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

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