though, we ought to talk about email real quick. Yes. Yeah. We were gonna we were gonna talk about that and emails the same the same kind of thing you were telling me before we turn on the mic. Yeah. That you have seen some of your clients that have, you know, email marketing platform, a virtual email marketing platform B Yep. And email marketing platform. His spam rates are significantly higher, even though the content of the email is quality or whatever. It's the same thing. So there's this whole, like, can spam act and all these spam rules in place? And it's it's honestly pretty complicated. Yeah. But you want to pick an email provider that takes that stuff seriously? Yes. And it's hard to figure out what that is. Yeah, as well, by signing up for all of them and testing it on large scale or whatever. So one of the things I would recommend is, keep an eye out for the the platforms that have super aggressive affiliate marketing. Yeah, because if they do have a very aggressive affiliate marketing, that means that some people are probably taking advantage of that. People out from that from those. And you can get associate with a bad IP and start seeing that happen. Now, if you feel like you're on a platform where your spam rates seem too high, most of the time, it's not the end of the world to switch to something else. Yeah. And, and I honestly, at this point, probably couldn't recommend any specific platforms. But I would say stay away from anything that has, like some crazy free option, because if it's free, someone's going to spam. Yep. And if you if you are on a platform, and you feel like you're too high on your spam rates, one of the things you could do is actually pay a little extra each month, all email providers have this. And you can have a dedicated IP address. So that way, your emails are all sent from like this custom domain and dedicated IP address. And you're the only one that has that. So then the spam rules only follow you. And so you basically are creating your own neighborhood. Yeah, and no one else is in that neighborhood. So you're fully responsible for for if you get flagged, it's your fault. It's your fault. It's your fault. And you you know, you need to adjust how you're doing things if you get flagged. So that's that's a couple other things to think about. But I don't know if you have thoughts around well,
Greg Marshall 21:58 you know, what, one one thing you know, that I gauge things around, especially when it comes to email is a text message. If the easier it is to upload a foreign list, the more likely that it's you know, that they're getting flagged, right? That's that would be my guess, because what I found is the ones the platform's I've used and I'm using a whole bunch of different ones with clients. The platform's have the highest open rates are also the most militant, when it comes to double opt ins, making sure that these people actually give you the permission to and even if they aren't customers, they still kind of make you jump through hoops to make sure that it's legit.
Blake Beus 22:44 Yeah, so what you're talking about is if I upload a customer list, if my email platform requires all of the people on that list to get an email that says I'm opting into this list, yep, that's probably a good platform for because they're taking spam rules. Seriously, yes. If I have a platform where I can upload a list, and I know
Greg Marshall 23:04 Yeah, shit about Yeah, then they're most likely gonna,
Blake Beus 23:08 they're not probably being very strict and militant about the spam rules. And you're probably going to see, see worse open rates and worse, you know, delivery rates and all of that stuff.
Greg Marshall 23:18 I agree. And the CRM system I use personally, for my business, is very militant about it. And initially, it was kind of irritating, because it's like, it's my list of customers. I can't just be on there. But now that I'm looking at, I'm like, Yeah, but also the open rates when I sense that for 70% 80%. Yeah. And, you know, you just don't get that most, you know, email platforms. So I think it has something to do with, they're very, very strict on how you communicate with people on your list, which, in the long term, like I said earlier, short term gain equals long term pain. This is, you know, vice versa, which is, I guess, short term, you can't bring on list as easy and you have to go through, you know, a bunch of terrible optics, but it's also higher quality, so I'm not getting flagged for anything. You're getting huge open rates, and you're having an overall more positive experience. And they, you know, I think you get rewarded for
Blake Beus 24:16 that. Yeah, you definitely do. You definitely. Wait, I'm curious. What are you using?
Greg Marshall 24:21 I'm using keep, keep calm. So, EP, K EAP, EAP. They were affiliated with Infusionsoft. Oh, okay. And, and I've, in my experience, all the guys that seem to be doing really well that don't get viewed as spammers use this Yeah. And so not keep exactly I know, they view some level of Infusionsoft. But I know keep I think is a spin off,
Blake Beus 24:50 you know, different environments. One I've used a lot and that's what I've never used. Yeah. And
Greg Marshall 24:54 I actually got on it about two years ago. And it's I love Have it? Yeah, I really liked the service. I think they run it very professionally. And I think it's actually repels a lot of people who don't want to run for it. It's higher price. Yeah, you know, so I'm paid somewhere around 150 or 200 bucks a month to really to use it. So it's not a, you know, 10 bucks a month, and you can do and that might be why, right? Yeah, you're probably paying for a higher level. Service. At least that's what I like to sell myself on. Yeah,
Blake Beus 25:30 I'll have to dive I'll have to dive into keep as well. That's what I haven't used. But I've used a lot. The one I'm using right now is called drip calm. Okay, I'm pretty happy with the delivery rates and open rates on that one. And they're pretty strict about adding people to the list and everything like that as well.
Greg Marshall 25:45 Well, if so, if you're learning anything from this episode, Blake is is recommended. Basically, don't be afraid to invest in your hosting. And your CRM, yeah, write your email software, don't be it. Those are great investments. Because
Blake Beus 26:00 two core platforms, you're gonna, you're gonna need, you're gonna need it, you're gonna need
Greg Marshall 26:04 anyone to have the visibility, like you're getting these emails. And you're building these websites so people can see them. Yeah. Right. So can't
Blake Beus 26:14 see if they can't see working.
Greg Marshall 26:18 The money that you think you're saving, you're actually losing, you're losing because they can't see what it is you're trying to show. Exactly. So I like that. I like that mentality. And I appreciate you explaining more in depth on how these work, because those are super valuable investments that people need to make.
Blake Beus 26:35 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So um, so let's wrap it up. Yeah, Greg, how can people get in touch with you? And do you have anything to like, pitch or tell people about any shameless plugs of your,
Greg Marshall 26:47 you know, me, any kind of marketing help that you need, especially like, building awareness, getting more clicks to your site conversions. If you'd like to learn more about how I can help you just visit Greg marshall.co. And just book a free call. And we can just discuss, you know, whatever your business needs. But no, no, no crazy plugs in there. Shameless plug. shameless plugs, just hopefully, like are.
Blake Beus 27:14 Alright, and if you want to get in touch with me, just Blake Beus calm. I do actually have a shameless throat anything. We've, we've may have talked about this before. But since we're talking about hosting, it fits. So I recently I've been asked to I've been doing consulting for a company called Asian for a long time, the last few years, just some consulting and I've been really impressed with what, what they put together. So I've actually hopped on as someone to help with growth, so helping kind of manage some of the growth on that. But it's specifically centered around WordPress, hosting, and administration. And it's geared towards people that were bootstrapping it themselves getting it all figured out. And now they're to the point where they're trying to decide, Okay, do I hire someone full time to just manage my website and the plugin updates and the security of the website? Or do I constantly keep trying to find freelancers to help me? Or, you know, how do I manage that, and this is essentially a managed service. So for one flat rate, you get, you get a dedicated team to help you with all those things, any content updates, or whatever. And I've been really impressed because, again, owning your platform and having control over that platform is becoming really important. Yep. And I think it's gonna be even more important as we start hopping into, like cookieless ads and all that stuff, which are topics for another day. And so I wanted to I wanted to hop on board with that. So yeah, if you have any questions, surrounding something like that, that's my shameless plug. You can hop over to ideation.com Ay ay ay T io n.com. Or just hit me up a Blake calm and we can we can chat. I highly recommend
Greg Marshall 28:44 using Blake services, he definitely knows what he's doing. So if you want to save yourself a lot of time and probably a lot of money, I highly recommend you do it. Yeah. All right. Okay.
Blake Beus 28:56 We'll wrap it up with like his later guys. Bye.
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Transcript: Blake Beus 0:01 Hi, I'm Blake Beus, and I'm your marketing technology Maestro.
Greg Marshall 0:06 Hey, I'm Greg Marshall. I'm your social media marketing strategist.
Blake Beus 0:09 And this is the modern marketers podcast. Okay, so we want to talk about on this Motivation Monday, Monday motivation. I don't know which. Yeah, it's around. But
Greg Marshall 0:23 it's I think it's all good. We'll keep it open and flexible. Yeah. So I think, you know, we want to talk about change. And what was the quote that we change brings opportunity? Yes. So change. The funny thing about change is, I don't know about you. But I hate it. But I know that it's necessary. And all of the great things in my life have always come from changes. Yeah, even though I tend to resist them as much as possible. And I don't know if that's something that's just a thing that I worry and deal with all the time. Yeah. Or if you ever feel that way, but I do know that. Over the years, I have trained myself to understand, the more I resist something, the more likely I need to do it. Yeah. And it never feels good when I do it, initially. But it always turns out better. So what, what situations or experiences have you had?
Blake Beus 1:19 Yeah, well, I mean, look, the fact that matter is, every good thing that is coming in my life has come through some sort of difficult changes, like literally everywhere, difficult, difficult change, right, like easy changes, that's fine. But some sort of difficult change, whether that's, you know, when I first graduated college, doing job interviews and things, those those are all difficult than getting hired on that whole, the whole, like, first 30 days, that job is a very difficult Yes, or, or even when I got let go from my most recent job, which started my entrepreneur journey. That was a super difficult change as well, that was not like a fun situation to go through. But I'm happy with where I'm at now. Yep. And
Greg Marshall 2:05 you probably got a lot of benefits from from those changes. And even though they sting when those changes happen, they hurt.
Blake Beus 2:14 Yeah, they hurt really bad. They hurt really bad. So so, you know, let's talk about when you're presented with those difficult changes, like, is there a mindset? Greg, do you think that that helps you get through that? Or? Or is it just something you just realize, this is the hard thing, I'm just gonna plow through it or what let's talk about how to get through those difficult change. For me,
Greg Marshall 2:35 I know, in the past I've struggled with, with these changes, because a lot of times they come at like inopportune times, right? And it's not the picture, perfect idea that you had in your head, before these changes came about. But typically, what I tend to do, that I didn't do a long time ago, is I tend to surrender to it. So I actually think, Alright, this change is going to happen, whether I like it or not. So I'm going to have to make the best of this change. And I use past experiences as reference points to kind of, I guess, Kotoko made me feel better. Yeah, which is, I've gone through the changes before in the past, and I've survived. Yeah. And typically, not only have I survived them, but I've gotten better and stronger from them, even though the lessons that are learned are very challenging. And like I said, they stain while they're happening. And so the mindset I like to use is to surrender to a man to understand that I can't control everything in the world, I can only control few things. And so just focus on that, and not worry so much about, you know, the future and the anxiety that it can bring when you get these changes. So that's what's helped me in the past, as far as mindset wise, just it I think it's almost counterintuitive, at least to me, it's counterintuitive, which is to surrender, when it happens, just surrender to it, and figure out how can I make this situation the best that I can make it and trust in the process? Yeah, as cliche as all that sounds. That's that's really what my mindset goes, right?
Blake Beus 4:09 Yeah. Also, sometimes cliches are true. Yeah. Just because it's a cliche doesn't mean that it's false. So yes, that Ray boy, I like that surrender. And honestly, that's something that I need to to work on more, I will say, in addition to surrendering. One of the things I've had to learn to do, and one of the things I've noticed I do, and I know other people do this, too, is I tend to take all of the future negative possibilities, and cram them into this instant right now saying, Oh, my gosh, this change has made it so that all of these future potential things could happen. And then I feel all of that, you know, weight gain right now, in this instant, but it's impossible to actually do anything about all of that stuff right now. In a sense, yeah, because you can only do One thing at a time, yeah, one step forward at a time. So one things I've had to do is is reduce the reduce my mindset around the permanence. Yes, some of the change in the permanence of some of these potential impacts. Yep. And focus on the temporary or the impermanence of the things that I can do right now that can have a large impact later on. Yes. And it's, it's been this weird thing that I've kind of realized over the last year is the difference between permanent negatives, versus temporary negatives, permanent positive positives versus temporary positives and focusing on the things that I can, you know, manage right now. Yep. And that can directly impact the permanence moving forward, or whatever?
Greg Marshall 5:47 Well, I think something I like to use, that's important, is essentially controlling something that is outside whatever the situation of the change is. And so for example, if I'm going through a big change, I tend to like to, you know, grab on to a different goal at the moment to help me kind of deal and cope with the current change that's going through, right, which, you know, in some cases, sometimes it's fitness related, family related, but just something different than what's currently going on, so that I can have a sense of accomplishment. I like that, right. So that it just, these are just coping mechanisms that I learned over the years to try to keep myself motivated, and to not get so discouraged on any type of change that I give up. And so these are literally like tricks that I play on myself, to try to get myself to keep moving forward, because I know I have to, and it's mostly a psychological game.
Blake Beus 6:50 Well, we'll wrap it up right here, but you heard it here. Greg says he tricks himself into being motivated. Yes. Yeah,
Greg Marshall 6:55 that's definitely true. Totally
Blake Beus 6:56 does work. I mean, I've actually read studies of things that show that that definitely works. It's part of the I know, this is another cliche, fake it till you make it. Yep. But that's, that's part of that. We can trick our brains into, into moving forward on things by by selecting smaller goals that we can accomplish right now. So anyway, we'll keep the short. We'll wrap it up right now. We'll see you guys next
Greg Marshall 7:19 week. We'll see you next week and we'll get you pumped up
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Transcript Greg Marshall 0:00 All right. So today a couple things we want to talk about. The first is delayed. Well, what would you call it? delayed data attribution? Yeah. And your ad account? Yeah, absolutely.
So you know, what I'm seeing currently right now, both in Facebook and Google is I'm seeing where you run a campaign for a few days, or whatever. And it's saying that you're not getting any leads or purchases or whatever event you're optimizing for, even though on your back end, you see leads coming in and you're seeing sales come in. But then the attribution is, at time showing up as late as 789 days later. So obviously, the challenge becomes shutting down campaigns that are actually working way too early. So right. What are some, I guess, ideas? tips are things to keep in mind from, from a tracking standpoint, in order we know, we're never gonna be 100%? No, but how do we have a habit to where at least it gives us 80 90%? accuracy? Yeah, to make the best decisions?
Blake Beus 1:09 Yeah. So I mean, we kind of have if, because when you're talking about that, it made me think of like two different sides of this, the first side of this is someone that's running ads for a client, right? Yeah, like, that's a problem you need to solve. Because if your client is looking at this, and saying, Hey, we're spending money, hundreds of dollars a day or whatever, and nothing's coming back, will, you know, now you're in the hot seat? Oh, yeah, to fix that. Whereas if you know, you're a business and everybody's running it in house, is a little bit of a different problem, because you have some responsibility. Whereas if it's your own business, you can, you can kind of play around with it, you you know, you're testing, whatever, but you're being paid to run. And so you're kind of on the hook of results right now. And so you've got to have that conversation that just surrounding what realistic expectations are what testing looks like. So that's the first thing I wanted to talk about. But the other thing is, is you always want to find some sort of a way you can kind of, I call it back your way into the data, again, and, and several different ways you can do that is the easiest, the easiest way. Easiest, this isn't as easy as it should be. But Google Analytics, Google Analytics will will track your UTM parameters, right? So whenever you set up a Google ad, or a Facebook ad, or anything, you have the ability to set up those UTM parameters and make them dynamic. So it actually pulls in the campaign name, or the ad set name or, or the ad ID or whatever. But that come up with a super simple methodology for naming those things and make sure those use UTM parameters are always set, then you can hop into Google and basically track track the flow, right? People landed on this page with these UTM parameters. And then how many of those people ended up on the you know, purchase conversion page or whatever, then you can at least show that data, because that that data has maybe a 24 hour delay. I mean, some of its real time, some of its not, there's a little bit of delay there. But it's, it's going to give you some high level data to say, Okay, these campaigns actually got, you know, some people to to the end goal, even though it's not getting reported back to the ads manager, we're seeing value from that. And if we turn these ads off, those are going to go away.
Greg Marshall 3:27 Got it? Well, here's here's a question I have. Yeah, based on that, because as a as being a business owner, myself, and having you know, we talked about last episode, the holistic marketing, I have the stomach to run, because I've just tracking overall revenue and azmin, right? Is there anything that could be harming you from an optimization standpoint, meaning, you know, Facebook, and Google, they say you have to have a certain number of events happening per week, in order for it to like, be fully optimized? Does that impact if the tracking is not coming back to the ads manager as effectively? Does that make your ad campaigns not as successful? Meaning can those ad campaigns not optimize?
Blake Beus 4:15 Yeah, I mean, we, we all want more data in there. And if that data is not getting reported back, of course, it's going to impact some things, though, if, if I were to make some guesses, I would make some guesses that both Facebook and Google, they've been at the ads game long enough that they know there's going to be some discrepancies there and there's going to be some delays there. And they're going to be kind of optimizing behind the scenes a little bit. But a lot of like a lot of the optimization happens with volume and honestly a lot of people in this position. They're they're not spending enough money to get 50 purchases a week. You have spending $100 a day or whatever. You're not going to see Realistically 50 purchases in a week anyway. So you might want to set your ads to optimize for an earlier funnel step, like as a cart or something like that. Anyhow,
Greg Marshall 5:11 yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, one thing that I've heard, you know, other kind of, I guess, attribution experts talk about is that the Facebook and Google, you can immediately optimize for purchase, or for lead with no data in your ad account? Because they say it's basing it off of other people's data. Is there any truth to that? I have no idea. I'd be honest to me, I think each ad account is technically like, unique in its own way, right?
Blake Beus 5:44 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, I think the reality, and this is sheer gas, because I don't know, I've never worked at Google or Facebook. But I would say the reality is probably a little bit of a blend of you have your own ad account, unique data. But also, there's some larger data out there because they're collecting data on billions of people and their purchasing behaviors. So it's probably some sort of a blend. I don't know where that line is drawn
Greg Marshall 6:11 to. Could you imagine, you know, whoever writes these algorithms where they would be the greatest ad person of all time, because they would know exactly what to do?
Blake Beus 6:19 You wouldn't think so. However, being a software engineer for a long time, there's, Well, I'll tell you right now, everybody's code is garbage. Every honest. Microsoft's code is apples code is it's all absolute garbage. And the engineers, all of them behind the scenes are like, why is this? Garbage is terrible. So all of them think that way? And a lot of them would probably say, I don't know exactly how it works. Anyway, it's pretty big. Like it's a pretty big platform. But they would definitely have a lot more insight into key areas. But But let me ask you this. Are you seeing this more on like e commerce accounts or on simple funnels? Lead funnels? Like what are you seeing?
Greg Marshall 7:01 mostly on e commerce accounts? e commerce, mostly Shopify, mostly Shopify? What I'm also seeing, and here's kind of my thoughts is it could be also impacted because a lot of the users and a target markets that we're going after are iPhone users, right? And so that may be contributing to the delay, or lack of data coming in, right? And so looking for different ways and strategies to essentially manage the clients expectation of right, how not to essentially get freaked out, if things are working just fine, right? Like, if you're spending X amount of dollars, and you're getting a three, four or 5x on your shop, and your sales are kind of you know, consistent, and you keep growing that aspect and your sales keep growing with it. But the ads managers are showing that don't let the ads manager dictate your, your thoughts of should you shut things down and relaunch? Right, right. And for me as just like a business to me, I could easily see it and just go Yeah, I mean, this is obviously impacting, because if we turn them off, which I've done with some plans for just turn them off, to see if they are impacting the sales or not, and the sales like Dang, yeah, they know like, oh, okay, so although the ads manager is saying this results happen, it's actually not 100%. True. It's only part of the story.
Blake Beus 8:27 Right? Right. Well, and I mean, the reason I asked about platforms too, is it all kind of depends. But I've seen some platforms. So for example, I use a cart software for my membership called pay kickstart, and allows me to put custom fields in there, and then they can be hidden custom fields on the payment page. Okay. And so if I want to just get some basic data on which campaigns are working, I've actually done this before, I've created several fields that will have that are hidden, that have the UTM parameters for campaign source, you know, those different things so I could put, you know, the sources Facebook, the campaign, is this campaign, the, the ad set, I could put under medium or, or whatever I like, how can you use those, and I can dump those in there. And then that data is associated with that person. Well, with that purchase specifically, and then, you know, I can run a report against that and say, Hey, you know, even though the ads managers and pointing this, we captured manually these fields, and this report says that, you know, these 20 people purchased based on this campaign Got it. Got it, right. And so that data does not even get reported back into an ads manager from that card. But I've collected that data and you can do that with many CRM platforms, right? Like Yep, whether you're using you know, for your email platform like HubSpot, or you know, use drip, calm, ConvertKit, all of these, all of those allow you to put in custom fields got it. And so most payment platforms will They have an integration with those will allow you to send custom fields to them. Yeah. So there's a little bit of a technical aspect for me, that's no big deal. Yeah. But maybe it's worth finding a developer to help you connect some of those dots.
Greg Marshall 10:15 Well, what about? So my next question would be with tracking issues and whatnot? How does the iOS changes impact a Google Analytics?
Blake Beus 10:25 There's, there is definitely a decrease in the accuracy there. But Google, I don't know, I feel like Google's much better at gathering that stuff and got to be sure they're compliant than Facebook is at this point. But there's definitely a decrease in the precise data. But I would say the high level data is probably probably good enough. And I don't think I don't think iOS has said that they're blocking simple UTM parameters. I think what they're mostly blocking what they've announced they're blocking is, like, personally identifiable types.
Greg Marshall 11:02 Got it. Got it. So and I've also heard that as well. So I was just curious, on your opinion, because, you know, Google Analytics, I feel like it's pretty accurate. I mean, obviously, like, everything else is not 100 accurate, but it's accurate enough to at least give you some kind of direction, what you should do next.
Blake Beus 11:21 Right. Right. And and that's, you know, honestly, that's good enough. I feel like, I feel like a lot of marketers, myself included, got a little lazy with the level of data that we had, yeah, we could just rely on this, like, pretty precise data. And forget about all the other things, forget about the marketing message, get about the angle, forget about all of that stuff. Because we have the data, right, we just had to trick the algorithm and putting it in front of you have enough people cheap enough, and we would come out on top. Whereas we're we're kind of in the process of seeing, seeing us revert back to, to only being able to have some high level data. Yeah, I think I think of direct mailing. Yeah, back in the day, I mean, still happens right now, back in the day, like the 50s 60s, direct mailing was huge. And you didn't get that feedback very fast. In fact, you got it very slowly, very slowly.
So you had to put a lot of time and effort into your marketing angle and message, because you had to spend the money, send the letters all the way out. And how you did split testing back then is you would say, Okay, I'm gonna mail everybody in Detroit, and I'm gonna give like half of them this, this envelope style and the other half this envelope style, and I'm going to see which ones convert better. And that's and you just have to wait and, and you would have a different phone number for them to call and the ups of those, so you knew which, which envelope packaging style I got. So you know, for the next one,
Greg Marshall 12:47 you know, it's funny that you bring that up, because think about the imagine the people in the 50s and 60s direct mail markers. were complaining that this isn't, you know, precise, right? Imagine what they would think this is the greatest thing of all time. The amount of data we still have, yeah, so access to
Blake Beus 13:09 Yeah, and and, and we're just gonna keep getting better and better at you know, the platforms are gonna get better and better at making sure that this data is good enough. Yeah, while also respecting the privacy of people. Yep. Right. And if you if you really think about it, personally, I don't really need to know which specific person Yeah, made it from the ad, through the ads platforms really want that data. But me as an advertiser, I don't care quite so much about the specific person that made it from the ad all the way through purchase, as I do, the high level data of this campaign has worked many purchases, and therefore it's working. So I can, I can put my time and effort into that. And that that right, there is not too terribly hard to have, essentially two sources of data on the ads platform, and then an analytics platform. I do wish Google Analytics was just a little bit easier to use. Yeah, they just they just launched about a month ago, a month and a half ago, actually. Time flies. It's been like four months, they launched Google Google Analytics for the brand new property. I've been playing around with that some things a little easier. I mean, be super curious to see how that. Yeah, how that helps. But yeah,
Greg Marshall 14:18 well, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. So you know, I'm asking a lot of kind of, because we've done this together, and you're the expert in this kind of tracking back and you don't I mean, yeah. What about audience overlap? So that's, that's something that I hear all the time about. You have to avoid it in order to get better results. But I don't know if I'm 100% sold on that. And I haven't heard a specific kind of number, or how that would actually how much does it impact it and I'll give you an example. I'm currently running a test for high end jewelry business. And I'm breaking all the rules when it comes to what they say you should be doing on the ads platform. And I have heavy overlap. In fact, I have a retargeting campaign that's hitting the same audience. But I got six campaigns going towards the same exact guy, obviously different messages. And I checked to see how much does that impact cpms, which is essentially the cost, you got to pay for that traffic. And then I checked historic cpms when we never had overlap, there's like literally almost no change. Yeah, so the CPM is almost exactly the same. So my question to you is, do you think audience overlap is really that detrimental? Because the value that I think that I see is I'm able to show, if I have a lot of products, I'm able to show that audience more to give myself more chances for them to buy something versus having to just rely on just like showing them a few and then open that, you know, if those don't work, let me swap it out again, but new ones in front of
Blake Beus 16:12 me. So let me ask you this, is each campaign for a different product group, or like grouping of products? Are they all the same?
Greg Marshall 16:18 different product grouping? So like one's earrings, another's necklaces? And others rings? And and Okay, and so that's, that's how I have it set up. And I thought we've had personally, you know, with you and I were running campaigns, we've had some successful campaigns where we have Yeah, technically a lot of overlap and tons. And I mean, it's at one point we had, I think the same like five or six. Yeah. Ad sets that were literally the exact same ads, and they were for the same offer. And it was a we barely even changed the mess. I think we even had the same message. I think we have the same. Yeah. Yo, what? Explain that, because I know a lot of people in the advertising space, and it feels like I don't know, if it's Facebook, or Google raps, or people who have influenced us to think this is their, like, how concerned should you really be about and if there was an audience overlap? What percentage would even guess? Like if let's say you're getting $10 per purchases? Well, if you have audience overlap, does that go to $12? I mean, because I wouldn't really care. Yeah, if it went from 10 to $100. Versus now that that's an issue. Yeah, but if it's very incremental, I think you can actually gain more than you can lose Yeah, I got to hear your thoughts
Blake Beus 17:39 Yeah, I think it's good so I have a lot of thoughts surrounding this and my first thought is I don't think any one person on this planet and I don't even think the ads reps you know those guys get the call with you? I don't think they know because I've gotten different answers from different people. Yep.
Greg Marshall 18:02 Those guys I call all of my customers in the fourth quarter to freak them out. But keigo
Blake Beus 18:10 side note Simon, I had a conversation with a LinkedIn advertiser, okay. You know free free the rep the rep rep call works for LinkedIn and it was it was a good call I liked it. It had some good information. But then I talked with someone that runs an agency in France that does very much just LinkedIn ads for people and he's like yeah most of the stuff that guy told you does not work yeah, so that's he's like places he was working and I trust that guy more because he's actually spending his serious his serious money his money on those ads and the advertiser some guy that probably got hired on LinkedIn to help people feel good about it maybe has been through a few courses but probably hasn't actually spent any hard Yeah, hard earned cash on ads. So so that's just this is the thing I will take every one of those calls I can because sometimes there's a nugget in there that I haven't thought about but I'll test but I wouldn't take anything they say for gospel truth you know,
Greg Marshall 19:12 yeah, I think you know, one of the things that's really funny because the reps I think I've only talked to one or two reps ever between Facebook and Google that have actually given me information that I was like, okay, maybe this this could help right but unfortunate I've also been given I think some I will call it just lower level Okay, we'll call it lower level advice. That is not that just didn't get the results that we were really hoping Yeah, cuz I don't want to you know, obviously trash these guys. These guys are doing a job. No, they are and and I think the services that we're getting are great. I just think some of the information that maybe they're sharing isn't always 100% applicable to every business? Right? That's where my question with the audience overlap. I know, I've heard that. I don't know how many times from advertising reps. But you don't want to have overlap. You don't want to have this. But some of my best results have come from having unbelievable overlap.
Blake Beus 20:21 Yeah. So. So this, this is where I get, you know, I said, No, I don't think anyone knows, for sure. So my actual theory is, it probably doesn't matter as much as it used to. Just looking at how algorithms work and everything, you you can write them in so many ways, but they probably wrote in ways where you have kind of buckets of data right bucket, you have this bucket of data surrounding the ad, bucket of data surrounding the ad group bucket of data surrounding the the campaign. And it's less sophisticated to kind of keep those isolated, right. But it's more powerful if you can blend that data in into an algorithm that works. And I feel like especially for Google, because they've been out for a long time. I feel like with Google, they probably have that down. Yeah. And and the reason it was probably an issue early on with Facebook, and probably early on with Google was it's how it your their ad exchanges, right. So if you think about like the stock exchange and everything, you're basically bidding for eyeballs, you're you're bidding against other advertisers, eyeballs, and a lot of people tend to forget that. Yeah. And so if you had two overlapping audiences, the theory was that you were bidding against yourself and driving up your own costs, because you're you're basically bidding against those exact same eyeballs. And that was probably true early on, I would hazard a guess that Facebook and Google have put significant effort and lots and lots of money into making sure that that's not a problem. Yeah. Because they want people to spend money with them. Yeah. And if if I'm trying to scale, and I'm not scaling in a way that fits the algorithm perfectly, and it ends up costing me a lot of money, I quit, I quit running ads, and so and so I'm confident that they have, if it's an issue in the past, it's less of an issue now, and it will probably be even less of an issue moving forward. Unless there's some sort of unintentional bug or something like that. But they want to keep their advertisers happy. I mean, Facebook, specifically, and both of them are Facebook and Google, their whole revenue model is, like 70 80% ad revenue. Yeah. So they want to keep people spending money. And to keep people spending money, they want to give them a good advertising experience that makes them money as well. And they don't want to have these weird things where you're bidding against yourself and driving up the cost. Yeah. And
Greg Marshall 22:48 that, you know, and that makes sense. Because one of my theories of, you know, kind of when you find an audience, you go deeper within that audience is because I know we're talking about algorithms and the internet and all that, but I like to mentally move things into like real life, right? Yeah. So if, let's let's break a town down for, for example, right? Let's, if I'm selling high end jewelry, or something very expensive. I obviously can't sell everyone in this town. But there's a section of the town that makes a lot of money. Yeah. And they're perfectly in the market for these types of products. So I want to invest as much money as possible. It's just that section right there. And I want to show them everything I got. Yeah, right. Because it makes no sense to talk to anyone else if they're not in the market, right. But if you want to scale and get more sales, then I want to show them more of these things. That's my theory of using an audience that works and showing them more and more different offers, but still targeting that same group, because it makes no sense to go like Well, I have these two products, so I'm not going to show them the rest of them until like I only show them these two, and those kind of burn through and then I'll bring in the next two, versus just show it to them all the time and just always be in their face. That's my theory on why I've had success and a lot of success with audience overlapping and essentially breaking that rule. So
Blake Beus 24:24 and I think, I think ecommerce is a perfect example of you can probably break a lot of rules because you have products that appeal to people in different ways. Yep. Right. So high end jewelry store, watches, earrings, whatever. If it's not gender based then then you have lots of ways you can overlap lap that household, right or, or anything like that. And it applies to just about anything you think about, say say I was running ads selling baseball supplies. We were talking about baseball earlier, right? You have a town. And not everybody in the town watches baseball. Not everybody in the town is ready to buy a bat. But they might be ready to buy a glove. Yep. Right? Yep, they might be they might last year or a couple months ago hadn't thought about this. But now they're the, the the coach for their daughter's t ball team or something like that. And they need, you know, a T ball stand and some practice equipment and one of those sticks with the ball on the end. Yeah. After run after the ball, you know, and but you don't know, you might know from an ads perspective that they're interested in baseball, but that doesn't mean they're interested in buying things, buying, you know, a bat or your love. You show them lots of stuff. Yeah. And then, you know, and then they have the opportunity.
Greg Marshall 25:46 The reason to I bring up the there's actually an aspect that I think I'm leaving out. So that also the thought process based on that, you know, when you have an ad set or an ad group, right? Facebook tends to show one of the offers or to the offers more than the other. Right? And so, it I've tested this as well, if you have an ad set with like 10 different products on, like, seven of them never even get seen. Yeah, right. And so what ends up happening is you make all these ads, but they're not being seen, right? And it just keeps running. Yeah. So instead, I broke it down to where the ad set or the ad group can only there's only two options. Yeah. So it's like essentially a be testing itself. But then I'm targeting the same audience multiple times, showing two different products, two different products, right. So that I'm essentially forcing these ads to be shown to this audience, and then I can start making decisions on this one's just not resonating at all right? And I'm only looking at CPM to really see if the cost of my traffic is going going up or not. Yeah. And as of right now has been gone for a few weeks. Once again, as I've tracked this between historical and now, there's been no change in cost.
Blake Beus 27:04 Yeah, yeah. And that's zero. The CPM is something that a lot of people ignore when they're running ads, especially at first. Yeah, right. Seasoned advertisers, they know what they're looking for. But a lot of people they're like CPM, its cost for 1000 impressions. Yeah, is what it stands for. Yeah. And but what don't people what what a lot of people don't realize is that is the core metric that shows how much you're getting charged, yes, your cost per purchase. And those things, that's not how much you're getting charged. That's what the numbers ended up being the math, what you're actually being charged is is cost per impression per 1000 impressions. And so and, and this varies from industry to industry. So with, with my conversation ad LinkedIn that I'm doing for one of my clients, the CPM for that, is I think we're $350 Okay. But it's a conversation ad that gets sent out to people, it's a messenger, it's like a bot, it's very bizarre, our our engagement rate on that is like 80%, yep. And we've only spent a total of $27 at this point, right. And so it because but it's a very targeted ad for very specific purpose for very specific group of people in the audience is only 1800 people there. So, you know, we don't care, the CPM is high. But if you're running, you know, ecommerce ads to things brought on to a broad audience, your CPM is what you're getting charged, you want to look at that. And you know, it could be $10 per 1000, or $50 per 1000, depending on your industry and cost of your product and all these different things, but you need to have that baseline, and then that baseline can help you judge you know, your other campaigns and effectiveness. Here's, in fact, the
Greg Marshall 28:52 way you're explaining you know, cuz you and I, we're in the digital marketplace, we know like, cost per 1000 impressions like that makes sense in our brains, because we're looking at all that, right? So the way I like to explain it to my clients, so that it's an easier I guess, understanding is I go imagine this, you're selling your shirt for $25. And the cost for you to purchase that shirt, or to sell it is 10. Now, if you can get that shirt for five, you'd be more profitable. Now if you have to automatically start buying that shirt at 20 or 25. Now you're no longer profit. Nothing changed about the product. Yeah, the only thing that changed was the cost right for you to get it and so sometimes I think you can get caught up in like, yeah, you know, the, you know, something's going on or whatnot. And you can realize, well, nothing's changed, your numbers are the same. Your conversion rates are the same. All these changes the cost of the actual product, and in this sense, in this case, it's to get your ad in front of eyeballs and so It's an interesting experience that I have with a seat, I could not figure out why this one client was getting a super high CPM for the same audience that she had gotten in the past. And it's a broad audience. So I was like, How is this even possible? And I even tested on other clients accounts, because they're kind of going after the same person and all of their cpms are way lower. Right? So I was like, this is very odd. And I'm talking six times more expensive, really, six times. So I was like, wow, either this is really competitive audience or something's going on here. So what I did was I actually went to Google Analytics, I looked into the site speed, okay. And I noticed Facebook truly does care how fast your website is, I always thought that was just theory, because I looked at the checkout time. 15 seconds. You want to know why, why they had all these plugins, they had too many plugins, slowed everything down. And so I looked at I was like, wow, 15, one time, 71 time choice. So we got rid of all of them. All right, and we reduced the time to five seconds, which is still slower, but that way better than 15. Our cpms drop, like, right back towards the supposed to be
Blake Beus 31:20 Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not surprised one bit by that just learning for me. Yeah, it's you again, you you want to you want to think about what you know, Facebook and Google are trying to achieve here. Yeah. And they want to make these experience good. And everyone knows, if you have a slow loading website, it's insanely frustrating. I mean, there's anecdotally, I heard this thing, if you want to know, you know, before you get in a long term relationship, or get married or whatever, you want to see someone kind of you have them use a little Wi Fi connection. Yeah. And see how that goes. Yes, that that will really bring out the worst in someone. Yeah. Right. And that's the same thing with people get so frustrated with with load times, and they're not happy with that experience. And so you're going to start seeing indicators, like a lot of people hitting the page and leaving. Yep. And, and so yeah, site speed is, is honestly one of the first things I always look for when we're not getting the results we want is his site speed. And a lot of people a lot of business owners don't think about that, because they're not technical, and I get it, but you need to, and honestly, I mean, I'll tell you right now, there's a couple of tools people can use, okay. One is called gt metrics. It's free, you just go there, you put in, you put in any any URL on your page, product, page homepage, whatever. And it will go through and analyze the page, give you a score, you know, A through F Yep. And then we'll give you some recommendations on how to make it faster. The other one is called Google PageSpeed. insights, again, a free tool, you put it in there, it will give you some different different answers and results. Now, don't get too hung up on the letter grade, both of them will kind of give you that because sites like Shopify and stuff, there's only so much you can do a lot of it's on Shopify side. But you can definitely make improvements on your side. If you're like me, and you like write your own code, everything, like I can do a lot of stuff, I host my own servers and everything. But most people don't do that I would never host my own e commerce server, it's gonna be Shopify. But, you know,
Greg Marshall 33:20 so basically, and in which it makes sense, on your end, right, one of the things I've picked up and learn from you. And trust me, I would have never even thought to look at that if it wasn't for working with you. Because honestly, I'm just looking at the ads part, right? So I'm looking at and here's the part I left out, the link, click through rates were the same, everything was the same, and but the cpms kept going higher and higher. And that's like you said, like, the first thing you think of is to look at sites view what's going on with the site. And that's the last thing actually, I was thinking home. And then I go and I go, Wow, who would have thought that the experience truly made that much of a difference. So much so that it was charging me six times more? Yeah, for the same audience that other people are going after including the same ad account, because the user experience was perceived as bad on Facebook. And so that was a huge learning experience for me, because now like, okay, so you do really have to make sure that your site speed is quick and that the user expect you have to think the user experience must be good, or you will get charged more from the app level. Yeah.
Blake Beus 34:31 And on that, in that same vein, we start talking about user experience. About 80% of traffic on most sites, today's mobile, yeah, so you have to have not only a good load speed on a desktop, but also on a mobile device. And you need to have any is to be mobile friendly and easy to navigate. And both Facebook and Google have a lot of information on how to determine automatically if your site is easy to use on mobile or not. And so that's that's the other thing to think about. You And you know for me that's second nature I think about that stuff all the time because I've been in this realm in that side of I approached marketing from a software engineer side and then and then moved over into the marketing technology side so for me that's very natural whereas my oftentimes the things that come unnatural for me oftentimes like marketing messaging angles and hooks yeah like I have to put a lot of effort into that because that does not come natural to me it comes natural to people like you that came from a sales background and and then moved over into the marketing and digital marketing side of things
Greg Marshall 35:33 this is why I think you know, we're doing this podcast I think the information to me is very valuable because you have any both right you can't you can't be too heavy on one or the other now or you'll be missing out on the true potential of what your business can do marketing wise and at the end of the day really profit was yeah because we're doing all this to make sure that we can maximize profits our our e commerce stores and our lead generation for our service based businesses. So I think all this is important and one thing that he talked to me about want to say was two or maybe three weeks ago that I thought was very interesting and maybe we might have to just dedicate another episode for this but you had mentioned that these ad platforms may have a bias towards certain platform I have actually and when I say bias both negative and positive Yeah, I have actually I don't know if I want to say the software name but I have seen a negative kind of performance from a certain brand when you send traffic there the cpms are much higher it appears that Google and Facebook not like this software very very much but maybe we have to go through that on another episode.
Blake Beus 36:58 Well, maybe maybe we just tease it and I'm okay saying the software in our next episode Yeah, but you'll have to you'll have to subscribe so you can hear that next one because I think you and I are probably thinking about the same software and and I've got a few ideas we got a few ideas of some other other software's platforms that are you know, maybe a little bit better Yes, and other things like that but yeah, let's uh you know, why don't we wrap it up here we'll wrap it up, wrap it up here Greg. How can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall 37:30 They could go to my website Greg marshall.co and if you want to follow me You can find me on Instagram or Facebook just type in Greg Marshall and then what are you what do you help people with I'm mostly help them out with their social media paid ads marketing strategy, and best practices everything that we've talked about today
Blake Beus 37:47 and I do know for a fact that oftentimes you loop in consulting and insights on surrounding email marketing and how to even text marketing those other things so how to how to how to make it a more holistic app we've talked about in the past so yeah, okay, cool.
Greg Marshall 38:06 How do they get in touch? In fact I have a quick question for Yeah, if someone needs your help specifically and I would recommend people reach out with tracking or making sure that their pixels or their anything that's necessary in the back end to help optimize their business how they get a hold and
Blake Beus 38:27 yeah so like these comm is the best place to kind of get a hold of me You can you can contact me on on that site there
Greg Marshall 38:35 and are you actually taking clients current I know you're busy so are you actually accepting new clients
Blake Beus 38:41 so I am in a limited capacity I'm being very picky about about who I love helping people which is why I can help a lot of people with this podcast Yeah, but I also am human and yeah so many hours a family like you and I've gotten you know, other priorities outside of work. But I will tell you this I have I'm wearing multiple hats at this moment. So the first thing is I have I have a group where I give I help people with social media marketing and it's like a group coaching consulting with some dumb few aspects called SM three you can find that at Blake Beus comm slash SM three and then I also just recently partnered with a company called aviation that helps people with WordPress website set making sure that it's hosted on a good platform, it's fast and you get the help you need over time it's not a it's not necessarily a will build your new website. It's uh, if you want a website that's always going to be maintained and you can't bring you know you can hire someone full time or whatever. I hope I help people with that guys. So those are kind of the two things I'm working on right now. The two parallels I'm working in that really play on my strengths in both areas. So yeah, well,
Greg Marshall 39:54 Fantastic episode. I think we we dropped a lot of gems in this one, I think All right.
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[00:00:00] Blake Beus: All right, let's go. Let's do
[00:00:02] Greg Marshall: this. All right. So, you know, we, we talked about some last week, which you actually made me reminded me to talk about, which was creating content, the importance of actually creating content and almost no one wants to create content. And I said this saying last week, and I thought it was funny, but it's, but it sticks, which is creating content is a lot like going to the.
You know what you need to do, you know, the benefits of it, but you just don't feel like doing it. And so therefore you don't stay consistent and you don't get the results that you want, but if you actually stay consistent and do it, you get great
[00:00:37] Blake Beus: results. Right. Right. And I liked you summarized that super short.
You said basically no one likes going to the gym, but everybody likes the results. And it's the same thing with like content marketing. And that's what you were talking about it to, you know, today. But, and that, honestly, that principle applies to literally anything across. My wife and I talk a lot about this, that we call it the concept of duality, the things that are most worthwhile in life also have this side of it that you don't like.
And, and you know, that goes with working out that goes with marketing that goes with you know, running your ads, running your own business. There's all of these different things. Push you in a direction or you're driven toward to go towards those things, but they have this dual nature to them.
And they're the, there there's these unpleasant parts. So, I mean, it's the same with, with raising kids, both you and I have to have a family, right? One of the greatest things in my life, but also one of the hardest, hardest things I've ever done in my life too. So there's that duality and I love that the, the tight, concise way that you put all that together.
Cause it's super true. Well, and I
[00:01:36] Greg Marshall: think, you know, just staying focused. Taking the actions that are necessary and not having that, like ni for instant gratification, it's almost like there's a, what is it like the inverse relationship of the less instant gratifying it is the most likely it's going to be very beneficial for you.
Right. Right, right. And that's, that's what creating content is that there's no, you know, you make a video, you make a, a podcast or an audio clip where you write. You don't get that immediate gratification that we're all looking for, right? That immediate sale that immediate business, or seeing your business grow.
But over time, if you just do it each and every day consistently, the results will show up. It's just, can you last long enough to do it and be committed and disciplined enough to
[00:02:27] Blake Beus: do it. And, and, you know, since this is what we call our, our motivated Monday's motivation, Mondays The answer is to that question.
Can you last well? Yeah, you can. And are you going to fail at it sometimes? Absolutely. But that's part of the process. So when you get out of the habit or whatever, the gym is such an easy example to talk about. My wife and I were going to the gym super consistently. We're doing really good. One of the first time in my life, I was being super consistent and this weird thing happened called a pandemic and the gym shut down and I got so out of the habit.
And then once we got vaccinated, everything got. We started getting back in that habit again. But those, those bumps and things happen. It's not always a global pandemic, but you might have a day where you miss creating the contents or whatever the next day is a new day. It's kind of like a reset and I'm kind of a behavioral economics nerd, and a lot of people maybe haven't heard of that term before, but there's been quite a few studies on basically what you call.
Motivation reset. Yesterday's in the past, whatever happened yesterday, if you didn't get the things done you needed to, or you miss that content piece, or you missed that, that whatever, today's a new day, you can reset today and move forward today with, with that goal. And also no one is super consistent with things.
When they first get started, it takes a long time to be consistent. So the answer is you can totally do this. Everyone can do this. Even if you kind of screw up today or you didn't get it done today, you can still get up tomorrow and make some things happen. And, and you know what happened yesterday, doesn't need to affect you.
[00:03:51] Greg Marshall: Well, I think, you know, hopefully that that clip right there gets you excited and motivated to at least do the, you know, the daily, the daily work that's necessary in order to get to the big goals that you want. So, Blake,
[00:04:02] Blake Beus: you got anything else? No, that's great. Just a happy to have you guys here on the motivation Monday.
We're going to drop these every Monday and they're going to be super short, motivational ways to start out your week. So we'll see you guys next time. All right.
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[00:00:00] Greg Marshall: All right. So Blake, even you you've been telling me a little bit about some some LinkedIn ads. We, we touched on a little bit last episode, but very, very lightly. And you know, I would love to go into this a little more deeply, so. Tell me the lake, that message. How does that work? So, so tell me what, what that's
[00:00:17] Blake Beus: all about.
Yeah. So the there's two, there's two different ways. You can do message ads, they just call a message ads, or they have conversation ads and w one of the most absolutely infuriating things about LinkedIn is their documentation is terrible. It's absolutely abysmal. And so there's, there's times you're, you're maybe reading documentation on how.
And it tells you that you can do it this way, but that menu option isn't there inside the ads platform.
[00:00:42] Greg Marshall: So basically in instructions, manual is flawed.
[00:00:45] Blake Beus: Yes. Yeah. And so you've got to do a lot of poking around that being said. I, I feel like sometimes when something's harder to get into it, weeds out all the lazy marketers and then there's a lot of gold there for the marketers that are dedicated.
So. I feel like it's a big opportunity. The message ads are basically like a one time message sent. So LinkedIn has its little messaging platform. The message ad is you type it, you send it and it gets sent to people in your targeting group. Got it. Like a want it's it's almost, almost feels like email marketing.
Got it. But it's like a one-time email, not like a drip sequence or anything like that. A one-time email. Now you could set up a drip sequence. You just have to do it manually. You just have to say, okay, we're going to send. And then we're going to send this and we're going to send this, but you can't really guarantee everybody that got the first one is going to get the second one.
So you would have to make sure that those messages are kind of self sustained. Got it. Got it. You couldn't say in my last email, I said this cause you, you, you
[00:01:43] Greg Marshall: wouldn't know.
Got it. So what about like, who's this for? So who, like what type of business would work the best with LinkedIn messaging ads?
[00:01:51] Blake Beus: Like anytime, anytime the sales conversation is maybe a little bit more complex.
I think a message ad works really, really, really well. Just because, I mean, if you look at banner ads or something like that, you, you get a sentence may be sure to get your point across. Usually it's a headline to get people on the sales page and a sales page does the heavy lifting, but a message ad is it sends a message out.
You can spark a conversation. Now I haven't actually done a ton of the message ads and they're not being sent from me. Okay. So one thing I actually don't know about the message ads specifically is if I send a message. And someone replies to that message, does that like show up in my inbox and do I need to reply to that?
And their documentation doesn't have a lot of data surrounding that. But we're actually using more of the conversation ads. Okay. Which is more like a chat bot. Okay. And that's a very, very interesting option. So. Let me tell you a couple of things we ran into. So I was telling you about my client.
They're targeting 1800 people that are account managers for a very, very large company, like tens of thousands of employees. And we want only employees of this company and only the account managers of this company. Okay. And this is for a you know, higher end software as a service SAS product that starts at about a thousand dollars a month.
Okay. So we have very specific messaging for these people. Our, our first message was with the first attempt we did it. This was very much You know, Hey, I'm Blake. I mean, it wasn't sent for me, but Hey, I'm Blake and I'm the director of sales for this company. And I'd love to have a quick conversation with you.
Do you want to book a 15 minute chat and they can say yes or no. If they click, yes, it would open the Calendly link for this guy's calendar. We got very few message opens with them. And we, we, we have two problems. Very few message opens and number two, very few. Sends Kevin. And so our, our D our delivery just wasn't happening.
And so I had to dive into that and they don't have a lot of information as to why delivery isn't happening. But as you know, as a Facebook marketer, we've, we've bumped into delivery issues in the past. Right. So there's usually kind of two go-to methods. If you got to think, okay, delivery happens via an algorithm, and you're also bidding against others in an exchange.
If you have a smaller audience, sometimes the algorithm gets a little confused about how to, who to send it to how to bid your bid in an exchange when there's 10,000 other bitters.
[00:04:17] Greg Marshall: That was my first thought to adjust the bid.
[00:04:19] Blake Beus: Yeah. So, so. When you do conversation ads, LinkedIn tells you most advertisers are bidding this and this.
So you should bid in this range. And on this particular one, the LinkedIn said most advertisers are bidding 15 to 17 cents per send, okay. On this. And I like, cool. I'll just put it at the high range of that. Cause I don't care, whatever 15 or 17 did 15 we got like 6 cents and we spent. Less than a dollar and our budget wasn't high, but it was $25 a day and we spent less than a dollar a day.
Got it. So. Then I adjusted the bid to 25 cents. I'm like, okay, we'll go over same result. Okay. So then I adjusted the bid. I'm just like super high and it wasn't even that high. I went to 50 cents and then it actually started delivering one. I went 50 cents. So the first thing I would say is maybe take the, their recommended bid into consideration, but it's probably not accurate.
[00:05:17] Greg Marshall: That's just, you know what, I've actually seen the same with a running Google. Particularly YouTube ads where if you don't bid high enough, it won't even deliver, particularly if you're trying to get like laser targeted. Right. So I found that I could stay within the cost per view that I. But I had to bid very high.
So at one point I was bidding $2, $2 per video view. Right. But then once it started delivering, I was getting at the number I want anyway, it's around 30 cents. So sometimes, you know, and, and that's, I actually learned this from me, but I don't even know why it does. Is there like a more in-depth explanation of like, I just know if it doesn't deliver, increase the bid.
I just know that, but I don't know really like the backend of why you need to do that. Yeah.
[00:06:06] Blake Beus: Well, well, there's, there's kind of two things. The first thing I want to say, so I don't forget about the reason you were bidding higher, but not having to pay that price is pretty much all of these exchanges and they literally are exchanges like the stock exchange, where people are buying and selling.
That's what we're doing. We're buying and selling eyeballs, right? How they price, how they price the model is you can bid whatever you want, but you're charged what the, basically the next highest bid was that you'd be wherever the market is. Right. And they do that, that you, you might be thinking, oh, that's great.
That's so nice of them to not charge me what I actually bid, but they do that because it incentivizes people to bid higher overall across, across the network. So they actually get Google, Facebook, whatever they actually. They get more money out of that because people are more willing to bid higher. Yup.
[00:06:51] Greg Marshall: And so then, so then what you wouldn't want to happen. So I see what you're saying. So. Google or anyone that's making the bid higher theoretically could get more out of can drive the price up just because you have to keep bidding higher. So the worst case scenario would be if there's too many people thinking like me just saying, well, I'll just bid it at like $2 to guarantee it goes up and there's too many people doing the same.
[00:07:14] Blake Beus: Now you're paying two at all. Yeah. Everybody's paying, but it does. It does because of the, how the market, you know, how that marketplace works. It does, self-correct a bit, if everybody's paying $2, I said, they're like, well, I'm shutting it down. So there, there is some self-correcting there, but you know, in general, if people are less afraid to bid higher amounts than across the board, across the entire exchange, Facebook, Google, whatever, they get a higher margin on that.
So that's the first. The second thing is with any sort of algorithm, whatever that's handling these complex things behind the scenes. And it really is complex. I mean, you have billions of viewers, millions of advertisers thousands of data points for targeting and bidding as part of that, you have all of these.
Knobs. If you want to think about them, that that are dialed and tweaked to to make your bid more, you know, aggressive or whatever. And you know this with Facebook and Google, the higher, your quality score, meaning the higher they deem your ad, an offer and everything relevant to the person. The more aggressive your bid is in the exchange.
Even if the cost is lower. Yup. Right. Because they want to keep people happy as well. So there's all these different things. But the biggest knob is always bidding price. So if you're willing to push something through, with a lot of money that will basically kind of short circuit, a lot of the other things and kind of force your bid to be much more aggressive over top of everybody else's does that
[00:08:43] Greg Marshall: kind of like notifies that like a city.
To, to the algorithms essentially, or the platforms of this person really wants pretty much.
[00:08:52] Blake Beus: Yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you can say you do that and then your prices are too high. Well, you can actually bring your prices down by making your ads more relevant to. Specifically with Google, like the, the keyword search those ads seem to, you seem to be able to get much better price by having a much higher the quality score.
[00:09:11] Greg Marshall: Well, and I think too, like basically what they're trying to do is incentivize a perfect message to market match, right? So like, if you're targeting a certain key word, you want the message, whether that's a text or an image or video to match that keyword. Perfect. And the more perfectly. The better, they give you a higher ranking score, just because it's like, it's more relevant to the user.
And then, you know, that reduces the opportunity for people to get upset about the ad, right. Or having a negative user experience. That's what you're saying.
[00:09:46] Blake Beus: Right. That's exactly what I'm saying. Cause if you, if you, I mean, if you think about. All of these platforms. They want people to be happy with their platform.
If people stop being happy with their platform, then they go somewhere else because there's other places to watch videos. There's other places to engage on social media. And so they want to keep people happy. So that's kind of, you know, a bit of a tangent about algorithms and how that stuff works.
But to bring us back to this conversation at the, the other thing we did after forcing delivery was we changed our initial message cat. And there's not a lot of information out there about what's working and what's not working. So how I actually did this is I just hopped on LinkedIn and just poked around until I started seeing these.
Pop message pop up and it started looking at what they did. And I started screenshotting those that I like, and know if you're not, if you don't have like a library of ads, you're like you're maybe a lazy marketer. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. Oh yeah.
[00:10:41] Greg Marshall: I've got swipe my phone where they come swipe out, but I screenshot anything that looks like amazing or I study, you know, if I see certain ads yeah.
Like they're most like if I, or if I'm seeing them a lot, then I know for sure
[00:10:54] Blake Beus: it's boring because there's like funny, like a
[00:10:57] Greg Marshall: boy that we talk
[00:10:58] Blake Beus: about every week. I never can remember his name, but if you go to his webpage, you will be followed everywhere.
[00:11:04] Greg Marshall: Yeah. I think he does a great job though. I think his ads are good.
I think his message is good. And I think w lyric Allera. Yeah. So nice little plug for Larry and Debbie, if you want to go ahead and check him out, he's pretty good.
[00:11:17] Blake Beus: My favorite out of his, you pointed this one out to me is one where he says. I'll bet you didn't expect to see here. Yes. He knows people are seeing him everywhere.
And so he's using that humor to manage people, but I think he does great, but yeah. So so we changed it instead of an introduction. We changed it to a simple question. And the question was, this is, this is kind of a more complicated Sales process. Right? Cause we have to make sure that this, the manager we're talking to is familiar with a couple of key terms and programs that they have available to them.
Because if, if they're newer or something, they may not even know what those programs are. And those programs are what allow my clients software to help them shine. And so we, instead of just introducing ourselves, we switched it to. Hey, do you use program name in as, as part of your strategy to help your, your clients and customers?
And it's yes or no. Got it. That question right there. Probably I think it almost tripled our open rates and it, and it, and it quadrupled our. Yeah, because people can click yes or no. Yes or no. And it's a much easier thing than saying, you know, right now information or budgets do book a call with me right now.
It's easier to click. Yes or no, and then engage. And then once they've done that, they're more likely to engage here. They're on. And if the, if they click, no, then we are on our next screen. We have a quick little explanation of what that program is. Even if it's, even though it's a program, their company has available to them.
They may not know what it is. You explained what. We link off to their own company's website with information about how to use it. And that website also shows my client as an official vendor that helps with one piece of that program. And then, and then we explain how. My client works with them to make them more successful by helping their clients be more successful.
But just the way I have to talk about this, you can see this as a much more complicated sales conversation to have with people. And you can't really do that with a banner ad. You can do it with a video app. You can't really do it with a banner ad, but the conversation ads are a great fit.
[00:13:25] Greg Marshall: So, so basically what you're saying is you're, you're using these messaging ads to drive Demand.
I saw some interesting on LinkedIn. I like following a couple of these guys on LinkedIn. In fact, let me, let me see. I'll give them a little shout out. Cause there's, this guy has been really nice to me and he's a CMOs somewhere. I think his name is I always forget, but I see him all the time, but anyways, he does a really good job of talking about this concept, him and people in his circle about demanding.
Generation. Have you heard about that?
[00:14:01] Blake Beus: I mean, I've heard, I understand the concept, but I haven't heard about that specific phrase. Well,
[00:14:05] Greg Marshall: they, they pretty much go into you know, demand generation, which is like you're at the top of the funnel, basically trying to create content and conversations about something that maybe the account managers or whatnot are not thinking about yet.
Right. So it's, it's actually trying to build that demand and get them to come. And I, I thought it's interesting you using this as a way to drive awareness to a problem that they may or may not realize I have is that. Safe to say, versus like bottom of the funnel where like they're ready to go. And they, they like know like my car is broken, so I know I need a new battery.
[00:14:40] Blake Beus: Yeah. It's it's exactly that. If you think about account managers, you know, there's 1800 of them in this particular company, you have account managers that are brand new. You have account managers that are seasoned. You have account managers that are lazy. Do you have account managers that are hard workers?
You have a camp managers that know a ton. You have account managers that just don't know any. Yep. Yep. Right. And, and so we have to basically kind of hand them these tools that they probably have heard about in some boring meetings somewhere about this particular program. And the program is essentially a list of approved vendors that are guaranteed to work with their systems guaranteed to help you know, they've been vetted, they're trustworthy, et cetera, et cetera.
It's a lengthy process, but they just may not know that. Got it. It just kind of reminds me of. Back in back in my college days, I was selling office equipment online over the phone or through theater. And there was like these two salespeople that every month consistently would crush it. And it would just absolutely destroy my sales, even though with one of them, I had been there at the company longer.
We started about two months apart. And within the first month he was, he was a number, number one or number two every month. And I was like four or five. Yeah. And he's thinking. Well, that's different. So I just started chatting with him and everything. And he had just, it was a simple little spreadsheet that he had set up that helped him keep track and follow up with people.
That's all it was. And I know how to use spreadsheets, but it was this tool when he showed me how to do it, I made some tweaks. So it worked a little bit better for the way I worked. And from then on out, we were competing for first and second. But this is the same type of thing. These account managers are trying to help their customers get new sales.
Things like that. And they may not know that there's a simple little tool or whatever. And this tool is really easy in that. All they really need to do is tell their customers, Hey, there's this other service out here that can help you fix these problems. And you know, it's, it starts at a thousand bucks a month.
And for some people that sounds like a ton, but for companies like this, A hell of a lot cheaper than hiring someone in-house to take care of that and paying the taxes and the insurance and everything. And it automates this very complicated part of their business.
[00:16:50] Greg Marshall: Well, plus the other thing is when, when you're talking about demand that demand generation educating different people, you know, within the space, you, you really do have to sometimes keep reminding people.
You use the, what am I saying? Two words is if I'm counting correctly, follow up, which you know, when, when you think about it follow-up is, is everything. And one thing that I think is very cool. We all think in like an everyone else's business, we understand, we need to see things like a million times before we buy it.
But when it comes around our business, we believe that people should only see it once right. Immediately. And we don't
[00:17:29] Blake Beus: want to annoy them or whatever. Right. And it's, and but it's silly. I mean, it's. I look at my own personal buying habits. I was just telling you today, I'm going to be replacing the battery on my laptop.
I looked at, this is like an urgent need, right? Like this isn't something that maybe I could have, or maybe I couldn't have, I need to fix it. And I spent a good hour looking at different options and researching different options and things for this one time, $100 purchase as opposed to. You know, we, we want to have, have one banner I'd go out or have one YouTube video go out and people should just buy right away right away, because it's me.
And it's my product. I'm the
[00:18:10] Greg Marshall: one spending the money. So therefore I need to return right away. It just, it doesn't work that way. And I think you know, the, it's really interesting to think where you're talking about, you know, you spend an hour or whatever. I just made a purchase. We're like, I basically just wasn't sure if I really wanted the product or not for, I don't even know, maybe six weeks and I probably have seen the ads and the content and whatever for, you know, two, three times a day.
Right. So think about that because the, the, the product that I purchased was something where it's like, I know that I might need it maybe, but maybe not. So I kind of. More information to go like, okay, yeah, this, this seems to make sense that I need it. But that's like almost how I buy anything. It's like, I have to be shown different things and, and to see like, do I truly need it?
Cause I, I know some people will just buy anything. One of them, one of my like biggest pet peeves is to do things or buy things that are unnecessary. Right, right. Like it's just in my mind, I don't know why I liked that, but that's like, yeah, I just. You know, Eric more towards that. So you don't have any buyers.
I'm sure. Buying that way. They're like, I, you know, I don't want to buy if it's not necessary. And so you need to follow up with them a lot, a lot. So I think with the LinkedIn messaging campaign, that's a great way to. Start having start the conversation.
[00:19:35] Blake Beus: Yes. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And, and it's a built-in messenger bot and you can do this with Facebook messenger ads, but you have to use a third-party tool like ManyChat.
And we've talked about that before. This is a bot built into LinkedIn. It's pretty easy to set up. Like you, you have a tree view where you can see like the yes-no answers and you can have up to five buttons on each message and they can go kind of in different directions or whatever. But if you have any sort of a message that's maybe just a little more complicated, it doesn't have to be a complicated message.
You could just send. Send a quick message about something, but it's a good way we can educate those people if they say yes, they know what it is, then we say super cool. Did you know that we're one of the newest members of this program and this is what we help out with. We have the best customer reviews.
You can click this button. Or you can look at 15 minute chat with our person. The interesting thing about this particular offer is, I mean, we've total because we have those delivery issues. Total. As of yesterday, we had spent an entire $12 on this ad. Right? Well, I don't
[00:20:38] Greg Marshall: want you to spend it too much.
Yeah. We only spent 10,
[00:20:41] Blake Beus: $12 on this ad. We've booked one call. With an account manager and an account manager with this particular company covers a region and they could have anywhere from about 20 to a hundred customers, that would be an ideal fit for software for the software. So if it, if, if those callers lean into just one.
Sale the ROI on $12 at a thousand dollars a month. And once they're on the system, they love it is insane. Yeah. And if we get, you know, 2, 3, 4 over time, the ROI is so high, it's almost in calculating, right. It's just
[00:21:17] Greg Marshall: nuts. Which, which is a problem you want to have, you want to have the problem if you cannot calculate how big the return is and that's, that's, that's big.
I think using the LinkedIn I'm definitely gonna have to try that out. Cause I've got a couple, a customers. They have a specific type of person that they want to get in front of. And and we use LinkedIn ads and we use, you know, base off job title, company, things of that nature, but we're not using the delivery system the message campaign, we're using a video, text image, you know, all of those.
And we just haven't used the message one and to be honest, it's really cause I'd never really thought to use it. Yeah. You know what I mean?
[00:21:56] Blake Beus: It's pretty, it's pretty crazy. Like on the, on the flip side of things with our Google search campaigns for the same client we are pretty happy when our cost per booked call is between two and $300.
So if we get a $12, so we got a $12 call with an account manager that has access to 20, to a hundred potential customers.
[00:22:16] Greg Marshall: That's, that's, that's a really massive,
[00:22:19] Blake Beus: massive difference. Right. And. So, yeah, it's, it's been a good fit for us. I'd never done it before. It took me maybe an afternoon to kind of figure it out.
I will say there's a couple of corks. I'll tell you some of the quirks of LinkedIn, these ads. Once you publish the ad or submit for review, you can. Any changes. Okay. Even if it gets rejected,
[00:22:44] Greg Marshall: so you can't even make a change and get rejected. So you have to relaunch a new one. You
[00:22:48] Blake Beus: have to, you have, you have to duplicate the ad, but here's the thing.
You, the duplication process is a little weird. Sometimes you can duplicate an ad and sometimes you can't, you simply can't duplicate one of these ads and put it in a different county. That's not doable. Wow. You just can't. So, so, and if you duplicate the entire campaign, which you can do, if you change the objective of the campaign, because that was the other thing.
Oh, that was the other thing we talked about to get delivery. We changed objectives. We went for leads. We changed for reach. So that was another thing that probably had something to do with it. But if you change, objective, it deletes all of your. Oh,
[00:23:27] Greg Marshall: really? Yeah.
[00:23:28] Blake Beus: So yeah. So start from fresh. Yeah. And these mess, these conversation ads, it's not just like, okay, fine.
I'll just copy and paste in the textile re upload the image it's it's
[00:23:38] Greg Marshall: is allowed for a longer form. Well thought
[00:23:40] Blake Beus: out. Yeah, because you have a, you have a flow, so you have to create step one, you have to cross over to do you have to create step, step one and two for people that click no. And or people that click it has.
And I'm just thinking to my. Like you don't want to do that 2, 3, 4, 5 times. Yeah. I'm a software engineer and I'm just thinking really LinkedIn, you can't just duplicate that. Like,
[00:24:03] Greg Marshall: what is, I wonder why
[00:24:05] Blake Beus: he can't, but I don't, I don't know. I don't know. And they don't ever answer why that, the other thing I'll tell you too, is they have an option to add a banner two 50 by 300 banner, which is similar to Google GDS.
In, in combination with your ad, they don't tell you where that's going to be placed. They don't give you a place to put a link. So that banner goes anywhere. And every time I've tried to submit a banner, they've rejected my ads, regardless of what the banner says, whatever it says, Hey, I went super generic on the banner.
I just put, we have great customer reviews. And that's a, and they rejected it. Well, I don't know what, I don't know
[00:24:42] Greg Marshall: what it is. You know, in fact, speaking of, I have a question because as soon as you said, I'm putting up a banner and you mentioned GDN, I'm actually curious on your thoughts on this, because I have a feeling I know your answer is, but I would like to hear it from, you know, the option where you have audience network.
Yeah. Where essentially it extends whatever your promotion. Outside of like the news feed or the feed of whatever platform. What are your thoughts on the quality of that traffic? Because it seems like if I target certain positions or, you know jobs or job titles, if I have audience network tab, check on.
Almost all of my traffic comes from there and it's always at a really low cost, but my I'm suspicious of how quality that traffic is. And where is it even actually showing?
[00:25:39] Blake Beus: Yeah. I, I mean, I've just always turned that off every time I've done it, it, it feels like I'm spending money and not getting anything returned is cheap traffic, but the, the actual results I get the actionable results, the lead, or whatever seems really low.
And I think a lot of people maybe don't know what audience networks. But you have, we talk about Facebook, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn. We've talked about Snapchat and Tik talk a bit, but there's all these other ad networks that people don't know about. Amazon has its own ad network. Taboola has an ad network there's 10 or 20 different mobile ad networks, mobile only ad networks.
And what those people do is. People don't think of them like ever, but they do have ad space and, and real estate carved out, out in the greater world. And so what they do then is they strike up a deal with Google or Facebook or whatever, and say, Hey, we want to be. We, we have, you know, a billion mobile devices you know, here's the demographics of them, whatever.
And so we want to become an authorized audience network person. And so Google essentially makes deal with them, whatever, and they pay them for that traffic. The. No one says this, my guess is that the targeting options are basically non-existent, it's just kind of a best guess because I'm guessing the data collection on those users is not is not the high quality that we get from like Facebook or Google or whatever.
So test it out, but I almost always end up turning it off and it seems like a waste the money every time. Yeah. It, it, it
[00:27:19] Greg Marshall: feels like that on every platform, to be honest, Because I do see, I do see ads, right? Like, no matter what, on other websites that I'm on, but usually it seems like the quality of the traffic is lower.
And one of the, I think, misleading things that you can see I've seen this heavily. If you don't exclude mobile apps on Google, you'll get cost per clicks that early achievement you'll think, oh man, this campaign is crap. But then you go into it and it's, it's on app. So you're like, is, is my customer really using these apps right.
As a bunch of like kid apps and stuff like that. So you have to like exclude those placements. And so that's usually what gives me a little bit of suspicion of like, when you open up the audience network, it seems like the. Is that I don't want to say fake, but the quality is just seems lower. Like they're clicking it, but they have no real interest.
It could be an accident because they're trying to like hurry up and get you
[00:28:23] Blake Beus: off the screen, basically. Yeah. And that's, you know, just talking about mobile apps and everything that is, in my opinion, the main reason you should always exclude mobile apps unless you're offering a mobile app offer. Because.
The way the app developers write things. They have quite a bit more flexibility because they're all programmers and they get paid per click. And so they do a lot of tricks to get clicks, but that doesn't mean it's a quality click. Plus if you're like me, there's a lot of times my kids are like, dad, can I play a game on your phone?
I'm like, sure, fine, whatever. And I hand them my phone. So now, now whoever's buying ads on that end game. They're targeting me. But it's my kid on his phone, click it, just click it because they don't know
[00:29:06] Greg Marshall: what is this?
[00:29:08] Blake Beus: And so, yeah. But, and that's maybe something we should dive in deep on, on that, on a separate podcast, if people have questions about that.
Absolutely. So, yeah, I guess we can just wrap that up right there. Yeah. We'll
[00:29:21] Greg Marshall: wrap it up there. I think that, you know, we went into the LinkedIn ads. I think, yeah, I think that's, that's definitely one that I know. People that are like in that B2B space will want to know, because like, you know, there's businesses where you have to like, like yours, like the software business, you gotta like reach out to a very specific person.
There's no real benefit to like targeting a lot of different people. Just want a laser targeted group. Yeah.
[00:29:48] Blake Beus: So, so yeah. Do we I'm thought about, oh, I haven't thought about this a lot. Do we want to do some sort of an outro where we cause a lot of podcasts, they just say, okay, well where can people reach it?
And that's just kind of how we end it instead of just like ending it. We did that kind of on our first one, but yeah, why don't we just, I can just cut this out. So let's just dive right into.
[00:30:06] Greg Marshall: So so Blake, where, where can we reach you at if they want more information on LinkedIn ads or back end tracking her or anything?
Your specialties?
[00:30:14] Blake Beus: Yeah. So you can just go to Blake boost.com. That's B E U S people mix the ear in the you up a lot. And you, you can catch me on Facebook at like use official Instagram at Blake boost. And and yeah, and then I also have a membership called SM three, which you can find on my website where if you want more targeted information about social media growth and marketing it's a community thing with trainings and courses and stuff.
But yeah, that's where I'm at right now.
[00:30:39] Greg Marshall: Yeah. And you can find me, my website is Greg marshall.co. So make sure you don't do Greg marshall.com someone else has that. Yeah. So go ahead and go to Greg marshall.co. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram. My Instagram handle is a motivation GM, and if you look up just Greg Morris or on YouTube, you'll be able to find my channel as well.
I put out videos on there pretty consistently. And yeah, if you ever need help with. Paid social media ads or your marketing strategy, feel free to book a free call. I do have that option on my website.
[00:31:09] Blake Beus: Cool. Thanks.
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[00:00:00] Greg Marshall: All right. So what, here's something that I run into quite often, which is always confusing to me. Um, why is this such a big deal? But because it, to me doesn't make any sense. Which is devaluing customers that have purchased from you before, or even family or friends who buy our stuff because they like your product.
So,
[00:00:26] Blake Beus: so you're saying like, and you've, you've run into this where a business businesses mostly just focused on getting brand new customers. Correct. And they kind of disregard existing
[00:00:36] Greg Marshall: customers. So, and here's why this mentality is dated. This is kind of like saying, well, because I have my wife or my husband who already loves me now, I'm going to go ahead and just like, it's not that valuable.
I care more about other people who might want to date me. And you can imagine where your relationship is going to go with that mentality. Right. It's probably not going to work out. It's not going to work out very well, but for. If you think about the biggest businesses in the world, they actually have a different mentality, which is let's use Amazon because everyone pretty much everyone uses it.
They have a massive business and everyone can agree with that. Now I'm willing to bet they spent more time on how do they get Greg to spend. $18,000 more this year than last year, then just only caring about, you know, Sally down the road to buy a new $2 products. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because all the money is getting Greg to spend $18,000.
It's not in the one-time purchase of $2. Most business owners view their business in the light of, oh, somehow getting new customers that, you know, there's like this, you know, doing the air quotes, you know, there's this exciting feeling of I'm getting people who are buying my stuff that I don't know who have never bought from me before I get that feeling.
And there's always this like overvaluing of that individual versus what about the person who's bothering me 82 times in a row keys by for why are they not so exciting anymore? They're the ones that are actually paying your bills out, the person that buys once and leaves. And so that's kind of a subject I want to talk about is, um, changing the mindset to a more well-rounded business approach, where your point of focus is more about getting your customers to buy more from you, stick around.
And because in my opinion, by focusing more on those customers, you get much greater referrals. And you can grow from within. And so not only do you maintain your profitability because it's a lot cheaper to get the same person to buy over and over again, but now you're getting them to sell for you to bring you more people who are going to convert much faster than someone who has never seen or heard of you before ever.
And so that's, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, as a, as a business owner yourself, do you, do you ever fall into that trap of like overvaluing the new customer? Well, almost like feeling like, ah, you know, I already have them though.
[00:03:22] Blake Beus: Yeah, absolutely. I've 100% fall fallen into that. Um, and uh, I mean, everybody knows you hear this all the time that the new brand new customers are way more expensive to acquire than your existing customers.
Uh, I think, I think it stems from a place of fear, right? So if you're a business owner, a small, small business owners is mostly what I work with, but I work with some larger clients as well that have investors and everything. This tends to be a little bit more prevalent in small business owners. Uh, it's based on fear, right?
They, they constantly are afraid and I'm speaking for myself as well, constantly afraid that you'll be looked at as a failure, or you're just going to be another failure story, right. That business that didn't work. And, um, and you're thinking, well, I've got to get new customers. I need more customers. I need new customers.
And. We all make really terrible decisions when we're making decisions out of fear. We've talked about that before. I'm confident. We'll talk about that again. But the entrepreneurial journey is very much about the mindset and I know that seems like we will kind of out there, you hear a lot of gurus talking about mindset and everything like that, and it doesn't have to be that way for you, but you have to realize that fear based decisions.
We'll exist for you. You will have those and no one's immune to those, but you don't make good decisions based on fear. And that's where like an account manager comes into play to tell you to like, hold, hold, hold your horse out, slow down. We're going to hang, hang tight for just a bit. And then, uh, Circle up and make some sort of logical decision based, based on the data we have.
I think one of the other things too, especially for business, maybe just starting out and just diving into ads, they might think that they don't have any other products or services that their existing customers will want. So it's maybe more of a practical concern. Yeah, that's, that's a good point. But I think that solvable, because you're your own business, you're writing your own rules, just make another product or service.
Right? Think what that is. Sit down, maybe talk with one of your customers about what is it that now that we're helping you. Like, is there anything else that's that you're struggling with or you're you want or whatever, and then make that next best product. That's where the real money is in the second, third, fourth
[00:05:36] Greg Marshall: products.
Yes, I, and here's the other thing too, like w w w I've actually found resistance from clients where you're like, We, we use this as you know, I'm going to use that word. He views in, uh, several episodes, a holistic approach, right? Where you're thinking, all right, well, if I want to make more profit than the most profitable people are the people that are already paying.
For whatever it is that I have. T-shirts if it's, you know, services, whatever those people have already demonstrated that they will get their credit card out and buy. And so it only makes sense, like you can essentially make money at will. If you just keep focusing on that list while simultaneously you can bring new people in your business.
I'm not saying never focus on that. What I'm saying. The right balance, in my opinion is acquisition is just, don't even bother looking at acquisition as a way to make money. Look at your current customer basis. That's the money that you're going to put in your pocket. So if you want to make more money in your pocket, focus more on.
And not as much just on acquisition,
[00:06:46] Blake Beus: right. And acquisition then becomes just an operational expense. Exactly. Right? Yep. Exactly. And it's not only shifting that mind frame, not only helps your business out, but it shifts the stress, anxiety or anxiety a little because you're not trying to make your most expensive marketing channel profitable.
[00:07:03] Greg Marshall: Exactly. And in my opinion, advertising, if used correctly is not. Really designed for that anyways. Right. You have to spend money to get the people to come in and you've got to convince a complete streets. So want to go ahead and, you know, get into your business, right. Start dating your business. And we know that takes time.
It takes effort. That takes money. That takes a lot of things. But once you actually have the people that are part of your list and they like what you have, assuming that they like what you have, um, you can get them to buy more and more and more. And that's where we're most businesses make their money. So I feel like.
By valuing actually your customer lists more and looking at acquisition as a way to just build that up is the, the real road to profiting. So if you want to make more profits, use that model, if you want to really stretch yourself. Try to make money only on acquisition and completely ignore. And that will get you not only stressed out, but it's going to make you like, not be able to sleep at night and you're going to lose a passion for your business.
And you're going to lose confidence in your business because you're, it's like, you're, you're setting yourself up for failure by only focusing on that. Right. And not focusing on like what you remember. You've also invested in these people already know. So like, Get your return, your return on investment.
You get a customer and he paid for them last year for 50 bucks, but they bought 10 times right. Between last year. And this year, your true return is actually. 20 40, 50, a hundred at your,
[00:08:46] Blake Beus: your lifetime Rolex, right? Like, and that's people, people need to think about that. Now, one things I'd like to shift gears a little bit and talk about specifics.
Okay. So we've talked about the concept. We've drilled that in. What does, what does that look like? Should like a small business, a big business. Yes. Uh, cause everybody's at a little bit of a different stage in their business. Yes.
[00:09:11] Greg Marshall: So what that looks like, I'm happy you asked it in that manner because this cause sometimes when I hear a podcast, cause I like listen to this.
I, I, I can't, I don't love, I won't say I can't say I, I don't love when I listen to, but I don't have any like, concrete, like, so what do I do? What does that mean? Like what actions do I take? So here's the action. The way I view folks on your customer is incorporating email marketing. Okay. Text message marketing.
Retargeting ads and any other way or form of communication that you can have with your current customer base, a Facebook group, you know, your own chat forum that you created online. Just look at it as how do I communicate with my customers more often on different channels and the number one objection that I get when it comes to this is I don't want to annoy my customer.
Or get them upset because I'm talking to somebody and here's, here's the news flash. All right. Um, you most likely won't because you're making the assumption that people are thinking about you all day long, which they're not right. They, you know, w we've got families, we've got businesses, we've got jobs, we've got responsibility.
We've got all these things that were already occupied at times.
[00:10:32] Blake Beus: Well, you, and they're also assuming that peoples they're consuming everything you put out there. Not like I don't consume every email I get from a person. I just, I just don't. And so I get to choose which ones I open and which ones I don't.
And therefore I kind of manage my own level of annoyance with very rarely am I annoyed by the emails I get, um, because I can just ignore them or I can unsubscribe them or, you know, if it's really that annoying I'll unsubscribe and that happens. I, you know, I get unsubscribed to every time I send out an email, that's fine.
Yeah. Um, people aren't consuming every single bit of content out there, but some people are slow laners and fast laners, right? They're ready to buy the slow laners takes them a few weeks, maybe a month to buy fast. Landers are ready to buy right now. Some people are in between. Some people prefer different communication channels, text, email ads, Facebook group, whatever.
Um, and, and. And then we got to give them those. I don't think it needs to be overwhelming though. Especially if you're a small business owner, maybe a solo business owner, whatever, trying to do all the things will burn you out and maybe pick a core two or three channels and try to do really well on those.
And
[00:11:43] Greg Marshall: here's, I'm happy you brought that up too, because I'm a firm believer in stacking, right? Meaning you start off let's, let's say you just start off with a retargeting ad to make it easy. Right. And then you go, all right, I'm going to add another channel. I'm going to add email. Right? So that list, and then when you get good at that and you, and it's systematic and number one burnout, a lot of times comes from.
Not getting the results you want, right? Like if you were doing sales calls and they were guaranteed to make you $10,000, every time you pick up the phone, I highly doubt anyone will get burnt out because you'll be making so many calls to get $10,000 that you want to get burnt. So a lot of it just has to do with, you're not seeing results, right?
So if you do one channel at a time and you start to build the confidence that you're getting the. It's a lot easier to add another channel without feeling burnt out. So yes, I agree. Do one at a time and stack on top of them versus trying to do them all right.
[00:12:38] Blake Beus: Yeah. And you can also repurpose content.
This is actually something I teach in my membership. Um, so let's say email email was one of these things for the longest time for me and my business, I was like, oh, I need a ride, an email. So I just wouldn't and, and, and I've hired copywriters to help me write emails and things, and that, that's actually a great way to go if you don't have time to write your emails.
Um, but recently I kind of relaunched one of my memberships and I was thinking, okay, I have this nice email list of very qualified people. I'm going to just dive into this email marketing thing myself and figure it out. And, um, here's the thing with email. I really. It doesn't have to be a long email. No, it could be like, it could be four sentences.
Yes. It could be four sentences and it could work or it could be a paragraph if you're feeling like extra
Um, but it really, once you sit down and kind of get over the mental hurdles, you can send an email out to your list every day. And like 10 minutes and it doesn't have to be super salesy. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to have the perfect headline. It's more important that you're communicating and you're offering value.
But with repurposing, once I've written that email, I can just dump that same content into a social media post. And you might be thinking, oh my gosh, people are going to see both. Yeah. So most people won't, but if they do, is that, that big of a deal? It's not because they're consuming all sorts of other content.
That's,
[00:14:07] Greg Marshall: you know, That is funny. Cause that's another objection that you have is like, well, I already created this video and didn't everyone already see it already. And it's like, do you remember? I mean, I got people that I follow religiously a lot. Okay. I love their content and I don't remember what they posted last week.
No, versus today, first couple of hours, because we've got so much content coming at us that the memory is going to be so low. That you should never worry about, well, they are a made this video, so I can't use it again. And instead you should view it as well. And how many times we've done this, you see there's videos that I've watched or articles that I've read or books or movies that I've watched them 2, 3, 4 to get a deeper understanding of.
Right. And so there's value in like, yeah, it's the same video, but if I watched it five times, The fifth time I'm going to receive a different piece of value versus the first time I watched it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I think, you know, being afraid that, well I've already did this, or I prayed to that. Aren't people gonna really, once again, it comes back down to fear, right?
Everything is driven by fear. I don't want people to get mad at me. I don't want people to get upset and here's a very unpopular opinion that I'm going to share. You're doing it right? If people are either a making fun of you or be saying something that you know, is, is less than nice to you. Right. And the reason for that is because, you know, you're getting enough consistency that people are seeing it consistently.
If they don't see you consistent. You're going to get inconsistent results, any consistent results equals and inconsistent business that doesn't last very long. So you have to look at it as I'm going to do. Forever. And I'm just going to keep doing it and that there's no end to this. There's no, like I hit a finish line.
It's just, it's part of the,
[00:16:10] Blake Beus: yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm going to piggyback on Greg's unpopular opinion and share a popular opinion in that. Uh, I, I'm confident everybody's sick of politics, the politicians, and I don't want to like get into politics and political views, but one thing I do look at. Um, is how politicians market.
Yes, they have, uh, they have some of the best and highest paid marketers on staff always. And so watching their marketing strategies can be very valuable. But if you notice, uh, you, you sign up for any high ranking, uh, Political figures, email lists, you get an email consistently. It might be every day. It might be every two or three days, but you're getting those emails.
They work it's because they work. Um, and, and the, a lot of those emails have a very direct call to action, make sure to donate to my campaign, which is another thing, a lot of. Clients are hesitant with, they don't want to make a call to action on every email because they don't want to annoy people. And, uh, but here's the thing, these political emails that they do and they work and in one of my recent clients, I helped them build out a 90 day, drip, drip email sequence.
So someone signs up and for the next 90 days, they get three emails a week and they were super worried. They're like, we're going to annoy these people or whatever. I only want to put maybe one call to action in a week, you know? Cause I. Let let's let's middle ground. Let's put a PS call to action on the value-based emails and then put a call to action on the others.
And they're booked calls for demos. Went through the roof. They just weren't leveraging these email sequences. Well,
[00:17:52] Greg Marshall: I have to share this with you. Let's do it again. So you just said something that I convinced this one camp. To do this and their sales have PRI I don't know the percentage, but I bet you it's like a thousand percent and I'm, and I'm dead serious.
Um, we send, and we measure this. This is part of our holistic marketing system. We send 23 emails a month, every month. They used to only send one. Okay. We sent 23 emails and we have measured this now for months, almost six months now. And we have seen an unbelievable increase. In fact, they've had their busiest months and their history in the last three months when the last three months seasonally is the slowest.
Oh, interesting. Okay. So think about that. Their biggest. Have happened during the slowest season of the year, three months in a row. So it wasn't a flute and all we've done was increased our emails to 23 emails a month. And when I first proposed this idea to the business, they basically laughed me out of the room saying this ain't going to work and people are unsubscribed, but we'll try it.
But now they see that at work. They're trying to incorporate more even so that right there should show. If you're looking we're into, if you think about why you're in this, you're in this to grow your business, right. You're not in this to just be popular. Okay. It might be more popular and quote unquote, cool to sometimes email your list and not that much and play cool that way.
But if you're in the grow your business, The example I always use is bath and body works. My wife gets an email for them, like three times a day. So you can imagine how much money she spent on a bathroom. If, if they can do it. See, here's the thing we can't allow as business owners, we can't allow our own egos to get in the way and believe.
That people need to hear from us once, but these large corporations they're being seen all the time. Right? What makes us think that our marketing and our business is anywhere near as influentials is apples and Coca Cola. And all the other guy goes somewhere that we're not anywhere near. No. So we have to understand, like, there's a reason why they're doing it because it
[00:20:26] Blake Beus: works.
It totally works. And it could come from, uh, you know, on the flip side of ego, it could come from like a point of insecurity, too. Sure. Right. Like, uh, I, I see that a lot. I'll, I'm honest with it. I feel imposter syndrome, which we could talk about later. All the time, all the time. It's been very much a part of my professional career.
Uh, but there are times that you're just like, well, my product's not good enough or my business not good enough, so I'm not going to sell it or I'm just, or even, I'm just trying to milk my email list for money. Well, here's the thing. If you have a, if you have a, you know, something that adds value. People want more of that because you're solving a problem where you're giving them, giving them something that they want.
You're not milking the list. You're not raking people over the coals. You're not taking, you're giving. Yup. You're, you're giving and you're helping. And that's what it is. Even if you're even if your product is, is, is something, uh, silly, like, uh, the worst example ever. But it's what comes to mind is those truck nuts.
Okay. The guy that came up with those, some guy based in Utah and in the first year he did like a million dollars. Silly product crazy. I don't own them. I never will own them, but there were people that loved them. Yup. Yup. And it wasn't taking advantage of people. He was offering a product that people, that people loved, they wanted it, they thought it was hilarious and he bought
[00:21:47] Greg Marshall: it and they bought it.
Yeah. Well, and I think to, to go back to the, to the egos thing, cause you're told that's a fair point. It could also be the opposite, right. Fear of just, you know, looking bad or not, you know, not having a good product, et cetera. I use the ego, um, angle, because I literally have had business owners say, everyone knows who we are.
And I remember thinking like, whoa, like who. Okay. If I asked that lady across the street, if she knows who you are, she will she now. And so it's like, you know, there's
two,
[00:22:24] Blake Beus: before you reached out to me to help you with this, I had never heard of your business before. So as sample size of one, you see what I mean?
That's not
[00:22:32] Greg Marshall: true. That's funny. So, so you look at it from both sides, but there's a commonality in both sides, which is.
[00:22:40] Blake Beus: And our mind, uh, and, and, uh, it's time to get over it. Yeah.
[00:22:44] Greg Marshall: Where's the, and we're the ones causing the very, very, the irony is the very issue you want to get rid of you're causing it. Yeah, totally.
And when I say you're meaning me too, like we're all causing our own problems. We just need to get out of our own way. Right. There's a book called isn't it
[00:23:04] Blake Beus: probably. Okay. So I do want to talk about specifics before we wrap up and we didn't talk about specifics. We talked about email lists. We've talked about frequency of emailing, uh, text messaging.
There's lots of, lots of ways to handle that. There's lots, there's lots more rules surrounding what you can can text and how you can gather that text, phone number and stuff. So, uh, but if you sign up with a legitimate text messaging, marketing service, I know my email and some email lists are now starting to add this.
My email provider, drip.com has a text component to it. So I could just gather that. Uh, and they make sure all the requirements are met. Uh, but there's some others out there. Have you worked with any specific platforms that people could use? Because I get asked this question a lot, because this is feels like new for a lot of people.
Well, I've
[00:23:45] Greg Marshall: used easy texting.com is good. So if they want to go ahead and sponsor us as great, the other one is a, I always say this wrong, but, uh, Klaviyo or Clavio. Okay. That's another text. My sisters where you can implement both. They do email. Yeah. Email and texts. Yeah. Um, The way, you know, you, there are different rules of text messaging, right?
So you have to have the opt-in. Um, so there, especially Cleveland's very strict on this. Um, they have to consent that they're willing to be on the list. Um, but you could build. Uh, text messages often form just like you do email with great success. We've had, um, similar opt-in rates with text minutes, which has actually surprised me because I thought people would be a little more guarded, but with text message and email
[00:24:32] Blake Beus: opt-ins interesting.
I didn't know that I thought, I didn't think it would be the similar opt-out.
[00:24:37] Greg Marshall: And I was surprised because I thought people would guard their phone numbers a little bit more, but, and maybe it's the one variable that could be is just the offer. Like maybe the offer we're giving them is like, Hey, you know, we're going to give you 50% off.
If you give us your phone number for text for texts. And so maybe it's just the offer that's causing an interesting, that's something definitely that you should test is just to see what causes a greater Optum. But I think texting. You don't want to get crazy with it. Right. So, so that's one platform where I would recommend, you know, once a week, probably maximum twice.
[00:25:12] Blake Beus: You got to understand though, the open rates on text massages are like 90 to 95%. Were the open rates on a good email list with good headlines is about 20 to 30. Yes. So, um, even though you're only texting once a week, almost everybody in enlist is going to
[00:25:28] Greg Marshall: see it. And I've, I've had examples, uh, with clients.
They send out a text message and within minutes, so thousand $2,000 worth of product, really. And when I say minutes, I'm talking like the text messages went out, we checked eight minutes later. And we add a thousand dollars on sale. Wow. And that's very common. And the, and the text messages, this wasn't even that big.
It was like 2000 people. Really? Yeah. So it wasn't like they had like 10,000 phone numbers. It's literally like 2000 people on this list and that's what happened in return. So what that tells you is messaging matters. And if you can reach the person. You will get better results, which text message allows you to reach them more effectively.
Right? Because you're literally getting just as many clicks as you wouldn't email with like one 10th, the size, because of the open rate of huge and people are on their phones. So they see something that's compelling. They will click it right there and take
[00:26:30] Blake Beus: a look at it. I mean, I literally every single text I get, even if I, if, even if it's spam.
Yeah. I open it to like mark it as spam or something. I open every. So,
[00:26:40] Greg Marshall: yeah. So I think to kind of wrap this up, what do you got Blake?
[00:26:43] Blake Beus: Well, I was going to, I was going to go down to, well, probably just one small tangent of some nonconventional ways to communicate with your customers and ways people don't think about that.
I've seen work, uh, that you just have to be a little creative with. So, uh, the first one, and this is probably the most common one is messenger bots. Is probably the most popular one. You have to get people to opt into that list. Um, but many chat is, is a good way to communicate with people via chat bot. Uh, if you want a more organic way I've seen, I've seen people use telegram that, that have you seen that I use it.
You can create. Groups. That's like a one-way communication and you can have people subscribe to that group and you can communicate and send out like a daily motivation reminder.
[00:27:26] Greg Marshall: So I think what's interesting is I use that app with clients personally on a one-to-one. I didn't even know you can do that.
[00:27:31] Blake Beus: You can do groups and it doesn't cost you. People, and you can actually create a little, just a single link to subscribe to the group. It doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't cost them anything. And you can send out this, this one to many kinds of group message. Um, and it's not, they can't necessarily message you back.
So it feels a little bit like a text or like the email. I mean, they can email you back, but, but it's this one, one way kind of communication, but it's a way you can keep in touch with people. Uh, you talked about Facebook groups. That's a good way to do it. I personally hate Facebook. A lot of people. They just don't work for me because face Facebook, I don't know.
My feed is just full of crazy distractions, distractions, but I've seen a lot of people use that with great success. So if you're more, um, not dedicated, but if you're less distracted than I am, uh, then, then go for that. And then I've seen people use slack groups. Have you ever used slack? I've used
[00:28:21] Greg Marshall: slack minimally.
So. But I do know of clients that use slack, particularly just within their own, like, you know, the business, right. They've got different departments and they've got plans and stuff like that. That in Trello, those are like two ones. People use, but I haven't used
[00:28:37] Blake Beus: it. And so you can set up slack for free. Uh, it has, uh, some limitations, but it's pretty capable and you can have up to, I think, 500 people in there, but it's, it's a chat application where it's a lot of like collaboration and things, but I've seen people use that, uh, in lieu of like a Facebook group or something that gives you that kind of, that kind of communication.
Um, so that's, that's been another. When I've seen people use, and then there's like these one-off platforms, I'm actually using one right now called circle. That is kind of like a social media clone a little bit. And it's where I host my paid membership. But you can, you can host free memberships and things inside of that as well.
But there are several other platforms out there like that, that, uh, people are used to using as well. So I just thought I'd throw out some of these other nonconventional options that you can use to communicate and connect with your ideal, you know, with your customers and. You know,
[00:29:31] Greg Marshall: make things happen well, that's, you know, so if you pick anything up from today, it should be, you should love your customers who work with you and value them very highly.
And you should communicate with them in as many different ways as possible, just because any valuable relationship that you have, you probably talked to them on Facebook and Instagram and on the phone and in person and all these different ways. That's how you build more. Uh, relationship. Right. And so you almost want to mimic that with your customers and use all the tools and different ways to keep communicating with them because yes, they are valuable
[00:30:11] Blake Beus: and yeah.
And, and we've talked about attribution and everything before some of these marketing channels, you have no way to. Attribute sales to those, but they work. And so it's just one of those things. The more you do it, it's like content marketing, right? If you have a blog or whatever, the more you do it, the faster you grow, it just, it just does.
You just need to connect with people and don't worry about trying to measure it or whatever. Just, just hop in there and do it. And if people are finding value, then it's going to be.
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[00:00:00] Blake Beus: Let's talk about Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Instagram,
[00:00:04] Greg Marshall: WhatsApp, anything
[00:00:06] Blake Beus: that Facebook owns, basically everything like their employees couldn't even badge in to the building. I did
[00:00:11] Greg Marshall: read that. What do you think.
[00:00:14] Blake Beus: Sure it makes it really hard to troubleshoot a problem. If you can't get into the building to fix the problem, I just thought
[00:00:19] Greg Marshall: it was crazy.
[00:00:19] Greg Marshall: Cause uh, they had that, uh, like, no, I messaged you yesterday. I remember. And I was like, that's crazy. The coincidence of this all happened the day after. I guess they had that 60 minutes, like employ come out and say that there was a funny. Yeah. Yeah, I guess not so great things. So
[00:00:38] Blake Beus: I, I actually had a few people reach out to me and say, oh, Hey, is this like, are they wiping their records and everything?
[00:00:46] Blake Beus: And. No just, no, this is purely coincidental. It's not, there's, there's too many backups of everything. Everything there's too many employees there that know everything they're not going in and cleaning up data or whatever. The 60 minutes interview was interesting. I actually listened to the whole thing, but it was interesting.
[00:01:07] Blake Beus: I do think that person's telling the truth. There's, there's probably some stuff going on there, but
[00:01:12] Greg Marshall: it's just, I think it's just too hard. Like one of the things, I guess, you know, an unpopular opinion would be at some level, I have sympathy for some of these, uh, CEOs and founders of these programs, because they're, I mean, imagine trying to manage.
[00:01:31] Greg Marshall: This type of, uh, I mean, you got over 2 billion people using the platform and most, most people can't even manage their own household. Let alone 2 billion people.
[00:01:41] Blake Beus: I can't manage my house. There's six of us. I can't manage. Yeah.
[00:01:46] Greg Marshall: And so it's, it's, it's, it's a very challenging task to have to go, you know, essentially manage 2 billion people, make sure everyone behaves in their best interest and you don't have any.
[00:01:57] Greg Marshall: You know, like, uh, personal biases, right? I mean, that's, that's just super challenging.
[00:02:02] Blake Beus: So in, in incredibly incredibly challenging. So, so, uh, but yeah, I mean, do we want to dive into the technical technical bits of it, or do you want to, do we want to talk about the impact on people or impact on advertisers?
[00:02:16] Blake Beus: Like what do we want to talk about?
[00:02:17] Greg Marshall: Basically the biggest thing we want to, uh, bring up in this, you know, shorter episode. Um, making sure that you're diversified and just multiple channels and understanding that each platform does have its value, but that you always need to understand what that value is, which is you don't own it.
[00:02:38] Greg Marshall: And we don't own a lot of things, but because you don't own it, you have to treat it as if one day can be taken away.
[00:02:45] Blake Beus: Yeah, and this is, this is why, uh, email platforms are so, so, so important and you might be thinking, okay, well, the email platform could, could go offline or whatever. That's, that's true. But email is a very old technology.
[00:03:00] Blake Beus: It's been around for a long, long, long time. And you can pull your own email address and back it up into like a, you know, an Excel spreadsheet or whatever. So you can always have your own copy of that information, but you have a way to communicate with your, your customers or followers or. In the event of some sort of large, uh, large breakdown or something that can impact things.
[00:03:20] Blake Beus: And that breakdown doesn't necessarily have to be a breakdown. It could be a change in the way Facebook does business or Instagram does business or changing a law or something like that, that can, that can deeply impact your business or. Or a change in, uh, Apple's terms and conditions make it difficult to, to, uh, your
[00:03:39] Greg Marshall: altruistic change.
[00:03:41] Greg Marshall: I really I'm happy that they care so much about my privacy, that they've teased them, but, you know, but here's, here's the thing, the advice that I would give to everyone, and I, I believe both you and I follow this right. Which is always understand nothing is forever. Things change. You always have to evolve and diversify as much as possible.
[00:04:04] Greg Marshall: And this is more, this isn't just about a Facebook thing or a Google thing, or an email thing. This is about in general, right? Because anything can be taken. You have to treat each platform like it can be taken away at some point, therefore making sure that you have a full-out system when it comes to marketing and running your business, you have to make sure your.
[00:04:27] Greg Marshall: Uh, multiple channels for, uh, acquisition for awareness. Um, you have to have backups to, you know, your customer list, your email that you just it's just in your best interest to make sure you're diversified. So let's say if two platforms go down, you still have another one to, to, to work with the likelihood that every single one of them goes down all at the same time is very low.
[00:04:49] Greg Marshall: Um, and I mean, and it is possible of course. Just give yourself the opportunity to not panic, because I saw a lot of people panicking yesterday, especially businesses for, for every right. You know, it's just like, if someone just basically shut your business down. Yeah.
[00:05:08] Blake Beus: And I'd like to add to that. The likelihood of all of them going down at once is very low.
[00:05:12] Blake Beus: The likelihood of one of them going down at some point in time in the future is almost certain very right. Like it's very, certainly the likelihood of one, one platform going down. Um, and, uh, so you definitely want to diversify and just diversify your business in general. I mean, when I was at working in the, uh, the financial industry, we had what we call disaster recovery protocols, and we would kind of test those out from time to time.
[00:05:35] Blake Beus: That's an enterprise level solution, but your business should have some sort of dash disaster recovery plan. Like, okay, I backed up the contacts or I have some offline data surrounding my orders, or I have ways to communicate with people if, if social media is down or
[00:05:49] Greg Marshall: whatever. So yeah, I think this is, this is a good, um, I, I don't want to call it a wake up call, but this is just a good demonstration of if you, if you're using platforms and almost.
[00:06:02] Greg Marshall: I'll just throw this word in there. If you're almost lazy building your business, right? Because we are spoiled. We do have access to so much data and so much, so many algorithms I can do most of the heavy lifting for us that we forget that you have to, in order to be a long-term business owner, you have to be thinking about.
[00:06:21] Greg Marshall: Well, if things shift or move, how will I move my business with it so that I don't have to like completely shut the doors. And that's, it's a scary thought. You never, you never want to do that. Thinking of like, what if this. Uh, but the reality is you have to, because once upon a time, um, you know, there was other marketing platforms and, and they just got con laws changed and they just, you can do many more, you know, the infomercial stuff changed back in the day.
[00:06:50] Greg Marshall: There's different platforms that changed back in it. Where it literally made it like impossible for you to do these marketing channels. And so you have to just be able to evolve
[00:07:00] Blake Beus: quickly. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we'll, uh, we'll wrap it up there, but we want to take a quick minute to, uh, to chat about what happened yesterday.
[00:07:09] Blake Beus: And, uh, how can impact people and we'll probably have a lot more episodes on diversification. I can even talk about the nitty gritty if, if people are interested on how to have a disaster recovery plan for your website, because a lot of people don't
[00:07:23] Greg Marshall: get that's, that's a great topic. And I think, you know, what we should do is if you need help with a lot of the backend stuff, Blake is really skilled.
[00:07:33] Greg Marshall: And that, that area, where, where should they go?
[00:07:36] Blake Beus: Just go to blink boost.com and you can contact me. I have a form on that side or a couple different ways you can reach out to me.
[00:07:41] Greg Marshall: And if, if you need help with your, uh, diversification of advertising or basically distributing. Uh, you know, visit my website, Greg marshall.co.
[00:07:50] Greg Marshall: And so yeah, if you guys need any help, I'm sure we'll put together some type of a plan or, uh, offerings that we can do that people can take advantage of. So be on the lookout for that. And, uh, thanks a lot for listening today and, uh, we'll see you next time. Can I talk to you
[00:08:05] Blake Beus: later?
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How do you know which ads and campaigns are working and which are duds. It's harder than you think, but we're going to clear the air once and for all...until they change it all again.
Reach out:
Blake Beus
Greg Marshall
[00:00:00] Blake Beus: Hi, I'm Blake Beus. And I'm your marketing technology Maestro.
[00:00:06] Greg Marshall: Hey, I'm Greg Marshall. I'm your social media marketing strategist.
[00:00:10] Blake Beus: And this is the modern marketers podcast.
[00:00:17] Greg Marshall: All right, well, uh, you know, Blake, I've got quite a few questions that, you know, I want to ask you because this is, you know, down your wheelhouse. This is your expertise right here. All right. Uh, one of the things that I want to talk about is attribution and tracking and what ad platforms are giving you and you know, just how that works.
[00:00:36] Greg Marshall: So my first question, um, is what is, what, explain the differences on attribution, meaning first, give us the definition of attribution for people who don't know. And then yeah.
[00:00:47] Blake Beus: Yeah. I mean, every attribution answers the question, which ads campaign. Audiences got you the conversion. So the sale, the lead, whatever.
[00:00:58] Blake Beus: And this is a question that basically, I mean, every business owner asks me this, every single one. Okay. Which one worked. Yep. And that's what attribution tries to solve. And it sounds like it would be a super simple thing, but it's pretty complicated.
[00:01:13] Greg Marshall: So, all right. And, well, this is a topic that I really want to go deep and because I think this will help out a lot of business owners, particularly with.
[00:01:22] Greg Marshall: So number one, can attribution be inaccurate on Facebook? Google, Instagram, YouTube, you name it?
[00:01:31] Blake Beus: I will take, I tell you right now, attribution will always be an accurate, there's never a time. It's not an accurate. Because that's a loaded, it's insanely complicated. It's there's so many little, just from a tech perspective, little networking glitches that could prevent, um, an attribution perhaps from happening there.
[00:01:53] Blake Beus: So someone could have an ad blocker or the wifi could drop right at the instant things. Uh, you know, that little packet gets sent off to include the attribution or the data could get grew up corrupted. A lot of people don't think about this stuff because we have a lot of. Error handling built into web browsers and everything, but behind the scenes, mistakes happen constantly, constantly all the time.
[00:02:16] Blake Beus: So that's the technical side of thing. The non-technical side of things is, um, is sometimes Facebook doesn't know enough about the person who made that made that purchase. So they can't correctly after they know a purchase happened, but they can't tie it back to a specific person. Or you bumped into what apple just did with iOS 14.
[00:02:35] Blake Beus: And they're, they're blocking tracking of certain things, which is a preventing Facebook from, uh, and Google and some of these others making more complicated to get correct attribution to, you know, whichever ad the ad set, whatever
[00:02:48] Greg Marshall: targeting God. So what about this? So here's the other question that I think will help a lot of people who are in particularly e-commerce, but even Allegiant.
[00:02:59] Greg Marshall: So. When you have attribution, not all attribution is the same. Most of these platforms are doing what you call last click attribution. Right? Right. So explain, explain what that means. Okay.
[00:03:14] Blake Beus: So, and this is where it all, it gets so complicated. It sounds easy, but it gets so complicated is essentially. Most of the time someone makes a purchase.
[00:03:23] Blake Beus: Let's just use that as our conversion objective. Uh, they've seen that ad multiple times. They probably even clicked on that ad multiple times. People don't oftentimes make an impulse purchase. Very
[00:03:33] Greg Marshall: rarely. Now we know by immediately when you see it.
[00:03:39] Blake Beus: I guarantee you, everybody listening to this right now has been to Amazon and has read reviews for way longer than you should have 30 minutes to an hour to decide which $10 item to purchase.
[00:03:51] Blake Beus: I guarantee you you've done that. Now. Think if, think about it. Now, if you're trying to get someone to go off of Amazon and make a purchase on your website that maybe they've never purchased on before. It's going to take multiple interactions with that ad for them to feel comfortable making that purchase.
[00:04:07] Blake Beus: Uh, and so last click essentially says, okay, the last ad was clicked on, even though we know we clicked on these 10 other ads, the last one is the ad. We're going to give the attribution to and say, that's the one that made the sale.
[00:04:19] Greg Marshall: So let me, let me ask you this. So I, I feel like I know the answer to this, but I think it'd be good to go ahead and explain it more than.
[00:04:28] Greg Marshall: So his last click attribution, the most accurate and best way to view what you're doing as far as advertising?
[00:04:36] Blake Beus: Uh, no. Well, and the answer is always, it depends though, too, right? Because it really depends on what metrics are most important. Um, but the problem with last click and this problem exists on different ways to handle attribution, but the, uh, the problem with last click is that.
[00:04:54] Blake Beus: Uh, you are, you will be tempted then to shut off all the ads that weren't performing. And, but those ads may have been the ads that warmed up everybody to it. So then you see a performance decrease because all the ads that didn't get at, you know, that conversion objective, uh, you turned them off, but then your conversion objective starts tanking and you're thinking, why?
[00:05:18] Greg Marshall: I'm using the ad. That was core alone getting all of the conversions. So here's, here's something that I try to explain to clients. And sometimes it's obviously it's challenging and I understand why they're thinking this way, because it's logical, right? You would say, well, if one ad is getting me a 10 X, my money and the other four ads are getting me zero, I should shut the other ones.
[00:05:37] Greg Marshall: And only focus on the one that's going to be 10. The problem with that is the last click attribution only gives credit to the last ad that was clicked. For example, I'm a perfect example of this. I like to watch boxing and I like to watch MMA and I have never actually clicked and bought from the YouTube ad that's being served to me or the Facebook ad that's being served to me and bought the pay-per-view.
[00:06:03] Greg Marshall: Never not. But those ads made me go to my TV and actually buy it. And this is why look at last click attribution is challenging because you have to take into account. Each touch point has influenced you to create the action. So. Technically in their ad accounts, the, the boxing and UFC and all that, and their ad accounts.
[00:06:29] Greg Marshall: I'm not going to show up as a last click attribution on their ads, even though I converted off of the very ad they showed me. So if they're not using a high level, um, tracking mindset, or even maybe just a more relaxed tracking mindset, they could be shutting off ads that are actually working.
[00:06:48] Blake Beus: Yeah. I like to think of it as a, I like the more relaxed.
[00:06:51] Blake Beus: Uh, holistic. Yeah, like a holistic thing. And. Some advertisers use. Cause when we start talking about numbers and metrics, if you, if you're running ads for a company, they want to know these numbers and metrics and you, you kind of need to deliver something so they can feel like they're getting their money's worth out of your services and everything.
[00:07:08] Blake Beus: Um, but if for people call it a blended return on ad spend, and so what they talk, they, they look at the whole account, how much we spent on the whole account and how much we made on the whole account. And then the return on that is, you know, two X, three X, whatever, even though some of the campaigns are getting a zero return on that ad.
[00:07:25] Blake Beus: Um, and so here's, here's the question for you? What, what would you recommend if, if you have a bunch of campaigns, one is getting like a 10 X row as the others are getting zero. Uh, I know there's tons of variables here, but instead of just turning them off, like, what would you do with a particular?
[00:07:43] Greg Marshall: I actually, it's funny you ask this because I actually have a client right now that is, is, is growing exponentially because we're using this approach.
[00:07:54] Greg Marshall: My personal approach and I'd use this on my business as well. So this isn't just like, cause it makes my job easier. It's literally like the, in my, in my mind, the correct way to view it, view it as everything that you're doing is actually impacting your result. For example, if you're working out to get in shape, would you just say, well, the reason why I have a second.
[00:08:17] Greg Marshall: Is because the 10 crunches I'm doing and the nutrition has nothing to do with it and my sleep and the other exercise. You wouldn't shut everything else off just because you believe only one has given you a certain return. Right? Right. It's the same with the ads. I believe every ad and every touch point should be viewed as like a stacking mechanism.
[00:08:38] Greg Marshall: Meaning they're all influencing each. And so if you take one of those out, you're now getting less influenced, therefore not being able to get the 10 X row as on a certain campaign. So by eliminating the rest of them, you actually will take away from the one that's actually working because they are impacting it.
[00:08:58] Greg Marshall: So the way I view it as if what I'm spending is the number that I need to spend, and I'm making a certain revenue, I touch. And go and add to it. So I, I do not get too emotional with looking at the result and saying, oh, because this particular campaign doesn't have a six return Aspen, it's got a zero. It has no value false.
[00:09:24] Greg Marshall: Right. It's adding a valley because every impression, every experience. Is impacting the other campaigns that are working. Yeah.
[00:09:32] Blake Beus: Yeah. And, and it could be, it could be that, that campaign. And you can, you can dive in and look at some specific numbers, but it could be that campaign is getting you insanely cheap cost per clicks, which then are getting scooped up in your retargeting campaigns, which, which decreases, it increases the size of your retargeting audiences.
[00:09:49] Blake Beus: And decreases the probably cost per purchase on your retargeting campaign. Exactly. Right. And so you can dive in and kind of look at some of those metrics, but sometimes you just have to take a big step back and look at the, the whole playing field and say, is this working? Yeah. Is the system, is the system working?
[00:10:05] Blake Beus: Uh, and then just kind of run with that even though each individual part
[00:10:10] Greg Marshall: isn't. Well, here's the thing we, I feel like we've probably. We're so spoiled and being able to track things right. That I know we, we become. And if you think about tracking, right, if you look at it from a mindset standpoint, what tracking really is when a business owner is like overly tracking things to the point of like, they get concerned, it's really it's fear-driven right.
[00:10:33] Greg Marshall: It's the fear of losing money and the fear of not making enough or missing out on the operative. And what causes that is. We all know we make most of our worst decisions when we're overly emotional. And that's what happens is you look at some of these tracking, these numbers and your emotions can get the best of you and you make decisions emotionally, and then it hurts your business.
[00:10:58] Greg Marshall: Right? It's business is more of a logical thing. It's just do certain things and you will get extra salt. Right? And so when you look at the tracking, I think sometimes you can do yourself. Trust me, I've run into so many times personally where you feel like, oh man, you know, I've got to, I feel anxious because you know, this campaign is.
[00:11:19] Greg Marshall: Getting the specific return. It should be based on the data that's coming in. That's inaccurate anyways, and you start tweaking things and you make things worse by doing that. And I'm thinking in my mind right now, as you asked me that. The client that I'm working with is actually just letting it all happen.
[00:11:39] Greg Marshall: And I have to like daily discipline myself to go do not touch anything, leave it as it is because it is growing. And every piece that you take away or change or, or mess with you actually get a greater loss than a higher return than you think you're getting.
[00:11:58] Blake Beus: Too many people will feel conflicting because we talk and we will probably always talk about testing, but you got to test and see what's working and that's how you can really figure things out.
[00:12:08] Blake Beus: Um, and so. It's it feels conflicting, but uh, every time we talk about this subject though, I do feel like we need, we need to write a book called Zen and the art of advertising, you know, and it will be written like that Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance book or whatever, but that's really, that's really what the, that it, the number of times I've stayed up at night because I wasn't happy with the numbers that day is yeah.
[00:12:37] Blake Beus: Need to count.
[00:12:37] Greg Marshall: Here's the other thing talking about. Attribution and you know how to track things. And you know, one thing you have to take into account too is also because we have minute by minute data coming in. It turns into like day traders where it's like, you don't see any like high level, high net worth individual making minute by minute decision with their wealth.
[00:13:03] Greg Marshall: Yeah. We're doing that with advertising. And when I say we I'm including myself in this is why I've been guilty of it, just as much as anyone else, which is like, you believe that the more you try to like beat the system right. And beat the algorithm or beat the time of day or beat the targeting or whatever.
[00:13:22] Greg Marshall: Almost never works because you can't time. It. Sometimes there's certain things that are not in your control. And in my experience, I have had the best results with. Campaigns or I've done very minimal changes. Um, and, and think taking, if I feel like I need to make a change waiting another two or three days before making that change to allow my emotion to go.
[00:13:47] Greg Marshall: Do I just emotionally think that I need to make this change for whatever reason, or is it best for the business and what we're trying to do? Right. So giving myself an extra few. A lot. And so I've actually had some clients I'm thinking of a few in the past as well that I'm still working with, but I'm sure they've had frustration where they're like, why is he making more?
[00:14:09] Greg Marshall: Why is he not making more changes, more iterations, more this, instead of letting things run. And it's because I understand from experience that it's better, it's actually better for you to wait. Then it is to continuously change. Right?
[00:14:29] Blake Beus: I would say that people maybe need to just shift a little bit and it's hard.
[00:14:34] Blake Beus: Like it's hard, but put this dream in your head because this does exist. It does exist up there. The dream where you have the campaign set up, campaigns that you forgot about. Yep. So you hop back in there, you look at the attribution, you, you double check with your hard enough. And you're thinking, I didn't touch this in a whole month and it gave me a four X row and it's, and it's worth crushing it.
[00:15:01] Blake Beus: Yeah. That dream exists. And it's actually more likely that something like that exists. Um, than it is for you to be hopping in there every day to try and eat out another no, the road, you know, one or two row ads. Yep. Um, but it, it, it does exist out there. I have one Google campaign with one of my clients.
[00:15:23] Blake Beus: Um, they sell a really high. Kind of software is the servant service offering. Uh, and they're okay with a qualified cost per lead of a couple hundred bucks. Yep. Um, cause they closed them really, really great and everything, but I have a couple of campaigns. I hop in there and Google quality score is almost everything with search campaigns.
[00:15:42] Blake Beus: I hop in there and look at it. Quality scores are good. Things are good. A number of conversions is always low because the number of searches each month is pretty low. It's a pretty targeted campaign. Uh, but we, we just don't have to tweak it. Yeah. Like it just keeps kind of performing and delivering and scaling up.
[00:16:00] Blake Beus: Doesn't help us because I can't force more people to search for these terms. Yeah. Uh, and so as long as I keep an eye and nothing's going wrong, it just sits there and hangs out well, you know, and
[00:16:09] Greg Marshall: that goes into, um, the value essentially of an account manager. The real job of an account manager is, is actually to prevent you or may, or the business owner from making emotional RAs decisions that will negatively impact their business.
[00:16:29] Greg Marshall: Because I can tell you this. You will hear our podcast, some new hack, new tricks, some friend down the road is no different than your uncle Johnny giving you. Uh, Hey, did you hear about the secret stock that is going to 1000 acts in the next three days? We should
[00:16:47] Blake Beus: have my right to the moon
[00:16:48] Greg Marshall: and you're like, well, you know, you wouldn't probably take that advice.
[00:16:52] Greg Marshall: Like, no, what does he know? Right. But we do hear a lot of times, like, and, you know, podcasts of like new tricks and things like that. And some of these. But the thing that you have to be careful of is constantly like feeling you have to change this and change that change because you are it's it's daydream you're you are hurting your business.
[00:17:12] Greg Marshall: Constantly, you're not allowing to gain any
[00:17:14] Blake Beus: momentum. Well, and, and to talk again, to talk about this from a technical perspective, this is all algorithm based. I know everybody's heard the term algorithm, but very few people actually an algorithm is, uh, it's just this it's, it's essentially a piece of software that uses indicators to, uh, try to optimize performance.
[00:17:36] Blake Beus: So. Uh, it's a lot of if then this type stuff. And people who've heard machine lane, lane learning and AI and everything at its core. All of these things are conditional statements. If this happens, then do this. And sometimes they're weighted, sometimes they're weighted. So like if two things happen at the same time, one has more weight than the other to make the, the next decision.
[00:18:00] Blake Beus: Uh, but they use thousands of data points to try to predict and optimize things that stuff takes time. It's not instantaneous optimization. And so if you keep tweaking things, it really. Those main core indicators. So then the predictive modeling can't work and the predictive modeling and an ads platform is which people are ready to take the next step or to buy or whatever your conversion objective is, or to click on the ad.
[00:18:28] Blake Beus: Um, and if every time you tweak, it throws that predictive modeling off. And so letting it sit there and hang out for several days, uh, sometimes even a week. Yep. We'll, we'll help that stabilize. And so you're getting consistent
[00:18:44] Greg Marshall: results. So I think, would it be safe to say that and its simplest way an algorithm and a human standpoint would be if Blake buys a movie ticket, Blake, most likely will be watching a movie later tonight.
[00:19:00] Greg Marshall: Yeah.
Right.
[00:19:02] Blake Beus: And you could take it to the next slide. Based on Blake's past movie watching history and the fact that the new Deadpool movie just came out, Blake's a huge Deadpool fan. Therefore 99% certainty that Blake is going to go see Deadpool. Yes, yes. Right. And so those are like how the indicators work.
[00:19:24] Blake Beus: So
[00:19:24] Greg Marshall: that's, that's a good way to explain it too. Cause I, I wanted to use that human example for people to. Um, understand, always try to simplify what it is. And if you think about it in regular terms, right? If I, if I want you to go watch Deadpool, but I keep basically changing my offer. Talk to me than not talk.
[00:19:43] Greg Marshall: He kind of telling you that Deadpool's coming out, kind of not telling you that changing. What, what, um, changing complete subject lines come complete different topics. It's gonna be a lot harder for me to get you to go see Deadpool. I'm not giving you the right information to make the decision to go, oh, Deadpool's coming out tonight.
[00:20:02] Greg Marshall: Let me buy the ticket is at this theater. And I'm
[00:20:05] Blake Beus: going to go ahead and do it. Yeah. And one of the things that, and I know you, and I've talked to extent extensively about this, but one of the things we've I've noticed with ads is in campaigns and every. Everything is moving more towards a simpler structure.
[00:20:20] Blake Beus: And it makes a whole lot of sense because algorithms are trying to do a lot of this complicated stuff. And if you make it as easy as possible for an algorithm to figure out what it's trying to figure out, it's going to be able to optimize faster. Uh, and that's where, I mean, you, you hear people saying things like.
[00:20:38] Blake Beus: You know, optimize for top of funnel events or something, you know, higher up in the funnel. And that's confusing to people if you haven't run ads. But essentially what that means is, is maybe we're trying to optimize for just people clicking on the ad or engaging with the ad. And maybe we put quite a bit of budget into that, uh, comparatively speaking, but then we have a retargeting ad that targets anybody that interacted with any of our videos or anything like that, and shows them a very specific offer that has a very special.
[00:21:06] Blake Beus: You know, act now type message. Those are very simple campaigns that tend to perform really well because the structure is simple. The prediction modeling is simple. You're not asking them to do something super complicated in an optimized for an event, you know, 10 or 12 page loads down the line.
[00:21:23] Greg Marshall: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:24] Greg Marshall: That, and that makes a lot of sense because. That's that goes back to the attribution nightmare. Right. Which is the more you're asking for. And the more hoops they have to jump and the more, you know, payment processes I use, I've run into this all the time. Clients have so many different payment processes that, you know, we discovered this when we were running international ads, right.
[00:21:45] Greg Marshall: Pay pal versus Stripe and how quickly the pixel can't stay stuck on those pages or how they can get lost. And so the ads may be working, but it's not feeding it back into the ads manager. And so now you're turning things off that we're working and you're just confused. Right. Right. And we learned that just from understanding that the more steps you have, the more complex you're making people do certain things.
[00:22:11] Greg Marshall: The less accurate your attributes is going to be because you're giving it more chances basically to get frozen blocked, uh, miss redirected in the wrong place. And so just keep that in mind that the more complex you try to make things the harder it is to trim is that, is that correctly? Absolutely.
[00:22:29] Blake Beus: And that's literally for everything ever.
[00:22:32] Blake Beus: And, and a lot of people tend to forget. Advertising has changed a lot over the last 20, 30 years. It used to be put a newspaper ad out that you put, you put a billboard out there. Those things still happen, but you didn't have a whole lot of tracking surrounding that. And so what more people need to focus on if your campaign isn't working the way you think it should or whatever, you probably need to take a step back and really look at the psychological angle that all of your ad, the messaging, the messaging, are you speaking to the, the right person in the right way?
[00:23:03] Blake Beus: Are you speaking to their hopes and dreams? And showing them how to avoid their fears and pain points. Are you, are you, is, is that the thing working and it probably has less to do with the objectives and the targeting and more to do with the messaging, right?
[00:23:17] Greg Marshall: Yep. Which, you know, that's another conversation I have with clients too, is, uh, overly obsessing about, you know, targeting, right.
[00:23:25] Greg Marshall: So, oh yeah. You know, I need to charter this. Art says that one, or they must like these 19 interests, you know, before the ad shows and things like. And a lot of times in my experience I've found that targeting. Yes, it is important, but here's a good example. If I sell dog food and I want to get this in front of cat owners for whatever reason, but they don't own a dog if I'm talking to the right audience, but the message doesn't resonate with them.
[00:23:52] Greg Marshall: It doesn't convert. It don't matter because they're not in the market for that, nor do they have the desire or they don't even have the duck to buy it. And so you got to keep in mind, it's like you're targeting can be. But if your messaging doesn't resonate with that target audience, then it doesn't, it's not going to work.
[00:24:10] Greg Marshall: So the message, you can make the case that you should focus more on the messaging versus just the targeting, right? Because if you have a good message, you could even get people that aren't the perfect match to want to take, you know, take the
offer
[00:24:25] Blake Beus: and you could scoop up those people. Facebook, Google, whatever doesn't know is interested in that offer, um, because they, they don't have all the data on everybody.
[00:24:35] Blake Beus: So you might find people that wouldn't have been discovered, uh, by having specific targeting by having more, more broad targeting.
[00:24:45] Greg Marshall: So I think too, like to simplify everything when it comes to tracking, I think the moral of this podcast basically is to think about your business more in a systematic way.
[00:24:57] Greg Marshall: How do I have something at all times running to ensure to introduce new people to my business. And then how do I always have something running to warm those people up? And then how do I always have something running to actually tell them to take an action? And you never changed that.
[00:25:13] Blake Beus: Right? And if you see if you have something like that, that's.
[00:25:18] Blake Beus: Uh, and then you see maybe a week or two months or whatever, whatever it is, you see the performance drop, uh, try swapping out your ads, but don't touch anything else because maybe it's just ad blindness. Maybe you need to kind of refresh everything swap and it doesn't have to be a big change. It could be a change of the head.
[00:25:36] Blake Beus: It could be a change of the picture, the colors in the picture. Or maybe if you have a video, you add some, uh, you know, bars on top and bottom with a, with a quick message. It doesn't have to be a massive change. You don't have to like revamp your whole marketing message. Uh, but just something small can, can kind of bring that back to life.
[00:25:52] Blake Beus: So I
[00:25:52] Greg Marshall: think, you know, pretty much to, to end this episode, build a marketing system where. You're constantly bringing people in to become aware, warm them up. And then go ahead and ask for closing and do not make the mistake of, um, the attribution. Most of the time. It's just last click, which means it's not telling you the full story.
[00:26:14] Greg Marshall: So don't get seduced by because your retargeting ad is getting you a 50 X that you're going to turn everything else off because eventually you're retarded. It's not going to be able to be fed through everything else. So you have to have both, right. You have to have a full system in order to maximize what you're doing.
[00:26:31] Greg Marshall: So same thing with don't turn your retargeting off. If your cold traffic aren't because you were targeted, he's going to help follow with the people that fall off you look at it as a full system and go constantly bring new people in, constantly warm them up and then constantly making sure. It's pretty safe to say, as long as you have a business with something that people actually want, which is the, you know, the, the key variable, right.
[00:26:55] Greg Marshall: but if they want it, you'll be fine. If you just have that mindset and just take it, take like the word you use, holistic approach. How much am I spending and how much is the business making? Don't pull your hair out, trying to get soap isolated with which exact ad and which exact moment and what to get rid of, because that's gonna Mo more likely than not break your business.
[00:27:17] Greg Marshall: Yeah. So that's basically the moral of this episode here.
[00:27:21] Blake Beus: So, you know, I'll add two quick little things that probably will cook will and should be their own episode. Took her in relation to that. Uh, the first one is. Uh, email marketing, that's part of the holistic marketing strategy. We will definitely have something where we talk about that.
[00:27:38] Blake Beus: Um, a quick point, just a real world, world data point on that. Um, I recently helped a client of mine beef up their email marketing significantly. And we're now sending three to four emails a week that are very much value-based with a very soft call to action. Uh, and in the last two months, since we've implemented.
[00:27:56] Blake Beus: Our, um, number of qualified leads has increased, not a lot, maybe 10 or 20%, but we also combined with that decreased some of their, um, ad spends on search keywords that we're trying to get work, uh, and switch those over to try to get email leads instead of sales call leads. Uh, and then in, in, you know, decrease that ad spend.
[00:28:19] Blake Beus: So our cost per lead has gone down by about 70% by just leveraging email. So that's a real world example. And then the second thing is, and this is something a lot of people don't think about, but part of the algorithm, it ingests the words in your video and the words in your ad and uses that to help with targeting and lining people up.
[00:28:39] Blake Beus: Right? So. People don't think about that aspect a whole lot. We could probably do a whole episode talking about how all of the different data points that the algorithms use, but that's another thing I think.
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In this episode we go over ways to reach the right customer using fear.
But how do you use fear to sell and still be able to sleep at night?
Transcript
[00:00:00] Blake Beus: Yeah, let's just, let's just dive in. So we were, we were talking about a bunch of different things here before this call. We should have hit record just,
[00:00:06] Greg Marshall: yeah, we probably should just record our entire conversation all the time.
[00:00:10] Blake Beus: All the time, body cams.
[00:00:15] Blake Beus: Um, but we were, one of the things we were talking about was different angles and marketing. We started talking about fear, which is I made the observation. I think fear is probably the biggest thing to make people make a decision today. You've been using that with some of your clients and stuff, but I thought it was interesting.
[00:00:32] Blake Beus: I love, you know,
[00:00:34] Greg Marshall: tell about that. I thought, you know, it's, it's tough because you want to use fear as a way as human beings, we tend to not respond. To benefits as much as we will responsive fear, particularly if we want fast action. Right? So if you look at like some of the things that we want to accomplish, we'll use like weight loss, right?
[00:00:56] Greg Marshall: If I say, Hey, I can help you lose X amount of pounds because you're going to feel more excited and more energy, blah, blah, blah. Right. That might get you excited. But if a doctor says, Hey, if you don't lose 30 pounds in the next 30 days, you're going to die. Well, that that causes you to act faster. Right?
[00:01:15] Greg Marshall: Cause you're fearful of what's going to happen if you don't
[00:01:18] Blake Beus: act. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It, um, while I just barely relaunched a sales pitch for, for one of my products. And I was just thinking that through when we were talking about the fear is I don't, I don't have a whole lot of language that gets them to start thinking about those fears.
[00:01:37] Blake Beus: Now I do feel like sometimes we're in. We have so much fear hitting us people with like all these sensational headlines and stuff. So I feel like it can definitely be overdone. Yes. But there's legitimate or abuse right. Or use to manipulate, but there's legitimate ways to, to use, use that fear. And I'm definitely, I need to think more about that with my current sales page, because I don't think I have.
[00:01:58] Blake Beus: Of that kind of the, uh, the, the stick and the carrot. I have mostly carrot. Yeah. You know, all these things you want, but I want a little bit of a stick in there to, well,
[00:02:06] Greg Marshall: I think to what, what, you know, I was talking to a bunch of clients earlier this morning about, um, something specific when people reach out and they want more sales.
[00:02:16] Greg Marshall: What they're not saying is I want a hundred thousand, 200, $300,000 in sales spread out over the next 20. What they're actually saying is I need sales today and I want sales yesterday. Right. And so with that being said, you have to focus more on, well, how do I create incentives to make people act now?
[00:02:38] Greg Marshall: Versus they see a product. They like it. Well, I'll eventually get to a and most people's like, uh, language when they're selling stuff is like, Hey, we'll, we'll be around at any time. So. Buy from me for many times. Right. We all know that, you know, we're laughing cause it's like, we know that doesn't work
[00:02:57] Blake Beus: like that.
[00:02:57] Blake Beus: Not only does it work, but it kind of lacks Lex the confidence in our products. And we all want to use very soft, very friendly, very kind, sure language. And I get that. That's like my default time, which is one of the reasons I've struggled. And I noticed I missed this on my own, but, um, The, the reality is, is that for the right kind of customer and you know, what industry you're in or whatever, what you're selling literally is kind of not really life and death situation, but it does help them avoid a very painful situation yes.
[00:03:35] Greg Marshall: Or prolong it right where it's like, they feel a certain level of pain and they've been feeling it for eight years or seven months or whatever. And they want to like fix it. Well, our job as marketers and salespeople. Give people solutions that they can solve the problem immediately and end the pain.
[00:03:54] Greg Marshall: That's basically what we're trying to do is, and their pain, but we have to help them get out of their own ways. So we have to create all these incentives and reasons to act now, or else they're going to prolong. No, absolutely.
[00:04:08] Blake Beus: I mean, uh, w w what kicked this whole part of this office earlier when we were first chatting before we hit the record button, was your headline.
[00:04:17] Blake Beus: Yeah.
[00:04:17] Greg Marshall: Yeah. One of the headlines that, um, you know, we were thinking about, and this is, this is almost like sad to say, because, um, as a, as an online marketer, I started off in sales in person. Right. And I used to really emphasize my sales. Uh, deliveries to talk about urgency and why you need to do it now.
[00:04:37] Greg Marshall: But on digital, I hadn't used that mindset as much until I was thinking about this offer that wasn't converting in the past, working with this company and they brought me on to help them figure it out. So I said, well, if we need this to come from. We need to really focus on how to get people to come in.
[00:04:56] Greg Marshall: So the start of it all is the hook. And we use the hook where, um, we said the hook says you are currently earning 36% less than your competitors by not having this skill. And what that does, is it number one, it gives you the fear of loss. Number two, we're using a random number. So we're. 50% or a 75%, we're using 36%, which is the real number, but it also communicates that this is a real statistic and it's not, if it's too whole, it sounds made up, right?
[00:05:33] Greg Marshall: Because most statistics are not 75%, 25. They usually like 26.2% or something. Right. So we used the number specifically to demonstrate that this is a real stat and we're using the. Almost the fear of like you were being left behind because you are not keeping your skills up and that's what hooks them
[00:05:53] Blake Beus: in.
[00:05:54] Blake Beus: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Now that that's, that's something, when you told me that I instantly was thinking I'm stealing that headline.
[00:06:03] Greg Marshall: What's a good headline. And we came up, we came up with it together. Um, between myself and this company, while we were brainstorming, we're thinking, well, how do we demonstrate that what we have, which is thinking exercise, everyone should do, which is how do we demonstrate what we have to offer in a way that makes people understand and realize that they need us and they need us now.
[00:06:29] Greg Marshall: Right? Right. And that's where this all came about is while we know who we're speaking to our core audience there, their whole. Goal is to increase the revenue and their money, particularly as a personal brand. So we need to have statistics that show how by having this scale. Well increase their, their income increase, uh, you know, their status and also help them to not feel like they're being left behind, which is why we use this headline FOMO.
[00:07:01] Greg Marshall: Very, very
[00:07:03] Blake Beus: well. I almost, uh, earlier this year, Well mowed some GameStop shares that it's almost almost active. I almost did cause I didn't want to miss out on the whole GameStop thing. Um, but, uh, no that's uh, and, and the other thing too, is you're that particular person you're speaking to in those ads. I just barely realized while you're talking.
[00:07:24] Blake Beus: Is a very competitive personality. Yes. Those people are very competitive people and they don't, like many of them are probably already pretty successful, but they don't want to be less successful than that guy over there. That's doing the same thing. Yeah.
[00:07:38] Greg Marshall: Well, I call that the. You know, the, the, the gorilla pound on the chest, right?
[00:07:43] Greg Marshall: Yeah. So like that person wants to, you know, in this space, right. They're competitive. Meaning we're going after successful people, successful people typically have a drive they're competitive in some way, and they do have the bad habit. I think. Of comparison. Right? Well, I'm doing good, but I don't feel nearly as good as I should because that guy's doing better.
[00:08:09] Greg Marshall: Right. Even though you shouldn't do that, it's what we do. And so we're almost using that as a way to be able to go, Hey, this is a real statistic you are. If you don't have this skill, there are people making 30, 40, 50, 60% more money. Just by understanding how to public speak correctly. Right. So we're using that competitive nature to help them step their game up.
[00:08:33] Greg Marshall: It's a way to motivate
[00:08:34] Blake Beus: them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's super interesting. And I, I, and I think, you know, I mean, we see ads all over the place, billboards, Facebook, whatever. And as, as you look at those, the ones that tend to have the most comments and things are the ones that are usually have a little bit of fear in there.
[00:08:51] Blake Beus: And, you know, Polarizing that's the other thing usually are things that make people say, oh, hell yeah, that's totally true. Or, oh, hell no, that's completely. Yeah. That's such bull crap. It drives emotion. It drives
[00:09:04] Greg Marshall: emotion. Yeah. That's where I think you strong marketing and sales really. I mean, sales and marketing pretty connected.
[00:09:10] Greg Marshall: Right. Which is you have to drive the emotion because we do not act unless we feel emotional. So if you think of. I know a lot of the posts that I see online, where people are getting like really upset. It has like a billion comments is because it's driving an emotion of either. I agree strongly with you, or I strongly disagree.
[00:09:30] Greg Marshall: It's never in the middle. Yeah. Right. Somewhere in the middle. You have to choose a side. Yeah.
[00:09:35] Blake Beus: And I feel like, um, Just taking a step back at the larger, larger picture of everything out there. We see this same principle in all of the clickbaits and sensational headlines, which I feel is an abuse of the concept, the principle or whatever, but it's, it happens a lot and it happens all around us.
[00:09:56] Blake Beus: These companies are doing it because it works. Now we can take this and make it non click baity and use it for growth in a more reasonable way. That makes a ton of sense. Um, but, but yeah, I
[00:10:09] Greg Marshall: mean, we're basically always in business to try to help customers. At least that's what I hope all of you guys are in business for right.
[00:10:18] Greg Marshall: Is we actually want to help these customers and we just want to help them get out of their own way. And when you can use strategy, Right that we're, you know, like a lot of the media uses to get you to click. But you can use it in a helpful and more positive way versus at times I feel like it's used the other way, you know, we won't get too deep into that, but that's just kind of sometimes what I feel.
[00:10:40] Greg Marshall: Yeah.
[00:10:41] Blake Beus: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so we've talked, we've talked about fear and I think we've talked about that a whole lot, but before this call, we talked about some other things and I don't know if you're listening to this podcast, you're going to read. There's going to be a lot of random stuff that we're going to talk about because we're out there actively doing this stuff, and there's a lot of things these kind of pop up.
[00:11:01] Blake Beus: Uh, but one thing I've been meaning to talk to you about that we didn't talk about before this call, uh, is I set up and ran my first LinkedIn conversation ads this week. Okay. Have you ever used LinkedIn conversation ads?
[00:11:14] Greg Marshall: Yeah. So I've used LinkedIn. For the actual distribution? No. Um, I've used LinkedIn ads for, uh, clicks, the website, landing pages, uh, awareness, video, marketing, all that.
[00:11:27] Greg Marshall: But I use LinkedIn messaging in a, in a unique way. So my objective with all of my, uh, all of my marketing for my business or anyone that's in the service-based business is to try to drive, uh, an inbox response. Right. So, um, Yeah. I mean, so when you're doing inbox, response marketing, basically what you try to do is start a conversation so that you can then move them on the phone.
[00:11:54] Greg Marshall: Yeah,
[00:11:55] Blake Beus: yeah, absolutely. So this, this strategy I thought was super unique. So I had this unique situation where, uh, my client needed to speak with account managers at a very large company. Got it. Uh, because they have a product that specifically helps them and helps their customers. It helps the relationship between them and their customers.
[00:12:18] Blake Beus: And this company has tens of thousands of employees and we needed to speak with just account managers. So LinkedIn actually lets you target big company employees of a big company by title. And so once we did all the targeting and everything was about 1800 people, but then this is where the conversation ads come in.
[00:12:36] Blake Beus: It's like a mini bot. If you've ever done many chat bots or anything like that, we can set up a little flow and a little conversation that. Briefly, uh, gets their attention, then explains the value proposition and how it can help them, and then prompts them to book a call with, uh, you know, the, the, the sales manager of the team with, with this service, because it's a software as a service company.
[00:12:58] Blake Beus: But, um, I was surprised at how cheap those ads were, which they were crazy cheap, and I've always heard LinkedIn ads are expensive if you're going for conversion, all of these things, but these conversations ads. We're 10 to 15 cents per cent, which is so cheap and it's targeted. It's directly targeted to the very specific people now that that cost changes because they did some other targeting for some other, you know, large companies just to see how the price has changed.
[00:13:27] Blake Beus: Uh, and it definitely does change a little bit, but. It was crazy. And I'm super curious to see how that's
[00:13:33] Greg Marshall: going to work. I'm going to have to use that because that's actually, so I've used messaging ads on Facebook and on Instagram, but yeah, you got to
[00:13:41] Blake Beus: build your list and everything on Facebook, on LinkedIn, you don't, you just target them and you can send them the message
[00:13:46] Greg Marshall: I'm going to have to for sure.
[00:13:47] Greg Marshall: Use that because I've seen some of those ads in my own. And I have your attention. They do, because you're like, do I know this person? Which is like, that's pretty much the key. Cause that's almost the most powerful headline is if I have to ask myself, do I know this person, they have my attention. Yeah.
[00:14:05] Greg Marshall: Right. And then what do you do? You go on and click? Who is this person? He started learning more about them. So it makes sense that that would be a very powerful marketing tool. Okay. As soon as we, you know, stop this podcast, I'm gonna have to test
[00:14:19] Blake Beus: all after the show off to show you a few things that I learned because it's, um, it's a more clunky ad platform.
[00:14:26] Blake Beus: Like it's a definitely a clunky app platform. And I did make a mistake when I was setting it up because they have, uh, they have a campaign group level, a campaign level, like a targeting level, and then an ad level. Three of those have a draft mode. Oh, and so you, I, I had set everything to active except for the campaign group, which you set that up one time and then you spend a couple of hours and you're like, oh, She never turned it on active.
[00:14:54] Blake Beus: So then you'd hear it on what was
[00:14:55] Greg Marshall: supposed to, and you probably thought similar to what I thought. I remember thinking like, man, these wires, the no impressions, like it's not serving. And then you realize, oh, because it's not on,
[00:15:05] Blake Beus: it's not turned on. It turns out you've got to turn ads on for them to
send.
[00:15:10] Greg Marshall: But yeah, I think, you know, what's interesting about, you know, moving into, uh, Lincoln. As I feel like LinkedIn is probably an underutilized platform because there's not as many people bidding for the same exact audiences with the same message, because you see kind of a saturation when you're doing a Facebook and Instagram ads, because it's the simplest to get in.
[00:15:33] Greg Marshall: Right. At least the perception is that itself. Right. It's actually, you know, you have to know what you're doing to get good results, but the perception is like, well, if I click the boost, Or if I just click a button that Facebook suggest to me, I technically have an ad running. Right. And you don't really have that on LinkedIn.
[00:15:49] Greg Marshall: In fact, it's a little clunky because you got to go to the advertise and it opens up a new page. And then when you open up a new page, then you actually have to know how to target. Then you have to know, you have to submit all the drafts and make sure you're not in draft mode on three different levels for tax you go live.
[00:16:05] Greg Marshall: Right. Right. Yeah. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, LinkedIn is definitely a platform. You always have an opportunity. If you can use a platform that other people don't really know how to use or it's perceived as hard. So no one tries it. Right.
[00:16:19] Blake Beus: Well, and the other thing, the old marketing phrase, you hear all over the places you need to go where your customers are hanging out.
[00:16:28] Blake Beus: And, uh, I always say. For the longest time. I always wrote off LinkedIn ads because I never, I never go to LinkedIn ever, like never, ever, ever do I go to, you know, whenever my, my whole history of going to LinkedIn is usually when I was working at a regular job and I started hating my job. So I started looking for jobs on LinkedIn, you know, uh, and, uh, but I know.
[00:16:53] Blake Beus: Hit LinkedIn to browse the content. Now that is changing. Definitely that's changing. But the thing I like about these conversation as is. If people have the app on their phone, it actually, I think it actually does a push notification to their phone because it's a new message.
[00:17:06] Greg Marshall: It does because that's how I'm seeing these conversation as, and I remember thinking like, how are they doing that?
[00:17:14] Blake Beus: It's not intuitive, but it's actually really easy. It's, it's easier than setting up a Facebook, uh, like a mini chat bot using Facebook. The, the, the it's not as sophisticated. You can't do that. Cool things, but it's very, very simple to get the, that the, the, the flow set out
[00:17:30] Greg Marshall: simple as good. Yeah. Right. And the, the big, I mean, the thing that impacts any marketing or sales the most is the who you're talking to.
[00:17:40] Greg Marshall: Right. So like, that's where LinkedIn seems to be. Especially if you're in B2B or you're looking for a specific title, Facebook, you can target some of these, uh, some of these audiences, but. They're tough because either the audiences are really tiny for Facebook to figure out, um, so your CPM costs or costs of reach.
[00:18:02] Greg Marshall: These people are through the roof and there's so much noise on Facebook and Instagram that, that same, you know, quote unquote CEO that you're targeting is also being targeted. Other interest based. Where they're targeting and he likes golfing and he likes to go to the movies and he likes all this stuff.
[00:18:20] Greg Marshall: Right. And so what happens is you're really just competing. You're spending more to get in front of the same person that someone else is getting in front of. And so the math usually just doesn't work because you have to be SAR where you can get their undivided attention and then move them off the platform.
[00:18:36] Greg Marshall: So they're isolated. So you can. You know, drum up some
[00:18:40] Blake Beus: business. Right? Well, and I think about attention quite a bit. So, uh, I just relaunched a membership that I was doing, and I was delivering this membership through a Facebook group and the Facebook Facebook group as a delivery tool and tons of people deliver memberships through Facebook group.
[00:18:57] Blake Beus: Cause it's free. If everybody has Facebook, there's few, there's not very many hurdles to overcome. Um, but the, the distractions on Facebook are astronomical, just absolutely insane. And what a lot of people don't think about is even, even for me, when I would hop into Facebook to go to the group to put out a new poster or do new live video, you know, deliver the things that the group is supposed to deliver, I had to Wade through.
[00:19:25] Blake Beus: Political posts or my crazy uncle spouting conspiracy theories or whatever, to
[00:19:30] Greg Marshall: get to my notifications or keep coming up before, get all of this stuff. There's just, it it's
[00:19:35] Blake Beus: like, I dunno, it's like trying to read a book in a casino, like on a math book, in a casino, you just can't do that, you know? Um, and, uh, there is definitely time place for Facebook ads and I've run a ton of those myself.
[00:19:48] Blake Beus: Greg you've helped me with a ton of those ads. And, uh, but LinkedIn, when people are on LinkedIn, they're there for business
[00:19:57] Greg Marshall: and they're more it's because there's not as much noise there. It's almost a more isolated environment. If you've done sales for a long time, you understand that it's always better to sell one-on-one and a place where there's no distractions versus trying to sell.
[00:20:15] Greg Marshall: One-on-one, like you said, in a casino or something, you know, an amusement park. That's basically what it's like. It's like selling an amusement park when you're trying to sell in an overly crowded noisy. Uh, too many notifications world and LinkedIn is more of the library. Right. There's things going on, but it's not, you know, it's not attacking your dopamine so crazy that you're reacting every two seconds I'm clicking something.
[00:20:40] Greg Marshall: Right. Right.
[00:20:43] Blake Beus: So, yeah. So I was super stoked to talk with you about that. And, uh, um, I, I can't wait to talk about the results that we would get out of it,
[00:20:50] Greg Marshall: but, uh, yeah, I think too, like, What's interesting about most of these marketing channels is folks on, uh, testing, right? So, um, you have to test a lot and you have to be looking for new tests to run.
[00:21:04] Greg Marshall: And I think, um, with LinkedIn, one of the things that I like to do with a platform to get better at it is to run a ton, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 campaigns of the same. Uh, platform and just trying to test messages or test delivery, test audience, to get a good feel of it. I look at it as like repetitions.
[00:21:26] Greg Marshall: Like if you're trying to be better at the piano or a sports or something like that, you have to do reps in order for you to feel competent at it. And I think one of the best ways to get good at it is to almost mentally think, well, I'm just going to go. And all I care about is reps not necessarily results at the moment, but the actual reps of being able to go through and get a feel for it.
[00:21:46] Greg Marshall: Is that something that you tend to do? Do you follow something like that?
[00:21:50] Blake Beus: I, I definitely do, but there are times because here's the thing I overthink. I overthink everything. I overthink everything. So. Uh, much, so much. So recently I've been trying to not overthink quite so much and just, and just, uh, do some things and then check back later.
[00:22:11] Blake Beus: So when I think of testing, because I'm a numbers and a data guy, I think of like statistically significant testing, where we have split audiences where there's a zero overlap overlap, and we have. We, you know, we have a large enough volume that we can make a call and the percentage of increase on one over the other is better, is better by a big enough margin that it can't just be like chocked up to, you know, time of day or whatever.
[00:22:33] Blake Beus: Um, and frankly that's, sometimes that's just not feasible. Uh, and so testing what I do right now is just get a ballpark for some baselines and then run some ads. See how they're working this conversation ad there's one campaign, one targeting one ad because it's a low volume ad. There's only 1800 people in the whole audience.
[00:22:57] Blake Beus: And so I don't, I can't have audiences of millions of people where it can all be statistically significant and random enough to make sure that it's working. Uh, and so we just have to see what's working and have to see what the cost per acquisition is and the cost per call. And then on the back end, uh, because this is for a higher ticket kind of offering and service, uh, on the backend, we need to.
[00:23:19] Blake Beus: On the call. And I talk with the sales team about this after, cause I'm not taking any sales calls, but I talked with the sales team afterwards and I asked them, you know, okay. Was this the right kind of person. When did we get the right person on that call? If not, then we go back and sometimes you can't fix that with targeting.
[00:23:36] Blake Beus: We fix it with the language we're using in the ads. We want the language and the messaging to get them to the right person, to raise their hand and say, oh, that's me. And that's the help that I need. Um, and so that's the kind of testing I've been hearing a lot more of
[00:23:50] Greg Marshall: lately, you know, it's actually interesting.
[00:23:52] Greg Marshall: That leads me to kind of. Uh, we were talking about actually right before we hit record, which was, um, how the numbers volume is not always superior. Right. So I've told you. You haven't, you only have 1800 people in this audience, right? Yep. So you can't make the goal. Like we need to get 20,000 views or 40,000 clicks on a website.
[00:24:15] Greg Marshall: Cause there's only 1800 people. Yeah. And I have found myself getting caught up in this many times where you mistake volume for success. Right. So you're like, oh, well that video that I saw on YouTube has a million views. It must be generating tons. That's not necessarily always the case and it must have
[00:24:37] Blake Beus: good information in it.
[00:24:38] Blake Beus: Yes. Right?
[00:24:39] Greg Marshall: Yeah. Don't be the case even to make these assumptions. When in reality of a smaller, more targeted, lower volume approach can work much better, especially in the B2B space because you, what makes you money is, well, if you get out of those 1800 people, you sign up five of them, but all five of them are.
[00:25:02] Greg Marshall: 20 30, 40, $50,000 contracts. I mean, you could be selling court million dollars off of just five people, right.
[00:25:09] Blake Beus: Or more. Yeah. And that's, that's pretty feasible for this particular instance.
[00:25:14] Greg Marshall: And how much does it cost for you to reach them?
[00:25:17] Blake Beus: I think total, literally total we're we're doing $25 a day. Total. The estimate is probably going to be less than $500.
[00:25:24] Blake Beus: So even if we hit people multiple times,
[00:25:27] Greg Marshall: So think about that you invest $500 and let's say five of those 1800 people and their contracts that were 10, 15, 20,000. You spent 500 again.
[00:25:37] Blake Beus: Well, yeah. And this particular service is it's, it's a, it's a monthly subscription and each account manager has probably 20 to 50.
[00:25:46] Blake Beus: Um, of their clients that they work with, that would be a good fit for this particular product. And so, and the, and the subscription costs, uh, it starts at about a thousand dollars a month and goes up from there. And so it very easily could be for the right account manager. If 10% of their workout, it could easily be $10,000 a month.
[00:26:08] Blake Beus: Each, each person that they speak.
[00:26:10] Greg Marshall: So imagine you're spending 500 and you get a hundred, 501
[00:26:13] Blake Beus: time. And, and this particular client is really good because once people are on the system, people love it. They've got great customer support. So once they're on board, They stay on post at their retention rate is insane.
[00:26:28] Greg Marshall: So it's great. Lifetime value. You spent 500, they stay on two years. You made $240,000 off 500. Yeah, you can, you can never dream of making that kind of money stock market,
[00:26:42] Greg Marshall: maybe, you know, maybe Bitcoin or something like that, who knows, but. That's C the FOMO, that's all
[00:26:48] Blake Beus: that we're missing out. Throw some, throw some, our daily tips, throw some money. Don't follow my financial advice
[00:26:53] Greg Marshall: there. I don't just, I mean, but yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right? It's like, that is an unbelievable rich.
[00:26:59] Greg Marshall: And if you get caught up in volume versus the right person, you could be spending more than you need to tax to get the sure. Right. Well,
[00:27:08] Blake Beus: and that's the thing. If we want to go back to organic marketing, cause we were talking about this with your organic videos, like Greg's really good at getting a short video out every day, almost, uh, related, related to his services and things.
[00:27:21] Blake Beus: And some of those videos have five views. Some have like 10, whatever, but you consistently get calls for people that say things like. I've been watching your videos. I haven't commented on any of them, but I need your help. And my customer ha uh, my, my company has, I don't know, a hundred employees, this is our revenue and everything, and we need help.
[00:27:42] Blake Beus: And you close a 12 month contract based on a video that had 10 views.
[00:27:46] Greg Marshall: Yeah. Which even to me, you know, I get caught up in that too. Cause I'm like, how could only 10 views, 20 views actually generate any money? Cause it's such a low volume, but yeah. What I have to keep reminding myself as if you reframe that and you're putting out those videos and you're getting 20, 30 views per video, sometimes less.
[00:28:09] Greg Marshall: And, but over time, you're getting a hundred of the most qualified people who keep watching them that will do business with you. Then you're speaking to the right person. Those videos are profitable because it's not costing me any money to like outside of maybe production costs, which isn't even that.
[00:28:25] Greg Marshall: 'cause some of these, I'm doing a off my phone. So really the investment is low. The only investment I have is maybe 10, 15 minutes of time. Yeah. Right. But they, it compounds over time. These people are watching these videos. It draws you up big contracts with clients it's worth it. And
[00:28:44] Blake Beus: that video is out there forever.
[00:28:46] Blake Beus: Exact like you take 10, 15 minutes now, but you know, it's out there for years. Um, it, it re, it reminds me of me. It makes me think of the, what we see most. Like I hop on YouTube. I have my favorite channels with millions of subscribers and I, I sit down and watch them and they, they all have some sort of a picture and offer one of the guys.
[00:29:04] Blake Beus: I watch, he, he does cooking and he's got, he just, he just wrote a cookbook and it's for sale on Amazon, uh, knowing how publishing works. He's probably the book is $20. He's probably getting a buck from that book. It's his very first book. Right. Um, but he gets millions of views and he's probably making decent money, but his margins.
[00:29:27] Blake Beus: Yeah, right. And so people are sitting down there thinking, okay, I'm doing business online. I'm trying to grow something. Whatever this guy has millions of viewers. Uh, and there's no way I can compete with that. So I'm just going to stop. But the thing is, is his margins are tiny. So if you have an offer that is a, you know, a service.
[00:29:44] Blake Beus: Or you're a contractor or a plumber or electrician, all of these non-sexy industries out there, you have much, much, much bigger margins. You're not trying to get a million people to buy your book so you can make a million dollars. You're getting a hundred of them. You can make you make a million dollars off of a hundred of the right clients, because what is that $10,000.
[00:30:09] Blake Beus: Each client, is that a million times? A hundred. Yeah. Which is very easy for, uh, a contractor or a service-based business to have a $10,000,
[00:30:19] Greg Marshall: which I, and that's where, you know, it goes into strategy. Right? What are you, are you looking to be popular or are you looking to make sales and grow your business?
[00:30:31] Greg Marshall: Because they're not always correct. There are, of course there's outliers where they're very popular and they make a lot of sales. Those are celebrities, but that's a very different style and approach that like, you know, 1% of the world ever makes. Right. Right. And unless your goal is to become an actor, an actress, to have some kind of celebrity in that way, which is very difficult, right.
[00:30:55] Greg Marshall: Then you're going to want to go the other approach, which is you have to build a business and you have to. Who you actually want to target? What can you do to help them and how to make a sustainable, right? And so the wrong approach is I need 8 billion followers to make money. That's because that's, you don't need that.
[00:31:14] Greg Marshall: You just need the right people to be following you and taking action and love what you do. And I love the, the article or the quote. I can't even remember, but Seth. Talked about the 1000 true fans. And like you only need a thousand true fans to really, truly make a living. Right. Cause they, from, from there, those people can refer people out for you.
[00:31:34] Greg Marshall: That's like your tribe. And so that's how you can grow. And I just, I just liked that mindset versus feeling the pressure to have a million subscribers or a million, this or a million. It makes it so easy
[00:31:49] Blake Beus: to just get. Yup, because you're, you're kicking and screaming and scratching and crawling for the first a hundred subscribers and doing that for the first thousand.
[00:31:58] Blake Beus: And you, you, you hit a thousand and you're like, I'm old. I only need to do this a thousand more times to get to a million. Uh, and, and it's, so that mind frame makes it so easy to just stop, get overwhelmed, just quit. Say it's not worth it, but really it's, it should be shifted around in that. How, you know, Do is my business model, the right kind of model for the people that are my followers.
[00:32:24] Blake Beus: And if not, pivot, make adjustments, successful businesses, pivot all the time, all the time. I've pivoted like a bajillion times in my business. Well,
[00:32:33] Greg Marshall: here's, here's the other thing too with, um, if you, if you get too trapped in the vanity metrics, right? Uh, yes. Um, if you get too trapped in that, what happened?
[00:32:43] Greg Marshall: Yes, there's a time and a place you can use it, but you could be chasing the wrong thing and it becomes this weird cycle. Or if you're like just chasing followers with likes, you're, you're doing things that aren't necessarily designed to increase your business. Right. You're doing things just to increase views.
[00:33:00] Greg Marshall: For example, if I just put up like a bunch of cat videos and it gets millions of views, does that mean my business group? No. No. It's just entertained millions of people.
[00:33:11] Blake Beus: You entertain millions of people. The model most people have with something like that is I'm going to monetize YouTube ads, but it's pennies like as
[00:33:19] Greg Marshall: so slim.
[00:33:20] Blake Beus: And the, and the, the, the number of pennies you're getting, you know, based on a million views get smaller every year because of that's how competition that's how bad that's how bad supply. Yeah. That's supply and demand works
[00:33:32] Greg Marshall: well. And you're also giving up all your power to the platform, which we know very well with running ads and stuff like that.
[00:33:39] Greg Marshall: We won't get too deep into it. Cause we got so upset. Last December, was it December 29th? We were ready to
[00:33:47] Blake Beus: we'll talk about that. I do want to talk about this. We'll do it on a different episode. We
[00:33:51] Greg Marshall: were cheers event. So you have to stay tuned for that one, because that was a kind of a funny Ana, a NASA funny, extreme.
[00:33:57] Greg Marshall: Oh my
[00:33:57] Blake Beus: gosh. I swore a whole lot that January, January 20, 20, I swore a whole lot,
[00:34:04] Greg Marshall: but I think, you know, like with, with the whole vanity metrics too, if you're I've worked and this is what taught me this. Okay. Before. Um, I've worked with individuals like this. I also had to believe, well, the more followers you have, the more money you're going to make.
[00:34:20] Greg Marshall: Well, the more views, the more anything, right. I, but it's, it's, that's not true because I've worked with people who have, um, there was a scenario where I worked with a quote unquote influencer, right. And they had, uh, I wanna say it was close to 600,000 followers. Right. And they w they, they actually, uh, reached out to myself and a couple of other people.
[00:34:40] Greg Marshall: That was part of this little group. Cause they couldn't sell anything with 600,600,000 followers and they could not sell anything. And that's when it like really hit me where I was like, all right here, this lady has this outward, you know, like his look of success, all these followers and all these vanity metrics, but behind the current.
[00:35:08] Greg Marshall: Hey, I haven't sold anything. I'm talking zero. Really? Not now. Like I sold one, I'm talking zero, nothing, nothing, nothing, no sale. Right. And I'm like, that almost sounds impossible. It almost
[00:35:22] Blake Beus: sounds impossible. It feels impossible. It feels impossible. Mostly. When I launched my first product was this, which was a social media calendar to help people grow on social media.
[00:35:32] Blake Beus: I had 300 followers
[00:35:36] Greg Marshall: and I can assure you, you sold
[00:35:37] Blake Beus: a lot more hundreds of thousands of dollars of that calendar. Uh, and I had 300 followers at the time. And so just imagining having 600,000 followers and selling zero is insane
[00:35:52] Greg Marshall: and what's even crazier. Not only do they have these amount of followers, but they also they're on the, on the surface.
[00:36:01] Greg Marshall: Their page seemed engaging and all these comments and likes and shares. And you're so great. And you're the coolest and this, this and that. Meanwhile, it didn't translate to sales. And so basically that showed. That you should not be. And it's very seductive, right? Because I know I've thought many times, wow, what would it be like to have a million followers?
[00:36:24] Greg Marshall: Or they have this huge, this, a huge subscriber list or whatever. Right. And if it can, it can cause you to like, lose your focus because it doesn't directly translate into dollars when really what you really are saying when you want all that. Most of the time is you want more sales? You're thinking it's going to translate to more sales.
[00:36:46] Greg Marshall: Right. Right. And that's, that's where you go. Well, there's probably a better approach because if I just spoke to 10 people tomorrow, Right. And sold them all on a hundred thousand dollars. I'd be a millionaire, right. That's only 10 feet
[00:36:59] Blake Beus: and there's people that do those deals, right? Like, absolutely. Yeah. Um, I think we get caught up on those metrics because that's what we see.
[00:37:07] Blake Beus: Right? Yeah. And we'll dive into algorithms. We have lots of conversations around algorithms, but that's what algorithms do is they bubble up the most popular content. Uh, and so then that's what we see. So then we feel like that's what needs you need to have to be successful when behind the. Apparently, some of them are selling nothing.
[00:37:25] Blake Beus: Yes. Um,
[00:37:26] Greg Marshall: and very embarrassed. Like I would, oh, I felt embarrassed for her because as she was speaking, she had the tonality of arrogance is never good. Right. And I arrogance crushes, many things. The more arrogant you are, the more holes they're going to be in things you can't see. Yeah. And she was speaking in a very arrogant manner.
[00:37:53] Greg Marshall: Like I am this huge celebrity while simultaneously getting zero sales. Oh. And it was tough. Cause it's like, that's embarrassing. You're telling us the massive influence that you have, but you don't have as influence that you think. And so that's just like, I just, I can't believe, I mean, to this day, that is like, in my mind, I still think of that 600,000 followers.
[00:38:22] Greg Marshall: No sales. Yeah, man. So if you're getting currently discouraged about like, you don't have a billion subscribers or you're not getting these massive views or people that are in your same space are getting more views or more. That doesn't always necessarily equate to dollars. And so if your goal is to make more money and sales and grow your company, focus on that versus the vanity.
[00:38:48] Blake Beus: Right. Uh, and I will put a little plug in here on this, and then we'll, we'll wrap it up and talk about how people can connect with us if they want to. But, uh, I feel like Tik TOK is one of those places you can. Subscribers insanely fast. Yeah. But the way that people consume Tik TOK content is a very, um, ADHD.
[00:39:12] Blake Beus: Like if that makes sense, like it's a dopamine hit. It's like, it's like a slot machine, I guess we're coming back to, it's like a slot machine of things you're just swiping through there. Maybe people are, maybe they're liking it. Maybe they're commenting on it, but very rarely do. Hit the name, go to the link in the bio, click on that and actually take action.
[00:39:32] Blake Beus: Yep. Uh, and so I, I get people asking me all the time, how do I grow on Tik TOK and all this stuff? And we can dive into that on another episode. But most of the time I tell them, well, is that what. Is that where your customers are hanging out and we have a conversation about customers, and I know it maybe sounds super old school cause Facebook was yesterday's news, but Facebook from an organic standpoint, there's so much potential on there because of the people that are spending money are oftentimes hanging out on Facebook.
[00:39:59] Blake Beus: And the people that aren't spending money are on tick. Now that's probably going to share that might be well, it, it trends younger, right? Like Tik TOK trends, younger, historically speaking, the, the demographics that spend the most money online is from like the 35 to the 50 age range. Um, and those people aren't chilling on Tik TOK.
[00:40:19] Blake Beus: They're
[00:40:19] Greg Marshall: just. Well, you compare tick-tock to casino, which if you notice, I'm sure there's a lot of people in casinos who don't have very much money. So maybe there's a direct correlation to that. Right. But I think to, to play to your point, a metric that I think is very important that I feel like almost known talks about, but you've heard me say this many times is marketing.
[00:40:45] Greg Marshall: Consuming the actual marketing. So the longer you can have someone consume your content, the more invested they are in you, which is why like video, particularly at least one to two minute videos sometimes longer, because if they're consuming the marketing content, I believe you have a higher influence over that person.
[00:41:07] Greg Marshall: If you take marketing consumption in to like, let's say the rock, for example, the reason why I feel like he compounds. Is because we are consuming his marketing at huge levels, right? He's made hundreds of movies. He's been in hundreds of episodes of shows and wrestling. He's got his social media accounts.
[00:41:29] Greg Marshall: So what you're doing is you're consuming his content and you're consuming more and more of it. Therefore you feel more invested in it. Therefore you buy from him, right? That's the same thing you can do with your market. Is your goal is to get people to consume it more. Right. And if it's only 10 people that really are your customers and that's, that's the market, but they're consuming all of your stuff handled.
[00:41:56] Greg Marshall: When you said earlier, I've been watching your videos for a while. And then that is I that's basically the script of every time I talk to someone, they say I've been watching your videos every time. So that's how I keep investing more and more in. Just because I paid attention to the scene, they're consuming the content, the more content they consume, the easier the sale, right.
[00:42:19] Greg Marshall: Because the content has sold them already. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:42:23] Blake Beus: And it's, and it's one of the best ways to get the, that marketing consumption is to make sure that the content is value based. And that does take a little effort. It does. It's, it's a little bit more effort than, uh, you know, What is it called a mix, a mixed tape.
[00:42:39] Blake Beus: When you take someone else's Tik TOK and you're like react to
[00:42:42] Greg Marshall: us. Yes. Which, I mean, it takes more effort and the thing is, it's more long-term too, right? So it's not C we're also deuced by the overnight result. And the problem with that is sometimes you tend to, you know, try to take shortcuts when you could get a result.
[00:43:02] Greg Marshall: Now you, but you can get a better than. More consistent results that compounds. Yep. If you take your time into going, I'm going to focus on a core market and give them as much value as possible. And I'm not going to venture out of that. And what that does is you start to be able to craft your message better and better, and to get better at doing it and things start to compound, but you don't get, you know, you don't make a video and tomorrow, you know, you get 10 deals, right.
[00:43:32] Greg Marshall: I don't work that way. You have to be consistent because people are gauging. If you know, if they see do it consistently, the longer you do it, the more seriously than. Yeah, because they're like, this person is committed
[00:43:44] Blake Beus: well, and a lot of people will go back and watch back to this. Right. So maybe that video from a month ago, didn't get in front of the right person, but this other one did and they go back and they watch the others.
[00:43:54] Blake Beus: All right. Let's wrap this up. Yes. Okay. So let's, uh, Greg tell everybody how to get in
[00:44:00] Greg Marshall: touch with you the best ways, you know, visit my website, Greg marsal.co not com. Uh, and then, you know, you can find me on social media. Greg Marshall is typing. My Instagram is motivation GM. I like to post motivations of their most, you know, kind of the irony of that is I like to do it because it helps keep me motivated as well as anyone who just would like some extra motivation.
[00:44:23] Greg Marshall: So that's basically how you can reach out to me either visit the website, Greg marshall.co, or a following on Instagram motivation, GM, or just look me up, Greg. Um, and you should be able to find me. Alright, cool.
[00:44:35] Blake Beus: Uh, and then me just Blake, bruce.com and, uh, B as in boy is an echo U as in uniform, S as in Sierra and it's pronounced like juice, juice.
[00:44:45] Greg Marshall: There you go. Blank. The juice,
[00:44:49] Blake Beus: the juice, um, uh, yeah. And then, uh, my current project that I'm working on right now, actually just relaunched. I talked about it a little bit here. It's called SM three stands for social media moneymakers, but I also kind of expanded it to marketing masters and a bunch of other things.
[00:45:05] Blake Beus: Um, but it's a, it's a community. You can just find that on my website. Um, and yeah, looking forward to connecting with you guys.