Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

Blake Beus  0:00  All right, so I sent you a text while you were vacationing,
Greg Marshall  0:03  I was at my mountains, I
Blake Beus  0:04  didn't even I didn't even know you were up in the mountains. But it was just a random text that I sent you about a thing that which
Greg Marshall  0:10  is why my response was so delayed. I got it. Like, I remember getting like, at a random time when I had searched for like two seconds.
Blake Beus  0:19  But I thought it was super, super, super interesting. And it was about tick tock and an internal practice they have called heating, like heating something up, right, bringing the heat, bringing the heat and, and my initial thoughts of this is, and we talked about this all the time. But my initial thoughts were this is why you shouldn't try to go viral. Yep. You shouldn't even put any effort into that. Because you may have literally zero control over you could be have, you could create the best content, most entertaining, whatever. And you just might not be one of the chosen few who gets slow, who was allowed to go viral.
Greg Marshall  1:02  When you sent me this. And I took a look at the article. I was like interesting that they actually do a practice like this. Because I feel like off camera, we've discussed how these algorithms seems it's like there's it's almost like no rhyme or reason, in a way and organically to like, go viral member and we've done a podcast we were talking about going viral. And it's like, why going viral doesn't automatically increase business. And if you think about it, if platforms, I'm sure tick tock is not the only platform guaranteed, that does heating, right. And if you think about it, they're not going to pick stuff to go viral that has anything to do with selling anything, right? They're gonna pick stuff that gets more visibility, that can drive more behavior for the audience that they want to stay on the platform longer. Right. And so that's why going viral doesn't automatically translate into sales. And that's why if they do heating up, what do you think they do about sales type videos that are promoting Friday holding them down? Probably?
Blake Beus  2:09  Right? Probably cold. Yeah, cold. So let's talk specifically about what heating up is, and this particular article, and this article was all about tick tock, but I'm sure there's something similar, maybe not so blatant in the others, but essentially, internally inside tick tock. They would have meetings where they would choose which content and which creators, they wanted to heat up, aka, go viral. Yeah. And they made those decisions purely based on how it would benefit the platform itself, and how it would benefit the growth of their own platform. In general. Now, if we take a big step back, and we talk about algorithms, right, a lot of people talk about algorithms as this like, cold calculated computer software, whatever algorithms are built and tuned by humans for the benefit of the parent company. Yeah, like, that's the whole point of them, it's not to benefit you and me, is to love us. Right? And I'm not. I mean, there's a lot of things we can say negative or positive about social media companies or large businesses, whatever. And I have a lot of strong feelings on that on that subject. But the point is, is having a good understanding of the incentives, why they're doing what they're doing whatever can help you in your marketing efforts play in their sandbox, because for the benefit of you know, you and your your business, but essentially, they would choose which content which content, they wanted to go viral. Yep. And so you could create great content, and it might even be better than the content that's going viral. But if you weren't noticed by the heating up team, and you weren't one of the Chosen of the heating up team, your content can fall flat could just never go anywhere. It could never get
Greg Marshall  4:03  anywhere. Well, you want to know some interesting is? Do you listen to the podcast value? tainment at all? No, Patrick, I always say PVD. Patrick, but David, he actually had an episode. You guys should check this out on YouTube. He tested this. He said that on tick tock. He said that he figured out that there was some level of this happening when on his content when he started sharing things about US government that opposes the Chinese government. His content started to get he was normally averaging I think he said a couple 100,000 views on like every video and then he said all of a sudden his account like went from that to like 1000 views like significantly smaller and he shares the exact numbers. But he did actually say it's like they tested it within the team to figure out what types of content gets the most views and he noticed kind of this He grew, and then it didn't like a shark fin. He grew and then it liked his tank. And it never has really, like, come back. You've got a black mark. Yeah. And he discuss how he believes that in the background. This is happening. And so what, what do you do with this information? Number one, you have to understand, don't take it personally, if your stuff isn't going viral, or just because a video is going viral does not mean it's actually better content, or that they're doing a better job. The other thing is to not use the views or engagement purely as a vanity metric to think that the content is working or not. Because you and I have shared before Remember, I said, some videos that I make will make me money, and it has barely any views. But it goes to the right person, right. And so you want to base if you're using, you know, we're talking about marketing, right? You're using content to build a business, always keep the main thing, the main thing they say right, which is focus on how is it helping you generate your business versus getting caught? I think in the going viral trap, which is, let's be honest, the stuff that's gonna go viral, usually has nothing to do with building or growing businesses. And it's usually kind of seal your content.
Blake Beus  6:20  Yeah, it, it's, it's super interesting, just how, I mean, you talked about it before, with the addictive behaviors, right? This is not news. There's a lot of Addictive Behaviors built into social media intentionally, intentionally to try to get people to spend more time on the platform. And we talk about from the marketing perspective of part of your marketing efforts is to get people off of the plateau. Yeah, into your email list or into your shopping cart or onto your purchase pages. And so you have to overcome some of these addictive behavior, barriers. But in addition, that you need to really understand how a lot of these things work and how you might feel amazing that you had a piece of content go viral. But that went viral, maybe because you got heated up. Yep. And you didn't get any sales from that. Yep. And so you've got to balance that and really think about what your oops, I hit the table that I think about what you're doing, and, and why you're doing it. But the platforms are doing this because they want I mean, all of these platforms have a cycle, right? So Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter are are all huge. They've been huge. And then tick tock came in, tech came in and they needed to get adoption. So one of the ways they decided to do that was through this heating up, someone could show up, they could choose they liked that their content works, and they make them explode. And now this person is essentially a goal or we talked about a little bit earlier. A rabbit Yep. Right. So like the Greyhound races, they have a rabbit that goes around the track. And that's what they're all chasing. And well, now everybody's like, I want to be like this person. Look how many views they got and everything. So I'm hopping on Tik Tok. This person got that many views and, and so they were able to get just a ton of viewership and pull people away from the other platforms. And that's how, that's how they did it. But that doesn't necessarily translate over into money. And we're a we're a business marketing podcast here. And that is our goal. And so having something go viral and tick tock might equal $0 I know you this wasn't tick tock, but you told me and we talked about this on the podcast, you had someone that had I think they were on Instagram and they had 600,000 Plus Oh, yeah. followers and, and you had reached out and they had reached out to you for marketing. And I think your quote was they had made zero sales. They literally zero they were getting comments and engagement, likes followers were growing. But zero sales. So they did all of this stuff. And they weren't literally weren't making any money,
Greg Marshall  9:11  which basically tells you that, be careful what you're measuring as success, right? Like, make sure you're keeping, the main thing is you're trying to either generate a lead or generate a sale. If you're using these platforms for that reason. Make sure that's what you're measuring, and not getting caught up in like, how many followers you have, or, you know, how many likes or comments you have, because, you know, I can tell you like, I run ads for myself I you know, put content out myself. I don't have nearly the engagements, the comments, the followership as some other businesses Yep, my stuff works and does translate directly into business. And so I'm okay with that. Like, initially I wasn't I'll be honest, like initially I'd be like, Man, I'm only getting so many views. No one's gonna take me serious because everyone's judging on how many people are following and engaging and all that. But I finally got over that and pass that where I said, but it's generating me business. So why am I not excited about that? Because at the end of the day, that's the goal is for it to generate business, not just to get reach.
Blake Beus  10:21  Yeah, right. Yeah, well, and think about it this way, depending on the nature of your business. And let's talk about maybe a coaching or coaching or a consulting type of business where you're, you have a simple funnel, where you have some sort of way to generate interest and get your name out there, then people sign up to book a call or something like that. And then you sell them a service. And if it's consulting, could be something that's like maybe $1,000 Consulting package or, or $1,000 a month, or $200 a month for XYZ, whatever, depending on what your business is. But let's just say it's, you're selling $1,000 Consulting package, which is a very low price consulting package for a consultant. You have a video that gets 20 views, someone sees it. They're interested, they book calling you make a sale. That's $1,000. Yeah. That's completely feasible. That's the kind of stuff you do with with your marketing. And in your sales. I think he told me once you had a video that had 20 views, someone approached you and ended up being a client, they said, Well, that's the video of yours that I watched.
Greg Marshall  11:26  Exactly. And I was shocked, because I'm like, that's when the light ball hit, you know? And I was like, Oh, it doesn't matter how many views you get.
Blake Beus  11:32  Yeah. And but you have this person over here with 600,000 followers posting content two, three times a day putting all of this effort into that with zero sales. Yep. Which strategy is better? Yep. The one where you're getting the actual sales, but you don't, you don't feel cool. You're I mean,
Greg Marshall  11:51  bingo, you just hit exactly what I'm gonna say is that one looks cooler than the other. Right? It looks cooler to say, hey, I have 600,000 followers, you know, 30,000 likes, you know, 40,000 comments. And then the flip side is, yeah, I have 400 views. Two comments. And again, one fall right, buddy, in the last,
Blake Beus  12:14  I lost a follower. But I got two new clients for like a monthly, you know, monthly consulting, or something like that. And that's obviously way better. But it's not. It's not cool. And I think, trying to put words to what I'm thinking about here, I almost feel like the social media platforms have intentionally or unintentionally got us all to buy in to the followers views, all of that as being this really, really, really important, like, life changing thing for our own, like personal life and everything. And so that's why I'm sure you get this. That's why people that are making sales and making money with their current strategy still feel like they're failing. Yep. Because they aren't getting hundreds of 1000s of subscribers and they're not getting those million views on Tik Tok. Yep, yet they're running a profitable business that's growing yet, but they still feel like they're failing. And I feel like the social media companies have imprinted that concept into our head.
Greg Marshall  13:27  Yep. I agree. I think that's, it's obviously it's something that is consistently post, right. It's all about engagement. It's all about this, sorry about that. And they're like, but if you chase that, you'll start doing things for the wrong end goal. Right? If you want to get more engagements you can do go jump off a really high building that will get unbelievable engagements or do bungee jumping or go swim with a sharp, that will get you a ton of views. But how does that translate into actual like growing your business, right? I mean, it doesn't. And so that's where that it can be a trap, because it can drive your behavior. That's why you see so many crazy things on social media, because it's like, it drives that behavior because other people see, look how many views and likes, this got this crazy material that I did. Let me put a bunch of tattoos on my face. Let me try to smoke five things instead of one. Let me try to, you know, and you're doing like this really crazy behavior? Or what do they call it all for the cloud, right to get these likes, and these follows? And it's like, what is that actually? It's like, we've been duped by the social media companies to think that all that actually matters. And in fact, you know what, here's another example. There's a rapper that I remember seeing has millions of followers, okay? And he's, he's very well known people will know who he is. But He's younger. He's The younger demo coming up anyways, he has all these followers. And he found his his record sales were extremely low. And his social media following is all about the sensationalism he's doing. You know, he's doing these crazy things on there. And it gets all this Hey, man, look how crazy he is. He's so cool. But then his record sales were almost non existent. So what does that tell you? That tells you just because you have this following, and you're acting the dancing, monkey or whatever, doesn't mean you're going to actually translate to sales. And that to me is like the perfect example. Because this guy has tons of reach tons of notoriety, no sales.
Blake Beus  15:44  Yeah. And I guarantee you in you know, we're in Utah right now, I guarantee you in Utah, there is a business that has maybe two or three employees that no one's really ever heard of. Yep, that is making a million plus dollars a year. Yep. Because they're focused on business principles as their focus. They're focused on business principles and delivering product or service that might be boring, but it's super useful. Yep.
Greg Marshall  16:14  And they're making,
Blake Beus  16:17  they're making great money, but they haven't had to do all of this crazy stuff to get notoriety, because it just doesn't always translate over. And that's why that's why you really got to think about a plan and think about your strategy for getting out there. Because we're all about getting out there. We're all about running the ads, having a presence on social media, even if even if you're not focused on organic growth, just showing up there. But yeah, because that adds some authority, but having a plan to align the content and the people that are following that content, align that with an offer. Yep, that is maybe either either book a call or check out this purchase, or check out this product or whatever. And then getting them on an email list and start building that relationship of a cost a customer for life.
Greg Marshall  17:11  Yeah, I think that's that's the key is basically being okay. With not don't feel the pressure of hitting these big numbers, like I know, I felt I needed to do when I first started. Because it doesn't translate it to what you think is going
Blake Beus  17:27  to try. And you might not have control over those scenarios, like we just talked about with this tick tock. They literally chose which people they wanted to go viral, that would be a shining star that other people would want to be like or look at, or whatever.
Greg Marshall  17:41  Well think about that you have no control on that. Right. So since you have no control doesn't even mean that your talent alone, or the content alone actually even drove this behavior. So there you just got chosen, which that's not a long term, long term play, to be honest.
Blake Beus  17:58  But what you do have control over is putting some effort into getting some ads in front of the right kind of people putting some effort into your messaging, your first offer, putting some effort into the follow up and the actual sales process, which we talk about here, where he you know, you've talked about, you've bumped into some businesses where they are great at getting the people in the door. Yep, terrible at the close. Yep. Right. But putting, but you have control over those areas. So instead of just putting time and effort into this area of views and engagement and all of that, where you might not have control over it, put area put put the effort into the areas where you do have control over it. Now, if you're a well established business away to scoop up some more, you could hire a social media team or a full time social media contractor that could help you create that content. And then you can grow your reach org and that would make sense. But if you aren't to that position yet, you're I would say 99 times out of 100. better off putting $50 a month in ADS. Yep. Yeah, into a direct offer to call you or get on the phone with you or to sign up for something. Yep. I think you're better putting that 50 bucks a month in ads than you are trying to come up with a daily content strategy for organic,
Greg Marshall  19:12  I would agree. And I think that's it's all about investing. We all have limited time, right? So you want to invest your time in the most leveraged way possible, that will get you the result you're going after? And in this case, we're we're after business growth and sales and, and profits, right? And so you want to think what behaviors can I do now, that will give me the best chance to hit my goals, and spend all your time on that. And don't get sidetracked with going after the wrong goals? Because what you end up doing is wasting a lot of time. And if you're losing all that time, you're also losing opportunities to generate revenue. So you really have to, you know, choose wisely. And I'm just saying from personal experience, early stages I thought you had to do that. And now I'm like, I don't think it has any correlation. So. So yeah. So choose wisely, make sure you're doing things that actually drive your business.
Blake Beus  20:11  And final thought here, I just while you were saying that, I think we're seeing a resurgence of people moving away from social media platforms in the way that they've been using them in the past, I guess, I don't think social media is going away. But I think people are reevaluating what they're using social media for and how they're using it. Yeah, especially in the marketing aspect of things. And, and I think, I think now's a good time to be on the forefront of that mental shift. And it's going to be literally a shift back to the basics, where you're going to see people starting to really go back to the email lists, and that might manifest into text message lists, but with high quality, good content on text messages. So who gets spammed or blocked. But But But moving back into that kind of older technology, where you can have that conversation with people and not worry about a heating up algorithm. But people are opting in to hear what you have to say. And you're not, you don't have to worry about the weird political relationship between US and China and where tick tock sits in you don't have to put any mental effort into that because people have opted in to receive some messages from you. And you're putting effort into high quality relevant content for those people. That leads them into getting a service or a product that is extremely useful for them and high quality for them. I think. I think we're seeing the days of the garbage. Yeah, products like the hacky, the hacky the FBA businesses where you're just selling dropship kind of SCONUL garbage like and moving towards smaller businesses rails that are focused on delivering quality at a profit at a profit margin, but not exploding up to becoming bajillion airs. Exactly. I think I think that's that we're new way we're moving away and honestly,
Greg Marshall  22:13  I think thank goodness,
Blake Beus  22:15  it's it's a much healthier place to be for nearly every business and there's so many businesses out there that can do extremely well. But never explode on Tik Tok or, or Instagram and that's okay.
Greg Marshall  22:30  That's totally fine. Just build a strong good fundamental business.
Blake Beus  22:35  And yeah, focus on that. And And yep, I mean, that's all I have to say about the
Greg Marshall  22:40  subject. Yeah. So I think I mean, so yeah, as we wrap this up, Blake, how do people get ahold it's like, you start calm, and they get a hold of me at Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session call. And until next time, see you later. Bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  Alright, how do we start this one off?
Greg Marshall  0:02  We're talking about micro lead generate. Right,
Blake Beus  0:05  right, right.
Greg Marshall  0:06  And maybe I don't even know if that's a name that someone has come up, you know, somewhere else, we're or you want to take credit for it, because technically you call it, which is micro lead generation is, well, why don't you explain kind of what we're talking about with micro lead generation? And how you came up with that name? Yeah, yeah. So
Blake Beus  0:25  I mean, everybody in their dog talks about lead generation, getting them, you know, off of social media or off of wherever and onto your email list or your text messaging list. And all of that is great, everybody thinks about that talks about that, always putting effort into that. But there's like a little mini step before that, that you can do that works really well, under certain circumstances, that that should be considered. And it's this micro step, where you're basically basically generating leads that you don't know much about them yet, you don't know their name, you don't know, their email address you met may not even know exactly how many people are on that list. Yeah, but you're putting, you're putting concerted effort into building that list of leads, that you can then follow up with an offer for either, you know, a solid lead generation, or a product purchase offer or something like that. And so essentially, what we're talking about here is building audiences via whatever means that you can, that are much, much, much more likely to be interested in what your next offer is, that you can then target with traffic or with paid ads. Yep. So you're building a list of leads, but you don't know anything about them, other than they got on the list through whatever you were doing to get him on the list. So yeah, that's that's the concept there?
Greg Marshall  1:54  Well, here's, here's a question. And you can actually do this both organically and paid. You can, you can utilize content and put money behind it to build this micro audience. But I'd like to get your opinion on. Why do you think not as many people talk about this audience? Proactively building right?
Blake Beus  2:13  I think it's because it's it, it's hard to conceptualize what's happening there. It's not necessarily tangible, like an email list, I can go in there. And I can see oh, hey, we got x more leads on the list. My list is now you know, 15,000 people big Yeah, I spent this money to get there. I have all that information about them. And oftentimes, like business owners, whatever they want the hard numbers, well, they should want the hard numbers. Yeah. But sometimes there's these more intangible things you have to think about. And frankly, this used to be way more common. Back in the mail marketing days, the all of that stuff 50 years ago, because you just didn't have access to the data. Yep. But I felt my gut is telling me, that's why we don't have people talking about or not talking about it in this this way, per se.
Greg Marshall  3:10  Yeah. And I think with these types of audiences, too, I think you're right, with the tangible, right, you don't have a tangible name, phone number email, to kind of control the, where the direction of the nurturing goes. But the tools that we have available now are, you can actually retarget or run ads towards people who have watched your videos who have liked your posts, or commented, and those people, in my opinion, if you were to define, like, you know, when you have this conversation, should I do paid? Or should I do organic, and there's always like one side, that's like, it's all about pay the others, it's all organic? Well, on the organic side, if, if you're willing to invest the time, effort and energy to build this organic following to grow your business, then that would mean that would mean that you believe that these audiences are valuable. Right? Or else you wouldn't do it right? Right. So why not proactively both organically and pay try to grow these audiences so that you can go ahead and try to get them involved in whatever it is that you are offering? Right? Right. And that's kind of where I see not everyone is even ready to give you their name phone number email right away. Some people need to see a little bit more ago. Can I trust giving my name or an email to this company because I don't want them hounding me or, or emailing me all the time or calling me right
Blake Beus  4:39  or maybe they're not quite ready to purchase not because they don't trust you, but because they're not to that point. Yep. They need a little bit of leveling up. So you're capturing people kind of pre you know, pre being in the market ready to buy and you It's still a strategy that works.
Greg Marshall  5:01  And I think it's a more long term strategy as well, because you're building these audiences of people that obviously aren't ready to buy right now. But if you think about it, there's only a certain percentage of people that are ready to buy or take an action today. Right? Right. But there's a much larger percentage of people that are at least starting to become aware of what is out there to help them out. So when they are in that moment, they can make a decision. And if you start early enough, you can become that first go to person and they're like, in fact, I have someone that I'm talking to you, where they said, Yeah, I've seen your ads for six months. You know, in your mind, you're like, wow, six months, that's a really long time for you to take action. But that means he fits this profile, right? The person that at the time of seeing it was not complete in market, right, not in the need that day or that time, but now is, and because I was in front of him this entire time, he decided to reach out. And it just gives you a because it almost removes the like the sales part of it at that point. Because they're basically saying, like, I'm ready to buy, just what do you have to offer? Right. But it takes the patience, yeah, to do that, over a long period of time, which is, which is challenging. Yeah.
Blake Beus  6:22  Which is the reason why starting and stopping your tactics, campaigns, even even your organic is so harmful to a strategy, always, always having a little bit of something in the works me, maybe you're crazy busy, and you don't have time to put effort into organic posts. And organic is a big part of your strategy. Just phone it in and show up couple of times a week to at least have something, right. Same thing with ads, maybe your ads aren't quite working, and you need to revamp the strategy rather than shutting everything completely down. Maybe shift, you know, shift 10% of the budget you're spending into just some sort of awareness campaign or, or some, some getting some videos out in front of somebody that maybe isn't a specific offer, just to kind of keep people seeing seeing what's going on. And you're spending this much while you revamp the other parts of your strategy or something. And I
Greg Marshall  7:22  do think that having a continuous marketing plan, it's almost like you can't measure outside of E commerce, right? E commerce is pretty straightforward. When people see something they typically want to buy or their cycle isn't, you know, they're not waiting 90 days to write a t shirt. Right? But if you're in the service industry, right, or you're selling something more expensive, people take much longer to actually commit and buy something, right. So you have to like, keep doing things. And it's almost like you have to It's like investing, right dollar cost averaging. It's almost like you have to have $1 cost averaging mindset of like you're investing over and over again. To get those people that when they're ready, they're ready to buy is making your job easier. Because if you stop Yeah, then you lose the potential that compounding interest or compounding revenue.
Blake Beus  8:13  Yeah, it's the reason why you don't see say, Coca Cola. We're making enough money, stop all that. Yeah. Like everybody knows who focus. But they're never going to stop their ads, because they know that you gotta remind people keeping and reminding people or whatever it it keeps the momentum going. So yeah, let's talk about some specific strategies. We'll talk about the concept, right, like, how would someone actually put this together? Well, I know my kind of several different ways, but I want to pick your brain on death. What are the ways you would have someone implement that maybe for different types, like a service or a product or whatever?
Greg Marshall  8:52  Yeah, I mean, basically, I'm a big proponent of video, because I think video, you can, you can target pretty pretty well with video as far as like, how long people are watching through on most social media platforms. You can't do that on YouTube yet. But I hear that that's coming.
Blake Beus  9:10  But you can target them after they hit a threshold
Greg Marshall  9:13  can use Yeah, you can talk to them after they watch at least 30 seconds, at least 30 seconds
Blake Beus  9:17  of your video, but you can't target like on Facebook, you can target if people watch 10% 50% 90% 90% But YouTube, you basically have they've watched 3030 seconds or more of your video or ad or they haven't. Exactly that's how you go.
Greg Marshall  9:33  Okay, and so, but with that being said, that gives you information that can you can pretty much figure out like who's really interested
Blake Beus  9:41  well in 30 seconds is a long time as for a video ad Yep. You can almost guarantee that the person is quite interested if they haven't hit the skip button. Yep. And they've watched your ad for 30 seconds or more. And
Greg Marshall  9:55  I mean, and the biggest strategy I like to use is to develop the Killer, deliver value upfront and you know you're here to deliver value all the time. But really, all that really means is give them something that they can tangibly use immediately. Yeah, right. Like, after they watched the video, they should be able to take an action and either solve a problem or entertain themselves to do something. But they have to walk away with being able to do something with the content. And I had this conversation with a client yesterday, we were talking about, she has some content that's working really well. And she switched up her strategy. Two, this new strategies working really well. But she was like, I'm not really sure why it's working better than the other one. And the main shift that she made that maybe she didn't realize was, in her videos, she actually created to where the person could take the content that was given to them, and immediately implement it, versus the other one was almost speaking a little bit maybe over their heads, right? Not not to be like condescending, but just, you know, you get stuck, kind of like in your own space, and you're talking and your language versus new customers language. And that's why it's working. I think the key is, when they watch something, they should feel like, oh, I can actually, it's almost like they're testing you before having to commit to buying from you.
Blake Beus  11:19  Yeah, I would say one of the differences, because we can even illustrate that with this podcast right here. The difference in those types of content is first we talked about the concepts. Yeah. So we're giving people concept ideas, but how to actually implement those concepts is where the actionable piece comes in. So if we wanted to deliver value up front, based on what we're talking about right here, I probably wouldn't start on an ad with the concept. Yeah, I would start with the, here's a very specific strategy you can use to build these micro lead lists. Yes. And we've talked about that. So you've talked about video and retargeting. That's one of my favorites. Like, if I were a local business, you're going to do globally, but local businesses, oftentimes don't think about the strategy. And it's super cheap for what they use. But if I were local video business, the easiest way to do this is to just create a video ad and deliver some value up front. We've, we've talked about, I'll give you an example in a minute, but deliver the value up front, run ads on all the platforms for video views, but just in your local area, and you can get super cheap video views that way. And now you're building retargeting lists or micro lead lists on each of these platforms. And then you follow that up with either a lead list based on your business model or a purchase based on your business model or something like that. It's a very easy strategy where you can saturate an area locally for not a lot of money. Yep, and start building these micro lead lists that you can then convert into leads or sales.
Greg Marshall  12:53  Yeah, and I think the the benefits of doing this right is everyone, I believe, should use this because it's valuable. But the benefit is, it doesn't remove anyone out of using this strategy. Because of cost. Right? Anyone can do this, you could start as little as like $1 a day, and start building the so. So even if you don't have a big budget, you could start this strategy immediately. And even if you have a big budget, I still believe you should use this strategy to keep yourself in front of the target audience that you want to work with. Because that's to me, it's like, you're investing in the long term, and you're trying to get market share, right, and you're trying to get people to want to do business with you. And sometimes it for some people it takes longer than others to decide if they want to work with you, or because everyone's getting courted, you know, yeah, every day, all different types of ads and things like that. But if you keep showing up and giving them things of value, where they can tangibly take what you talked about, and use it immediately. And you just keep doing that. Over time, they're just gonna say it's almost like they've tested out your product on their own without utilizing you yet. And they have already had success, they're gonna be more prone to listening to what you have to say, than someone that's like, hey, I can make a million dollars in one day, but you got to buy for me, right?
Blake Beus  14:23  Yeah, absolutely. And it gives you it's really just one of the simplest strategies to set up as well. You don't have to create any complicated funnels or anything like that. And literally, anybody can do this, even if you're not an ADS expert, or whatever. In fact, it's a really good way to kind of test out an idea also, you you run some ads about something and see how people respond to that ad. You can spend 50 100 bucks to test out a concept before you actually build out the whole funnel and everything like that. So it's really one of the easiest strategies, however,
Greg Marshall  15:02  yeah, it is. And it's it's cost effective. It's easy. It's it's actually so simple, that it's easy to not do. Right. It's one of those tactics where it's like, it's so simple that you overcomplicated, right? It's like, well, you can if you just did it, yeah. And repeatedly did it, it will
Blake Beus  15:21  work. Yeah. I think another reason you don't see this happen very often, is probably because of how media buyers and marketing agencies show that they're delivering value. And what I mean by that is, if someone goes and hires a media buyer for, you know, $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month, or $10,000 a month, whatever their business is, and wherever they're at, those media buyers now feel, rightfully so an obligation to show what they're actually getting done for the client. But because of these micro leads, you don't have a lot of data about them, you don't have their email address, their name, their age, you have you know, nothing about them. Other than that the list is there. And the list is maybe this size, you don't even know how big the list is. It's hard for them to say, well, we have all of these micro leads, lists and in about, you know, in a few months, you're gonna start seeing more sales, they want to start delivering value now, which is fine, but having these conversations so if you're working with a media buyer, or marketing agency, and they're not doing this, I would definitely say talk with them about this and say, Okay, let's implement this. And let's put a percentage of our budget towards this as part of a long term strategy. It doesn't have to be a big percentage of your budget, it could be a small percentage of your budget should be part it should be part of your budget, and it should run continual continually.
Greg Marshall  16:44  Yep. And I think too, because you're right on the money there with, you know, with marketing agencies, you have to show ROI, right? And the ROI is like, basically, how much money am I making? Yeah, but it's almost I mean, yes, you need to have that metric. But it's almost like you should be focusing more on the process. It's kind of like in sales, right? When I would sales, train people, I would say, don't focus on your sales goal, like what your your quota is supposed to hit focus on every day, did I do the amount of activities that are correctly necessary for me to get there, right. And it's the same thing in marketing, you have to be thinking more? It's almost like you should be focusing more on how do I get the activities done, to make sure that I'm getting a return and measuring that versus just the end result and return? Yeah, right. Because there's a lot like, for example, I was listening to a podcast yesterday, where they talked about when they scale clients, they know a client is not scaling aggressive enough. If their return on adspend is too high. A lot of people true. Leave. Yeah, that's good, too. Like, yeah, you're getting a 30x return on adspend. You're probably not spending anywhere near the amount you should to grow.
Blake Beus  18:03  Yeah, yeah. Cuz think about it. Think about it. A 30x return on your ad spend is not sustainable, long term. Like it just doesn't happen. So if you are getting a 30x on your ad spend, you can't be thinking, You know what, it's gonna be great making a 30x on my ad spend for the next 10 years. Yeah, it's going to be amazing. It won't work. It's not going to happen. So if you're getting a 30x right now, that means there's a lot of market share that you can kind of scoop up and start building those lists, internal lists, building customer lists, whatever. So you actually have a much stronger foundation for the next five years for the next 10 years or whatever.
Greg Marshall  18:37  Yeah, it's it's funny, because I think when they I had, I've never heard it said that way. And I was like, that makes sense. Because like, for me, if I looked at something and just said, Well, I'm getting X return asthma. Right? Or, or the infamous I'm getting very low cost for purchases. It's like well, those usually do come from retargeting, right? People who are warmed up already. Yep. And the issue is that audience is only so big.
Blake Beus  19:06  Yeah, it's, yeah,
Greg Marshall  19:08  you'll run through it pretty quick. Yeah, if you want to, like grow, you need to go outside of that audience. And if you were able to find a 30x return on cold traffic, you probably will get shut down on these platforms, because they would be like, That is way too high. You're doing something you ain't supposed to
Blake Beus  19:25  run into that was running my stuff. We were getting really good return on adspend. And Facebook kept saying, We're shutting down your ad account because clearly, these guys are scamming the system. And I'm like, we're not scamming anything literally running ads to this landing page and selling a thing and delivering it.
Greg Marshall  19:41  The sad part was that to the same, the same offer that we have been running the whole year, the whole year, and so yeah, but I think you know, when you think about basically your returns, you almost need to think more about and I'm seeing this shift a lot actually even on economy stores the lifetime value versus customer acquisition costs instead of customer acquisition costs to average order value. Right? Right. So selling one off thinking more about selling the customer over and over and over again, which I think I came into marketing differently because I came from a different industry, the gym industry where that's kind of built into that. So you're almost trained to think that way. But in E commerce is the opposite, right? Before it's, can I get a cost of purchase at 10? Get an average order value 35 And make the difference and make that like, split, right. But now with acquisition costs going up? And you know, there's less tracking, let's target all that. It's more challenging, and there's more competition. Yeah. Right. And with that, you need to figure out
Blake Beus  20:49  if you're thinking like, oh, I cut you off, go ahead.
Greg Marshall  20:51  Do you need to figure out? No, you just need to figure out like that model. Edit, like if you're trying to scale like, and when we say scale, that's kind of like a generalized word, right? When scaling really means like, you're trying to absolutely destroy it. When it comes to growing your business. Like you're trying to spend 1000 2000 5000 $10,000 a day to like really capture market share, at those numbers, you're not going to be able to sustain what you're getting at 50 bucks a day. Yeah. Right. And so it requires a different kind of thinking.
Blake Beus  21:25  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Before we wrap up, I want to talk about one other strategy I've seen people do that I think can work pretty well, given the right circumstances. So if someone already has a pretty strong organic strategy, right, so they're posting good content regularly organic, and this can be on literally any platform, yep. And they're seeing some growth and things like that. But organic is already part of what they're doing. And they're very consistent in getting those posts. One way you can start building these micro lists for that type of a business, is to literally take every single post and put five to $10 of ad spend on each one of those. Yep. Right? Whatever, whatever that works. And just target an audience that is similar to your existing followers. And just put that out there and just make that part of your strategy. So I'm posting every day. You know, if you put five $5 on each of those every day, five times 30 is in a month is 150 bucks a month? Yeah. Right. So to, to some businesses, that is not very much more what they're spending. But it can can over time over a period of year or two years, or three years, can just explode your micro lists your retargeting audiences everything,
Greg Marshall  22:47  and you'll see greater, like, all of a sudden, they'll have more reach out having questions, and they know that so. And that's the point of marketing is really to kind of generate that demand. Yep. Right. And then once you generate the demand, then it goes into sales. Yep. How do I monetize this? Yeah, man. So
Blake Beus  23:05  and if you're, if you're that seems to work. If you're on a tighter budget, what I've seen people do is they say, Okay, I have a good organic posting strategy on whatever platform, but my budget doesn't really allow for an extra 150 bucks a month, because we're kind of just starting out whatever been there got it makes sense. What you can then do is take last week's best ad, which had the most reach and those comments, whatever, and then put five or 10 bucks behind that one. So you only have to do that once a week. So $10 Each week, for a month, that's an extra $40 a month. Now, for some businesses, that makes a whole lot more sense. You're still getting a lot of benefit out of out of that. You're still executing the strategy. But you know, you instead of 150 bucks that month, you're only spending 4040 that month, and that's for some businesses, that makes a little bit more sense.
Greg Marshall  23:52  It's start where you're at, but with the intent of always trying to grow if that's your goal to grow your business.
Blake Beus  23:58  Yeah. So well, let's wrap this up. I think we think we've covered it pretty well. Greg, how can people get in touch with you,
Greg Marshall  24:05  Greg Marshall Dotco, and you can book a free strategy session and Blake Blake beus.com. Alright, so next time later, goodbye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  So we talked a lot about split tests. Yep. And we've talked about it a lot in the past and everything. And I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast episode recently called, is Google Search getting worse? And in there, they talked with some actual representatives from Google, about some of the things and I wanted to bring up because I thought it was relevant in the fact that the interpretation of the test results is incorrect. And even Google did this. Yeah. And so I kind of wanted to point this pointed out. So it's, it's I don't know if you feel this way. But I literally feel that Google search is getting
Greg Marshall  0:40  worse. As far as being accurate. Yeah, what
Blake Beus  0:43  you're looking at feels harder for me to find what I want. I don't know. Have you noticed? Is that been similar to you or your, your good,
Greg Marshall  0:51  we know what I'm not. When it comes to Google search, and like, maybe I'm looking for somewhere to eat or products or something like that. I don't use it a ton outside of like researching marketing stuff. But it does feel a little bit less like integrated. Like, it does feel like I do have to, like, look a little bit deeper for what I want. Part of it could be the ads above six or eight or 12. Yeah, search ads before he can even get to the camera. And so yeah, you know, I probably haven't been paying attention as close because I'll just keep scrolling. So I find when I look, right. But if you're talking about immediacy, like I'm typing something, and it's not right there, I would say yes, it has gotten worse, because I'm not, I didn't notice I am scrolling more on Google. Yeah, what's the cause of that? So
Blake Beus  1:41  there's, there's a lot of different causes for that. One of the things I do for a lot of my clients as I help find solutions for them, right, so, so, right now I have quite a few clients where we have data integration issues, right. So they want to bring their marketing and advertising data, and pair that and merge that with their email marketing CRM, like HubSpot, or or any of those and merge those things together. So they can actually have actionable data. And so, so I deal with a lot of these kinds of data integration things, but I have to do a lot of searching to find, maybe they need a tool or something like that. So I'll search for a tool or an integration system or whatever. And I would say over 50% of the articles that I find these days, are something along the lines of, you know, the top 10 tools for this. Yeah, and it's just regurgitated content. And then at the end, the paragraph is almost identical on all of them, it says something like, so as you can tell, no matter what you choose, you're gonna find a good solution. And it really depends on your needs. And I'm like, I want an opinion. Yeah, I want you to and you could tell that whoever danced, take a stance, and you can tell it, whoever wrote the article, didn't write the article to actually help you make a decision, they probably haven't even used any of the software, they're just kind of regurgitating things. And you're getting a lot more of that content on Google. In addition, you're getting Google adding things like they have, they have, depending on what you're searching, they'll have like a box along the top with some information, or they'll have the sidebar box, like a little widget on there. You see that if I search for like a movie star or something like a little box, there, they'll have like, if you're searching for a restaurant or something, they'll have like a widget with placements and things like that. So what kind of the end result is that when you search for something, you could have widgets, ads, another widget, a thing on the side, and then your organic search results, you literally have to scroll down under everything. Now, I don't hate ads. So obviously, we talk about ads all the time. I think ads are a very, very important part of running a business and marketing and everything. But Google has done a lot of different things to try to maximize their profits, get more people to stay on their system, as opposed to like bouncing off on to something else, and whatever. So that's a this is some foundational knowledge. On this podcast, they interview the person at Google and they shared this person had been with Google for a long time, 15 years or whatever. And, and essentially, they ran an accidental split test, okay, for 10 years. So they had 10 years of Google search data. And here's here's what the test was they had a test where some people would not get anything other than just the search results, and a few ads on top and then everyone else would get all the new bells and whistles. And as they added new bells and whistles that got busier and everything. The person who wrote that test was the person they were actually interviewing saying she had moved on been promoted whatever. And then 10 years down the road, someone comes to her and says, Hey, we noticed a glitch. And she's, they start talking about it. And it was her test that she wrote the code for and never got turned off. She got promoted. moved on, and everybody forgot about it. Yep. And so she said, Well, before we actually turn that off, yeah. Let's analyze the data. Yep. And in the podcast, she's she, the, because the question asked was, by the podcast interviewer was, do all of those widgets and things actually make Google better? Yeah. And this was where and when, when they asked better? Are they referring to user experience or business better for the user? of Google? I want to clarify, yes, yeah, that's important, better for the people who are actually using Google, because those are the people you're best paying for those of your customers, right. And so they did an analysis of 10 years worth of data. Now, that's trillions and trillions of data points and searches and things. That's a lot of data. And the conclusion they came to was that there was a significant, let's see exactly how she put it. And this is where I was like, No, you're wrong. She said that, we found that people that had all of the widgets, and everything did, I think it was like three to 9% more searches in Google than people who didn't. And the conclusion she came to was that, therefore, people like the widgets, and all of that more than they like not having them.
Greg Marshall  6:46  So now it just sounds like you got lost, so you just keep searching,
Blake Beus  6:51  right? That was my exact thing. I said, as soon as I heard her conclusion, I was like, or, you know, people were frustrated and couldn't find what they were looking for. So they had they were forced to search for. And so the whole reason I wanted to tell this story and bring all of this up is that we need to make sure we're interpreting, interpreting the results of our split test correctly. And we need to follow those up with other tests to confirm what we believe, you know, we need to think about that.
Greg Marshall  7:25  Here's a couple of questions I have for you, since you're heavy in the data world. Yeah. What is like? And this is, like a personal question from me, as far as I would like to know, your opinion? What's the statistical relevance? What's like the minimum amount, that you really should be able to say, this is relevant, right? Like if you run an AB test, and it's like, you had, you know, five purchases? And maybe the ads been seen 2000 times, right? That, that seems a little bit less accurate than if you were like, you had 50 purchases. But the ads we're seeing 400,000 times, right, right, is there like what's kind of that threshold of like, where you where you can actually take the data and say, this means something.
Blake Beus  8:14  So the there are actual math equations to measure this, and it's called the standard deviations. It's a statistical thing. And it's been a long time since I've taken my stand, and actually done the math. But statisticians actually use a mathematical formula to determine the relevance of a data point. But essentially, it takes, it takes into consideration the sample size. So in the ads case, how many impressions it got, and how many people it was put in front of, because those are two different things, impressions versus number of unique impressions or number of unique people. So you would measure it based on impressions versus based on people and run the analysis that confirm compared to how many conversions or objectives were met. And then you you run some statistical analysis. And then if it's within a certain standard deviation of the, everything's measured on like a bell curve, right? So the relevance is right there in the middle of the bell curve, and the standard deviations are measured off to the side and the relevance is determined based on how far you are, how far you are from the center, but also how quick the bell curve goes up and down. If it's a slope that's like this, the relevance you need a wider standard deviation in order for you to say okay, within the standard deviation, we have a 90% relevance because we're getting 90% of the people but we have more variation that relevance right. Whereas if you have a very sharp curve within within like a half deviation, you get a 90 or a 95% row relevance because as that gets 95% of God's statistical significance, I'm going to I'm going to take out to answer your question as a real, central really quick to answer your question is, with Facebook ads and things like that, unless you're running very, very large dollar amounts, what I would do is kind of go on gut feelings and then follow up with a test. So for example, 4000 impressions with five conversions is more significant than 400 impressions with five conversions. Yep. Even though you have the same number of conversions, that might just be you happen to hit the right people at the right time, right up front. Which can be misleading. It can be mislim. So if you were to shut that off and be like, Oh, okay, let's just bump the budget up. 10x. Yeah. It might not scale appropriately. So you got to use your gut, and then run follow up tests on whatever you're testing.
Greg Marshall  10:48  So basically, to what I'm gathering is, the more kind of data you have, the better as far as like the sample size, right? It's going to be more accurate when you can actually make better decisions versus small decisions. And another. Here's another point, the reason the reason why I asked you that I so a lady that I really respect in the marketing world, she heard she had put out a tweet the other day that I was like, that's an interesting point, because I have seen that, but I've never been able to, because you taught the opposite. So I've never been able to like, figure it out why that is. And she had mentioned that click through rate really isn't as important as people think, especially as you scale. As you scale, the click through rate goes down. Yeah, but you're still getting the returns and purchases, she used the sample size, where she had a client that had a click through rate of like maybe 1%, or like point eight, zero, right. And I was getting a two to three row as at I think she said $500 a day in span. And she had another client spending 15 grand a day click the rate was like, point oh, eight or like really low. But still, they were maintaining a two to three return on adspend. So she had used that data point to basically determine this should give you an idea that click through rate is probably not the real metric to measure the success of an app. Yeah. And I thought, well, that's interesting, because I have seen like ads that scale really well that are below the 1%. Click through rate.
Blake Beus  12:25  Yeah, I would definitely say that. You what you need to do is look at the metric that makes the most sense, given the circumstances. And this is where I want to say gut or intuition. But But think about it. So for example, if you have a campaign that is new and doesn't have really any conversions, or the conversions are pretty low. Yep. conversions are a difficult metric to determine the successful of the success of that ad, because there's some bottlenecks elsewhere. So that's when you kind of move closer to the top of the funnel. And say, okay, maybe click through rate is the most important metric for us to look at right now between these two ads, because our spend is a little low, maybe it's a new ad account or so we don't have an established audiences or anything yet. So let's kind of look closer up. But as the campaigns get more mature, as the ad account gets more mature, as the offers get more mature, as the offer alignment with the audience gets more mature, yep, then you can start looking saying okay, click through rate is now maybe not the most significant thing, because we have a consistent record of sales and conversions. Now, the conversions is the most important thing. So we can kind of ignore click through rate, as long as our conversions are where we want them to be or improving.
Greg Marshall  13:47  Yep. So I think with that, with that being said, it just helps me understand because I've always been taught, click through rates important. And I have seen some level of correlation, but I always do like to challenge my initial beliefs to see if Do they still hold true? Or are they true, up to a certain point or economy. And so one of the things that I picked up from that too, was when she's discussing the click through rate, because I always thought like, well, you can kind of manipulate that if you want. Yeah, just put a cat video up with something really funny or something that's like, you know, you can you can almost
Blake Beus  14:26  force a click or a clickbait or something or whatever you can, you can game that number,
Greg Marshall  14:32  but that doesn't mean I'm getting the end business result that I want. Yeah, so that can be misleading. And I think that what she's mentioning is it's almost you could, I mean, obviously, you'd have to test this with relevance. But I want I would love to see the correlation between what if you Your goal should be the opposite. The click through rate would actually be you want it to be lower? Because you're pre qualifying people more If you are getting the conversion, right, like,
Blake Beus  15:03  Yeah, but you could manipulate that number to by just having the wrong audience. That's just so my click through rate is low, because I have the wrong audience,
Greg Marshall  15:11  assuming, right, that you're targeting the right person, right.
Blake Beus  15:15  And so I would say, that would be an interesting thing to look at, given, you're very comfortable and confident with the alignment of the audience, the messaging in the ad, the messaging on the landing page, and the offer that they get at the end, if you're confident in that, in all of those things being aligned, then I would say, Yeah,
Greg Marshall  15:37  well, and based on you saying that I was making the assumption, yeah, that the funnel is proven. Yeah, we've seen it work over and over and over again. And then you would test the click through rate and add to see, that would be something interesting, because I wonder if there is any, like, reverse correlation or something, you know,
Blake Beus  15:58  very likely could be definitely have to
Greg Marshall  16:01  take it out. You know, that's, that's where you start geeking out about like, well, you know, what, if you, you're looking at a different metric to try to prequalify more, because you would think your click through rates, assuming everything else is working, and it is a good offer, and you're targeting the right person, your click through rates would be lower if you're pre qualified, more meaning, let's say I'm going after an audience of entrepreneurs, and I say, my product, you know, you would say it's an apple, you say, like my product is for if you're making 10 million or more a year, and you're looking to spend, you know, 100 grand a month on ads, right, click this to talk to me, you're gonna have a really low click through rate because there's not as because they're very, very small. But if you're delivering
Blake Beus  16:46  on that product and offer and the people in that group are really criteria, that criteria, you can be wildly profitable on the kind of an app.
Greg Marshall  16:57  So that's kind of what I mean is I wonder if like the level of pre qualifying in the app, like makes the click through rate go down, but the return go up? Right? You got me? Yeah,
Blake Beus  17:08  absolutely. And I think I think some of these things are, some of the ideas and concepts we have with which metrics are important, are kind of old school carryovers, from the golden days of Facebook ads, when you had so much visible data on everything, which has been shut down or hidden behind algorithms for privacy reasons. And I think that's a good thing. But you know, seven, eight years ago, with Facebook ads, you could literally target people whose income was over a million dollars a year and lived in this place. And in their first name was Adam, and they had a dog named Gary, right? Like, you could target it was almost creepy levels of targeting, which
Greg Marshall  17:50  isn't that crazy to think like, now, when you think about that? Doesn't that sound crazy? Yeah, like, that's probably a little bit too much knowledge of an individual, but at one point,
Blake Beus  18:01  but yeah, we were run out a lot of gurus, for lack of a better term come out of that space. Yep. And, and teach people a lot of their concepts and ideas. But as things have changed, some of those concepts and ideas are still carrying over like the click through rate. Of course, I could have a 20% click through rate when I could target literally the exact person in my ad, I could say, hey, hey, Adam, with a dog named Gary, this ads for you?
Greg Marshall  18:31  Yep, click here. You're gonna get way higher click through rates.
Blake Beus  18:35  But, you know, now we can think okay, click through rate maybe is not the most important metric. We need to think about our campaigns and our business business, and our offers and everything more holistically, which I think is a good move, saying has so many people abusing that system?
Greg Marshall  18:53  Well, I also think to looking at your business holistically, will make you have a better business and actual business. Yeah, because, like, I don't remember who I think actually perpetual traffic. And I'm a big fan of they mentioned that if a lot of people don't have business, they have an offer. Right? So they have like one thing, they're selling it but then there's no upsells and down sells and like continuation right? And I feel like that back in the day, you could really just have an offer. And it worked just fine. Granted, the targeting was very tight. Yeah. But now you do have to like think of, you know, as Dan Kennedy mentioned, now, acquisition costs are more realistic. Yeah. How they really should have been just there was this golden age of where you could get like $5 Commission.
Blake Beus  19:45  Well, and it's it's important to note that every business starts somewhere. So if you have a side hustle or something like that, you're gonna have it's very likely that you're gonna go through the My business is literally just one awful Yeah, ads. And you're gonna go through that you have a you have you have to get there and you have to figure out okay, how do I turn this single offer business into an actual business that's going to last 2030 4050 years. And that's part of being an entrepreneur is figuring out okay, how do we go from from this little tiny thing to something that's more substantial that has some foundational elements that can grow and stay around long term?
Greg Marshall  20:30  Also, just to clarify, by no means? Am I saying having that first offer is not valuable? Yeah. Or it's part of the stairsteps. I think what he meant, and in the podcast also was not that that's bad, like you're less than you have it, but that there were a lot of businesses that maybe he probably ran into that were running. Maybe not so morally correct, or Yeah. Just bad offers, that they just were building these offers and taking advantage of all of that privacy that? Yeah, that we did not have back. Yeah, right. And so, but yeah, when you first start, every business has to begin with, well, what's the first thing I'm going to sell? And who is that customer? And why do they need this right? And you and you build on top of that. And I think if your goal is to only stick to like just, you know, because you see marketers out there that they just do like random launches or wherever they're not really like trying to grow a business or just doing like quick revenue. He's trying to do sales, right, quick revenue hits, I'm in and I'm out. Right. I think that with all this privacy gone is been mostly eliminated.
Blake Beus  21:45  I think so most, I definitely think so. Because it's hard.
Greg Marshall  21:48  I mean, how do you do that? Now you actually have to build relationships with people. That group I think, was not really interested in the note. And
Blake Beus  21:56  you have to actually, like, get to the point where you're hiring actual staff, right? Because there was a lot of those businesses that had an offer, and it was like them and a couple of vas. Yep. And a Facebook page and a landing page software. Yep. And that was it. And they had an app to create some PDFs or whatever. And, and it's okay, that that's where you start. But if that was their entire end goal, yeah. It's not I yeah, very, I see very few of those ads anymore. I just don't think they're working anymore.
Greg Marshall  22:27  I know. The types of ads I see are much different. Like I remember, and I'm sure even on TV, I remember just getting hammered by Google ads, like 24 hours a day, like every time I open a Facebook. Yep. Is the new guys like math or see that guy? But I don't see as many of those in our and so I think, I think yeah, the future. I do believe that based off the topic of stats, there will be a new set of metrics that you'll have to measure things off of as when the game changes. You need to evolve with it right? And we no longer have that precise targeting that you did before. That's not a bad thing. You just need to work around it. Yep.
Blake Beus  23:09  All right. Well, let's let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall  23:13  Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy call and like bs.com Alright, so next time, we'll see you later. Okay, bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  All right, leads like you were you're talking about, I don't know, a new way to do leads or leads or a new way to at least look at leads. Yeah, so
Greg Marshall  0:09  I actually got the inspiration from listen to a podcast yesterday, which I respect, so shout out to perpetual traffic. But basically what they were discussing a case study that they did where I was like, that makes sense, because lead generation, sometimes can be challenging to do for companies, because of the quality of the lead. Okay, right. So you can get a whole bunch of leads, but then they're like, well, these leads aren't very qualified, or they're just kind of looky loos. And that's like, the nightmare of every business owner is to just generate a bunch of like, people that actually are not qualified. And so what they had discussed was because they were in a highly competitive industry, and everyone is offering the same thing, right, like a free consultation, or a free, whatever. Uh, huh. What it was doing was it was attracting and training the audience to get this free offer, it's kind of like not really commit. So what they did is they changed it to where they renamed the offer, and actually added more to it. So instead of just like a free consultation, they gave it a name where it was like a, I think they call it an integrative wellness plan, okay. And what it was was a multitude of things to give them a full plan, right? Not just like, we'll just take a look at you and see what's wrong.
Blake Beus  1:31  So it was a free consultation, right? Yep. But now, it's which the consultation, to be honest, is almost always some sort of a sales call it which is fine doesn't mean like, it's a high pressure sales type thing. But it's like, hey, we want to make we want to see if we're a good fit for one another. And here's what here's whatever. But everybody calls that a consultation. Yep. So that still that still exists. And, but this is the consultation called plus, which is more than a plan, it actually maps out like, we're gonna look at this, this, this and that, versus coming for a free consultation, and they gave it a name like, they named it the packet.
Greg Marshall  2:10  And I don't think it's 100% Prep, I think they said something like the integrative wellness plan or something like that, right. But then they went one step further, what they did was actually charged for it. And they said, instead of it being free, it's $9, to get to get it going now, to actually do it. And they actually found, they tested the free consultation to that, they actually noticed they had an uptake of like phone calls and actions on the site, people purchasing. And the type of person that was actually coming in, was more like ready to go. So they're just like, well, here's my $99. And we'll go ahead and, you know, move forward. And let's see what this plan is about. And then they were more open to purchasing. Right, right, versus the other one, they said they kept running into the problem of the show rate was really bad with the free consultation, right? Because there's no commitment, right? $100, you will show up. And then the other thing was the person that came in for the free consultation versus the integrative approach, they typically had a bad taste in their mouth, because they just felt like they've come in for this free consultation, and they would do a bait and switch.
Blake Beus  3:20  Right. So they felt bait and switch. And honestly, it's like, kind of keeping a finger on the pulse of people out there, your your customers out there. And And if people are starting to feel like these free consultation calls are just a bait and switch. They're starting to look at you or even the industry as a whole kind of like used car salesmen that I was just driving down the road and it said, you know, get into your car for 77 cents. Yep. You know, and everybody knows. That's stupid. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So so they started charging for it, they charge $99 They added more things to it. The consultation call had a purpose. Now, were they trying to make that $99 purchase their profit leader, or profit a lot like loss leader or just, they weren't trying to necessarily make that profitable? No, no, they were just using it to qualify leads. Correct. So if they lost money on the $99 care, they didn't care because you're still looking at cost per lead. Correct. As opposed to I need to make this ad profitable. Exactly. Exactly. I love that shift in mentality. And sometimes that's all we really need. I worked with a company A while ago that they were thrilled if they got a qualified lead at $150 a lead. Yep. And I know some people aren't $150 A lead but these this company had a service that was started at $1,200 a month. Okay. And the service was great. And once people signed up, they were with them for years and years and years. Yep. So $150 lead was was for qualified leads was very, very, very profitable for them. And but if you're thinking with this type of an offer, I spend $100. Or, or I spent, let's say, I spent $100 on an ad and to get one purchase yet I'm breaking even, I got a free lead. Yep, I got a lead for free. That's and fantastic and qualified, pre qualified or even if you spent, you know, $100. And it costs you two $200 to get that lead or whatever, your instead of 100, but it's still at 100 bucks for a lead. And that's a qualified lead. And if your next offer is very profitable, you're you're still doing well,
Greg Marshall  5:37  well. And I think that's the biggest challenge with the service side, I was actually explaining this to one of my other friends that does marketing that only does on the service side. And I told him well, I typically prefer to do e commerce, even though a lot of other advertising agencies do not. And it's simple. The reason for me that I like it is because it's very cut and dried. So I spent X amount of dollars, I made this much back, and there's not very much discussion on is it working or not right versus a lead? Gen typically, what makes it challenging is you don't know how good of a salesperson or sales team they have, how good their sales process actually is. Yeah. Do they follow up to like there's there's too many things that the easiest person to blame with lead generation is the marketer? Well, yeah,
Blake Beus  6:21  as a as a media buyer agency and things like that. You have to make sure that those back end processes are working, and you have almost zero controls, and you can drop hints, and you can say, hey, let's dial in this back end process. But if they have someone on the team that's like, Nope, we're good. Everything's working great. And you know, it's not Yeah, you're going to get blamed for spending their ad money. Yeah, when they're not. They're not capable of closing the deal.
Greg Marshall  6:50  And they'll typically say, well, these leads aren't very good. Oh, yeah, blame the leads. But here's the thing. I'm a media buyer, but I think, slightly different than most media buyers. And the fact that I started reverse, meaning I originally came from the sale, right? From the sales side and running sales teams. And if there's one thing that I know, is that sales teams are full of excuses, when it comes to what sales sees want is they want to call someone on the phone one time, have them answer, have their credit card ready and buy the most expensive highest commission product possible. But if that scenario doesn't work that way, immediately, the lead is bad. Yeah. Right. And I know that and so anytime I hear that I almost will view the business like, Hey, I've heard this story before. Right? Every person who's selling will always say the leads are not very good. If they're not buying
Blake Beus  7:50  instantly, right? Yeah, well, it's so it's so interesting, because I've been on sales teams. Before when I was going through college, I worked, worked in sales, and it was pretty easy for me to fall into the mentality. When I started that the person over there that is consistently number one, or number two for the month in sales, and I'm over here like number eight, out of a 10 person to it was easy for me to fall into, well, they're just getting all the good to get the good leads. Which was stupid, because we had a bucket of leads. And they were just pan it out. They were just handed out because they were from lead forms or whatever. And we had to follow up. Yep. Turns out I was the problem. Yeah. And I needed to get organized with how I followed up with people. And then I started consistently getting up to the number two number three spot. Yep. But
Greg Marshall  8:42  that's that's really typically the case. But with that being said, there is times where there are times when the leads are really not qualified. Sure. And coming from the sales back on, I remember that too. Like we're, if I have a list of 10 leads, I never was of the belief that it's purely a numbers game, like sales managers that I've worked with before in the past are like, it's just get on your phone call any phone number. And if you call 100 times you're close, whatever. And I always thought, Well, how do I get them a little bit more pre qualified to where like, if I if you're going to sell something that requires you to have a bank account, which I've run into this before, and I'm talking to a person who doesn't have a bank account, they're, they're not qualified, right? Doesn't matter how good of a salesperson like that lead technically is not qualified. Or it's the same people in real estate. You can't sell a home to someone has a 100 credit score. Yeah, right. Like it's just it's not going to work. They do have to be qualified. And so I do I do like their process of taking it one step further. Implementing the they're paying for this, you know, integrative approach. They changed the language, they changed the offer, and they started to get an increase in leads and one of the big things that they were talking about is don't necessarily worry about the cost per lead, worry more about the qualified lead coming in. Because you can get kind of fooled and to going after cheap leads, but not they're not really qualified.
Blake Beus  10:14  I mean, you want cheap leads, it's so easy you get leads for 10 cents a lead, if you don't care about qualified leads, it's very easy. It's very, very easy. And, frankly, there are unfortunately, marketing and media buying agencies out there that that's what they do. And they just kind of burn through clients. And they, they their case studies are oftentimes like, these guys were paying $50 to Lea, we got it down to $1.50 per lead. Yeah. And they brag about that they sign up a new client, they spend a bunch of their money they make they make the agency makes a bunch of money over the next six months or a year, they usually try to get them to sign some sort of time period, long term contract, and then they burn through that. And then they move on, they move on to the next thing. And I don't think those types of companies are more media buying agencies as they are sales teams that sell their services. Exactly better than they do anything else. Yes. Yeah. They're they're essentially just better salesman. Yeah, than another for their own products. Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, you know, you could have an argument for that, which is, it's just not good. As far as like, if you're truly trying to grow,
Greg Marshall  11:26  you got to get a good qualified leads for them to grow. And I just think this approach is slightly different. Also, in this case, it was a locally based company. So a smaller market, but I still think like, if you focus on trying to get more qualified leads, which does from the media buying standpoint, you almost do have to train the business owner, you have to be okay with a high because it will cost you more, there's no doubt about it. Yeah, it's going to cost you more than like, hey, just put your email in, versus fill out a little bit of a longer form. And prequalify your so there's no doubt it's going to cost you more. But you almost have to not be fixated on cost per lead. It's more of cost per sale, right. And if you can think of it more in that standpoint, you could get a little bit more aggressive. And you'll and you'll basically feel better, because emotionally, it's just tougher to go, Well, I got these leads for five bucks with this other marketing strategy. And then this, the current one is 150. But I'm getting sales with the one with 150. But getting nothing with the $5. But it plays a mental game with you because you're like, am I overpaying for leads? Right? And it's like, Well, no. If one is if they're buying thereby Absolutely not. And the math word Yeah.
Blake Beus  12:46  And there's a huge, huge, huge commitment and self qualification difference between someone typing in their email address, versus pulling out their credit card, and paying 100 bucks for something that is directly aligned with your big your bigger offer or service or whatever that is, yeah, there they are, you're basically going to a big room of 10,000 people and saying, everybody who is a perfect fit for what I'm selling, raise your hand. And they're pre qualifying themselves, the sales process is easier because the people have already said, I'm interested, that's me, I want to buy, as opposed to you just giving getting everybody's contact info. And now you got to call them. Yep, so the sales process is easier. running ads is easier and less stressful. Because something like that you don't ever really need to scale up to $2,000 a day, $3,000 a day to make it to make it profitable. You could be very, very profitable depending on your business at a $200 a day ad spend or a $500 a day ad spend with just a couple of campaigns super simple, very, very simple structure, simple to manage, simple to keep an eye on simple to diagnose. Just it's easier all the way around. I'm laughing
Greg Marshall  14:04  because I have a personal experience with this, which is in the beginning stages of like running ads for my personal services. I noticed there was one word that if you changed, it made a difference on the quality of the prospect and it's it's interesting because you would think one word wouldn't make that much of a difference like, like everything considered the same way or I'm saying the same thing. But I added one word and it changed who spoke to me, like the type of person that would reach out and that one word was I would say I did social media marketing. And then the second one that improves on social media ads. Okay, and one would attract someone that was more like beginner stage, looking for organic Anik type route, how many times a day do I post? Right? That kind of an audience? And the second got, and this is my fault, right? It's, I didn't clarify, because really who I services people who run ads, right. And so I might, but social media marketing technically falls under that umbrella. But that's not what the consumer notice, right. Here's
Blake Beus  15:23  what you're getting in. And again, it's it's a pre qualifier, yep. If someone looks at that ad and says, and it says, you know, Greg Marshall helps with social media ads. Yep. And they think, oh, that's for me, that person already has an established business. Yep, that person is already making sales. That person already has a product or a service or whatever, probably already has a website. Yep. All of those things, which you can't help them with their ads, if they don't have the exact, exact. Whereas if it's social media marketing, they might just have like, a couple of social media accounts. And literally no website, no ads. No, no, even registered business probably not might not even have a business bank account.
Unknown Speaker  16:09  Exactly. And that's just that one word made a difference on because I was sifting through things like, why is it that this campaign that looks exactly the same?
Greg Marshall  16:22  Is getting me who I want. And this other one is not. But when I say the same, I'm talking like the same video that I mean, everything is essentially created equal. So what I finally noticed on one campaign, I was using the word ad. And then the other I just left it out social media marketing. Yeah. And I was like, interesting. That's really all it is, is and then I started going back into my customer database. And people who came in through I had different forms. But they pretty much said the same thing. And the ones that came in through one form, closed very high. And they were all like, Yeah, I've been running ads, or like, they had that kind of a backstory. And then the other one was like, the I have a Facebook, and I'm thinking about starting a YouTube channel. And as you can see, those are two different types of people, one that has run ads, who we can serve and serve as well. And the other one is theirs, they have not made it to the advertising for yet, they're still kind of in startup mode. Those are two totally different people who can serve us. And we can serve as both. But we serve as one much better than the other. And it's much easier, and we can get them more profits. Like there's there's a much better alignment. So it's like, it's like a doctor, right? Like a brain surgeon could probably help anyone. Yeah, like anyone has like a health issue. But they're what they're really good at, is people who have a brain, right? Have a brain, right? Like, that's, that's what they're really good at. And so it's it's similar, it's like, you just have to focus on where you can deliver the best results. And like live right there. And I discovered that just with one word, and so to like wrap that back into this whole offer thing. Yeah, how they switch just the naming of the offer, and then had a price point attached to it changed everything, even though they're still dressing
Blake Beus  18:23  the same horse, right. One thing I wanted to bring up about that is, is giving it an offer, giving it a name. And then putting a price tag on it makes everything feel much more tangible, even if it's just a digital deliverable. And what I mean by that is, if I if I'm going to have a free consultation call, I don't know what I'm going to walk away with gaint Well, I don't know what I'm going to gain from that consultation call. Even if I list out, we'll talk about this in this in this in this. I still don't know what I'm going to gain out of it. And it makes it easy for me to blow that meeting off or whatever. Right? And but if if it has a name, it's it has, you're going to get a download with it, you're buying it is much more tangible, like buying a shirt. Yeah. And so people who are a good fit are much more likely to take action on that. And it's going to be easier to upgrade them because they're a good fit for your service and service is going to benefit them and they've got a little taste of it. You only got to work with you on something and they got something out of it. Yeah. And I
Greg Marshall  19:31  think that's that's a key lesson that I learned. And I remember I used to almost discount like, are people paying attention to the message that much. But that shows you they are right, because literally changing one word know made the difference between who reaches out who doesn't. Right. And, and I think that if anything, if you can take anything from the case study of lead generation, it's really focusing more on how do I repel have the wrong person and attract the right one. And usually, if you repel one, it will naturally attract the other. Right? And it's very easy to forget that because you get the feeling of a why want everyone? Right? There's this fear. I want everyone I might miss out, right? versus saying, Hey, we don't really want to work with these types of people. We want to work with these types. Yeah. Right, because they're the ones we could actually help and help successfully. Right. And the other point that they made in a case study, which really resonates with me, especially early on in my career, even in fitness, fitness market doesn't matter. The ones that like they, they associated, like, you can almost train people to be like Groupon buyers, where they're never fully committed. And so even if you get them, they don't stick around long. Like they're they're gone quickly, right? And that's not really sustainable business. No, you have to have people who stick around for a long time. And that really resonated with me, because I was like, Well, if you get the right person who already fits that mold, you're going to keep them. Yeah, for a long time. Because it's like, you're like you said the word alignment. Your line is like, perfect. So therefore, you're both going into this kind of knowing, like, Hey, this is a long term play here. versus the other. You can attract a person that's like, Yeah, I'll just like dip my toe in and kind of see how this works. Yeah. But I'm not really that committed. Yeah. So it's kind of like online dating. Right? Where people are, like, they're not really even committing because they haven't even met you in person yet. Right? So just by saying, yes, on Tinder, or whatever the other apps are now, that doesn't mean there's any kind of commitment. It's very like, yeah, that sounds today. Sounds good. And if I have absolutely nothing else to do tomorrow, I'll meet up with
Blake Beus  21:54  it. I mean, swiping right, is a much.
Unknown Speaker  21:58  It's not even really a commitment, but actually showing up to go to coffee or whatever is is and we want those people. Right. Will that show up to coffee? Yeah, knowing we are meeting this person with the intent of potentially pursuing a relationship. Yeah, versus just, you know, swiping right or doing the group or I'm just gonna put my toe on there and see
Blake Beus  22:22  you bringing up Groupon gives me another thought. I think this is a potential trap people could fall into if you're not careful trying to implement this, in that. The big problem I see with Groupon is the offer the product is literally just a discount. Yeah. Right of something that someone might buy anyway. And that's why people buy Groupon. And then they never go back there. Again, no matter what Groupon says, that happens all the time. And you can talk to any business, that's lunch, a Groupon deal. That's almost always exactly how it works, you get a bunch of people come in, because you gave them a discount, and then you never see them again, yeah, you might get a couple, but the return rate is very, very, very small, because they're used to getting the discount that deal or whatever. I think the trap would be to do something similar. We have a product or offer or a service that is $500. Yeah. And so now we've bundled this, given it a cool name and everything, and given a $99 price tag. And now it's just a discount. It's not, there's no plan behind that. There's no larger offer whatever, we're just, we're just giving a discount, and you might make the sales. But again, what you're doing is you're you're you're pushing everything to be profitable on the cold traffic right up front, when that really just needs to be your lead gen. So what I would definitely not do is take an existing product or offer and discount that and try this strategy with it, I would come up with a new product or offer that is less effort for you to deliver and execute on. So you don't have to dump a bunch of time into it. And fits in between your offer that you really want to sell them and someone that's never purchased and make it this inbetween thing. Which is exactly what this particular company did, right. It was a brand new kind of thing to execute on it. They literally just have to do the consultation call and then maybe make some notes and then send them the PDF, because I'm sure it's all templatized and everything. So the execution and delivery of that is super easy. Yep. And it leads directly into the next product. So don't fall in the trap of just taking something you have existing discounting and giving it a cool name and thinking the strategy's gonna work. It probably won't
Greg Marshall  24:42  Yeah, and I just for me, personally, I found I have resisted I know the value ladder works really well for a lot of people. Especially in E commerce, I think Congress where it works big time, but I found that I'd much rather Do something how they describe like, the free consultations almost package different. And you have to prequalify by paying, then even just trying to consistently discount things. And I just feel like you train the audience to behave in a certain way. That's not really what you want to know. Right? And especially, like the complaint that I consistently will hear from people when they're generating leads. These people don't have any money. Right? They'll say, I'm talking to nothing but broke people. Right, right. And I hear this, like, a lot. Were there like, and I think the offer could fix it. Right? Because it's about what you're saying. Right? And I, what I've noticed is there there's a correlation between where that business owner is sending that person, what they're saying. Yeah. versus, like, if they're making it sounds like they're not repelling people. Right, right. So for an example, if you just say free anything, well, you're going to attract the person that's just into free. But if you repurpose or make it like, it's almost in sales, you call it the takeaway clothes, right? This is only for people that can do X, Y, and Z and are really serious about their health. And if you're not very serious, we don't really want to work with you. Because we only want community, right? Like, what that kind of does is it causes the person you could call it a takeaway, close, or ego close, it causes the person to say, oh, no, I'm serious. Yeah, and frames them into now I need to take serious acts because I need to save face,
Blake Beus  26:40  right? I think it does. It does two things, right. Because everybody's on the spectrum of I'm committed, and I'm not committed and everybody's here. And a closed like that basically forces people to either say, I am actually committed as this mental kind of I'm committing to this. So it shoves them further to the commitment, or people that are a shoves them further away to the non commitment. And really, that's what you want to do with leads, is have people self select and self filter, so that when you do get on a call with someone, they are much, much, much more likely to be committed, number one, because they're a better fit. And number two, they've already kind of pre committed because you told them this is only for people that are ready to commit. Yeah. And they're like, I'm ready to commit. And it's, it's, it's a psychological thing that helps with motivation. And and it's great, yeah, I'll
Greg Marshall  27:27  take an action. And I think it takes me back to setting appointments for personal training, where the I would always so when I started closing more, was when I would talk to the the prospect who was going to do a free fitness assessment. That's right, Jim called it. And I would say, All right, so they will say so is this totally free. And I say, it's totally free, what we do is we go over all of your goals, and then come up with a step by step gameplan, on how you're going to achieve those goals, with the strategies that we're going to share with you now. At the end, I am going to show you our personal training programs and pricing to see if you'd like to move forward with that. And I would throw that in there a purpose to let them know, this is not going to be a surprise attack. Right? This is literally I'm telling you right now, I'm going to offer you my goal. And sometimes people will say, Well, are you going to sell me something? I would say, Yeah, my goal is to sell you on personal training. That is my goal. Yeah. And because I think it works, right, those people that would show up, we're already framed, like,
Blake Beus  28:32  I know, this is going to cost money. They've already kind of committed to that versus in my beginning stage of the career, I would say Oh no, it's totally free. And I kept getting people that would just come in, get the free workout and say let me just go home and think about this. And just that small like it's not a lot like it's not like I changed my entire brands in I just literally would tell them at the end I'm going to show you programs and prices. Yeah. And my goal is to get you enrolled in one right and that would make people that aren't that already know they're not going to commit or already know they're probably not going to buy they're probably going to not they're much more likely to not schedule that free consultation which is fine. Yes. Because great because you're not a good fit for one another anyway Yeah, nothing against those people at all. It's just much more straightforward and clear communication and all of that stuff. So that people know what they're getting the whole surprise sales thing I still am floored when companies and salespeople try the surprise tax sales thing
Unknown Speaker  29:37  is or mislead you Oh no, I'm
Blake Beus  29:39  not trying to sell you Oh yeah, I'm not trying to sell you and then and then you you sit through their presentation and and you're just like oh my gosh, I gotta well and you know it's
Greg Marshall  29:51  funny you know how I discovered to use this was it was actually by accident. Well not I guess not by accident but through pure frustration, okay, me and my friend at the time. And an ex business partner when we were running the personal training companies, we had a blast, by the way. But we this is how we discovered it. I should give him a call after this podcast at times you remember.
Unknown Speaker  30:17  So we, the way we discovered it was we were constantly getting pounded by the like upper management. You need to have more appointments on your schedule, like this is a numbers game, right? So, of course, being good soldiers, we want it to follow suit and do what they're saying. So he said, Alright, great. So he and I went out, and we set so the just the, you know, the average daily amount of appointments, you would get in this location was like maybe three or four historically, right? And we set and one day, I want to say it was 15 or 16 appointments split between two people. These are our long presentations, by the way. So we got in like six o'clock in the morning and work all the way to like eight or nine. And we were like, couple people that show up. And the people that did they showed up lay and in all we did is we just tried to get as many appointments as possible. We went through all of those and close zero. Okay, I want you to think of the this is on a Friday on top of that. So we're young, it's Friday, we spent our entire wasted our entire day with a bunch of unqualified prospects, people with no bank accounts or no intent. By right. At the end, we went on looked each other in the eye, we were exhausted. We were like, completely, like, what did we just do? And we followed the advice, right? That night, we sat there, we watched the movie. And then we started like game planning. We said, You know what, let's not take any appointments that aren't pre qualified, like this is tell him straight up. Like, if you don't have a bank account, if you're not interested in really getting in shape, we're not setting an appointment, right? There you go, we did that. Okay, we started only scheduling two or three appointments a day. So we had more free time than ever. So you're
Blake Beus  32:12  a little bit below average number of appointments per day,
Unknown Speaker  32:16  we beat the sales record in that location, using this strategy. And then what happened was, we both got promoted to new locations together. And they kept saying we just ran the same play, we would so everyone else that was in our market was setting 10 appointments, just wasting their time all day, meaning it would show up, we'd have one appointment in the morning, one in the afternoon, go to the pole right after an A and B top and sales.
Blake Beus  32:44  So your your sales, you have more free time not only to have more free time, you have more time to prequalify appointments, I'm not sure how you but you guys getting your own appointments. Yeah, so you have more time to get your own appointments. Because the other problem with packing yourself with appointments all day long is I can't get new leads with that kind of model. So if I do eight appointments a day, they're eight hours long, where am I going to get tomorrow's appointments from or the day after? That's appointments. So you guys actually have more free time, more time to qualify leads and get good appointments scheduled. We're trying to follow up with people that legitimately couldn't come for legitimate reasons. And you're beating all the sales records.
Greg Marshall  33:20  And we had a whole lot more fun because what we started doing, we made a game out of which is like, how little of appointments can we get while smashing the goal?
Unknown Speaker  33:30  So we would try to precisely look for someone and we sat down I still remember we sat down in the office. And we wrote out okay, what does the person that pays the most always look like what how did they approach the gym? How can you tell why their body language, and we literally figured it out. We were like, they were these types of clothes. These types of sneakers, they're about this old, they usually come in around these times. They have a body language of like they're unsure but scared and intimidated. And so you had to talk to them in a certain way. We always waited till they were walking on the treadmill to approach them. Like we literally came down with like, precise formula.
Blake Beus  34:15  So you're not necessarily interrupting their workout because they're walking they're still but but they they aren't moving between machines. So they came to you like you're like oh man.
Greg Marshall  34:28  And we just we just figured this out like we just dialed in and like Okay, and so we're cold approaching people just so you know, these are people that are not in on the point we're straight up cold approaching and we figured it out and it became so easy that we will be like alright, so we would call them by numbers of the size of the contract. Because we because we just knew like not that they weren't valuable as a person. We were labeling like that right there is the perfect like if we're trying to sell someone to come use our training. We need them. If they if they're gonna get result, they need to train now one time a week, ready to train with a trainer three, four or five times a week, right? So and the size of those contracts were like, they'd be like $4,000, where we'd be like, that's a 40 100 right there, just
Unknown Speaker  35:15  wait till she gets on a treadmill, talk to her, set an appointment, she comes in what she did for you. And we just would repeat this. And that's the lesson that I learned in sales, where it's like, you can have 5000 leads a day. But they're not the people, you can serve the best,
Blake Beus  35:33  right? So and they're not gonna stick around, even if they do sign up, they're gonna stick around less whatever your model is, because they're not a good fit. Well, it's worth putting all that time and effort to dial in, who's a good fit, it's you just have way more energy to because if what's more fun, it's more fun to run your business when you're making money.
Unknown Speaker  35:54  Exactly. Then spending your entire Friday as an early 20 year old for 16 hours and literally making $0. And then even worse, I don't you have to call your boss and say, Jesse, you know, we had 16 appointments today and we sold zero,
Blake Beus  36:12  as opposed to calling your boss and saying just so you know, I have three appointments today. Close, close, all three of them. I'm already on
Unknown Speaker  36:19  Friday night later. Hope you have a great day. So that would make the boss happy too, because he made money off of what we show. So I think it was it was a strong learning lesson as far as always prequalify people know who you're actually going after and be okay with having less leads. But more sales. It's almost like there is a correlation.
Blake Beus  36:44  Yeah, definitely. All right, let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall  36:48  right marshall.com And you can book a free strategy session and Blake just like you start calm and you can reach out to me there. All right till next time.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  What was our lead off on this one?
Greg Marshall  0:01  What was the true value?
Blake Beus  0:03  Oh, yeah, the true value of social media. I was like, What did you wrap it up really nice. Yeah. Think of what that was?
Greg Marshall  0:10  Well, we were talking about what the true value of social media is and what that means for businesses, because you were talking about how some businesses feel jaded with social media, like God doesn't work, or it's overly hyped or the use of Word, or even
Blake Beus  0:27  just people. I mean, you hear all of these crazy stories about social media, Elon Musk kicking over Twitter, that's been this roller coaster ride out of news, meta, Facebook, their stock prices are down right now. And so you, you have this kind of attitude with, especially with advertisers that were or businesses that were maybe a little lukewarm about, about being on social media Anyway, you've seen this attitude from them saying things like, you know, it's not worth it. Yeah. Why even play this this game or whatever. But whatever your stance is, on social media being a net negative or net positive for society, and all that stuff. It's still worthwhile showing up on social media and marketing on social media, for many reasons. Yeah. And yeah, so dive into dive into that, because you were talking about some of the reach out to you. Yeah,
Greg Marshall  1:26  someone had reached out to me. And they were discussing, and then there's someone who, they do a lot of advertising and other channels outside of social media. And they had mentioned their struggle with trying to kind of wrap their heads around the true value of is it worth investing in social media? Because he sees other people in his industry, not succeeding? But I told them, I think it's because they're doing it the wrong way.
Blake Beus  1:54  And you said, this is a service based business? Yes. What industry was the real estate? Real estate? Yep.
Greg Marshall  2:00  So with, like, I know exactly talking about because in real estate, the number one challenge, right is always it's highly competitive. And then, really, what you're selling is the same. So it's everyone is selling the exact same product,
Blake Beus  2:17  and the exact same houses even right, like, it doesn't matter which Realtor you are, I mean, that might be your listing. But if I'm representing somebody, any 1000 actors could sell
Greg Marshall  2:26  that house. And that's kind of the the challenge that they all run to. So they all kind of are trying to figure out ways to market themselves. And I know what he was referring to. So he's referring to, we were kind of speaking about video. And he's jaded because he's like, Yeah, I've worked with some people who do a lot of video. And it's like, they're spending all day doing video, but they're not making very much money. And this guy makes a lot of money. Yeah. Okay, so he, so he's viewing that light, from an ROI standpoint, what he's doing is working better. What I tried to tell him, which I think he kind of intuitively knows is, it's just another media channel. So you almost have to remove like, the way someone uses something, is the difference on the success of it. Right? Right. So socially, when I say like, they're most likely using it wrong, in my opinion, if you want to reach a lot of people, you have two different ways to do it. If you do organic, you have to fully commit to organic and do it every day, you need to have strategy, you need to invest money, and time and energy into that it's not free, you still need to invest in it. Or the second one is you need to commit to paid ads. But you need to commit to one of the one of those options and preferably both, right if you want the maximal results. And so that's what I told them is what most people do is they are tiptoeing on, both of these are putting their toe in the water for organic, or putting their toe in the water on pain. Yeah, but they're never putting their whole body in for either or, and that's why they don't see an end result,
Blake Beus  4:07  you're better off going all in on one or the other. Correct. If you don't have the energy or the resources to go all in on, on both, or just have enough time to like dip your toes in on both. You're you're you're going to struggle. And in my opinion, do you need here is this? In my opinion? Yeah, you could either just do none of them and focus on other things. But I do think it's worth still showing up on social media, I would say if you don't have energy to do both, it's probably less energy and less effort to actually do the advertising side of the paid ads than it is to do the organic route. And I say that because the paid ads, you can see relatively quickly what's working, what's not. Whereas with organic, you have to put six months a year into that until you start actually seeing something measurable. But even then it's very, very, very difficult to state, this, these things that I did organically led to the sales Correct. Whereas with paid, it's very easy to say, these ads that I ran led to these sales. And so it's just a much clearer thing. And it's less, in my opinion, less mental energy. But the trade off is you put money into direct, but it doesn't have to be a ton of money. You don't have to like for realtors, if we're talking about that you don't have to put 10 grand a month into showing up in people's ads. Right,
Greg Marshall  5:30  exactly. And I think the point you're making with the paid advertising is if you remove kind of the personal, I guess insecurities from it as well, right? Because, yeah, you know, a lot of a lot of people don't feel comfortable putting themselves out there. It's like public speaking, right? You don't, people, most people are not excited to do public speech. And it's not because public speaking doesn't work and can't grow your business or spread your message. That's not the problem. The problem is you feel insecure about the judgment of what you might get, because I know that's what I felt. But at the same token, if you're going to use social media to like grow your business, you just have to like, you really just have to go, Alright, I'm gonna start taking it serious, I want to invest in it, regardless of the insecurities of what I'm feeling, and I'm gonna measure what I'm doing. But you have to, if you want the true benefit, you have to look at it as no different than any other marketing channel. Like TV advertising, more billboards or direct mail, right? Everyone in those aspects has essentially removed their emotional feeling and attachment to those channels. The social media hasn't been around enough for people that have done that yet. Yeah. So they, they're overly emotional about it, because it's kind of in that gray area of like, you are putting yourself personally out there. And it is a lot more personal because people can comment, or say this is stupid, or they can share it quickly. So there is a little bit more of a fear factor there. But I do think if you just view it as another marketing channel, and you're not emotional about just like your if you buy a TV ad, or a direct mail piece, I think social media is extremely valuable, because you can target better yes, even after iOS changes, you still can target much better than you can on TV, or direct mail my opinion, you can get faster feedback. And you can do a lot more reach a lot more people for a lot less money, right? And they're on their phones anyway. So accomplishing the same goal that you're doing investing in anything else, right?
Blake Beus  7:37  Yeah. And it's, I mean, look, there's lots, like I said, lots of opinions about social media, there's a lot of times Oh, my God, social media, kind of, yeah, but showing up business wise, it adds a lot of authority and everything. So if you are currently doing traditional advertising in any sort of other way, social media is, is literally just another channel. And before we turn the camera on, you were talking about this particular person, and they were saying, Oh, I've seen people put a bunch of time and effort into social media, and they don't make any money. Yeah, they're not they're not very good at it. Yeah. And I would, I would love to look kind of look at what they're doing. But I have a couple of guesses on what those people are doing, where they're putting their time and money into social media, and not selling any houses. My My first guess is they're only putting their time and money into social media. Yep, they're there, they're doing videos 345 times a day, they're trying to grow big on tick tock or some other platform that maybe isn't aligned with the people that are buying houses. And, and they're not very good at maybe the follow up side of things, I'm gonna guess, especially if they're a realtor, which is a sales position. And they're not making a whole lot of money, they probably never really were very good at the whole following up and selling game to begin with, and are trying to compensate with showing up on social media. So they've got maybe it may be going okay, or decent social media presence. But then once they get that contact offline, they have they suffer from the same problem that they had to begin with. Yeah, whereas this particular person, you were saying does really, really well with the current advertising that they're doing, which means they also are really, really good at the follow up side of things, because you literally can't sell houses if you're not following up. And so adding social media as a channel, even if it's not a huge challenge, adding social media as a channel will probably show significant benefits to them and what they have because they have their offline processes already dialed
Greg Marshall  9:43  in. Yeah, and I think this individual, I think would do exceptionally well with the paid ads on social media. And that's actually what I advised him. Yeah, we're at the gym talking. I was saying, you know, I really think that paid advertising is the way to go. Especially if you're someone who does not, doesn't have a desire to commit to creating an organic following. Yeah, right. Like,
Unknown Speaker  10:12  you just, if you don't want to do that, just do the paid ads route. It's faster and easier. It's easier. And with something like real estate, right? The organic stuff,
Blake Beus  10:24  it's gonna be really hard to show up organically on any platform, as as a as a realtor, and you just need to understand that because the fact of the matter is, is when do I follow a realtor? Yeah, only when I'm looking for a house. And when I bought my house, I unfollow the realtor, right? Like I don't, I don't need to see your content for the next 510 years. And so what you what you really need to do is capture the attention of people at that point in time when they're looking for a house or looking to sell their house. And paid is literally the best way to do that. Because you're guaranteed to show up in front of people. And you know how many people you're showing up in front of all of the like mysteriousness goes away. Now, I'll almost always recommend if someone's doing paid, that they post something organically, like once a week. Yeah, you know, just to show up and so your account doesn't look dead. Yeah. But it doesn't have to be amazing content or anything, just show up somehow, organically. So it shows doing stuff.
Greg Marshall  11:29  And you don't have to do it every day. No, not every day. And it's not. I just feel like the paid route is just perfect for that industry and individuals that are looking to get in front of people because you make a great point. Real Estate, I mean, what content does a real estate agent put out? Hey, I got these houses, I got these houses by looking to buy yourself. And it's it's repetitive. But the problem is, every real estate agent is doing the exact same organic strategy. Right? So you're literally competing, is everyone else doing the exact same? Or maybe if someone's doing it slightly different? It's not that much different to the consumer. Yeah, right. Like to the kid like me, for example. So who would be in a market to go buy a house or somebody that I look at all the content as the same, it's all the same like, because I don't, I'm not a professional. I'm not a real estate professional. So I don't know how different this content is. It's just this person is telling me about a house says this one, one person's tell me about interest rates. So this one, one person says the market is going up or down? So this one versus if you just run paid, you could just say, Are you looking to, you know, buy, sell, do whatever, this is what I can do for you. And if you can outbid your competitors, you can get those eyeballs to you, right?
Blake Beus  12:45  And the thing is, is like, if you just get in the mindset of Why does someone pick a specific realtor or plumber or whatever, since we're kind of talking about service based businesses, a lot of it has to do with trust. Yep. And if you're showing up in their in their ads, and they're getting to know your personality, they are automatically building some of that trust, especially in a highly regulated industry, like real estate or Friday Services and Financial Services, right? Because basically, everybody's offering the same thing, because you have to offer what's within regulations, right? Like, yeah, you can maybe tweak some of the numbers here there, you might be able to find a slightly better interest rate, because you got a mortgage place that has favorable rates right now, but you're looking at a quarter of a percent difference, maybe, yeah, but so so the product itself is almost identical. It's the service, the trust, the offline offline support. Yep. But it has to be you have to, they have to know who you are first and have to build that trust, before they're going to reach out to you. And you can close those those deals,
Greg Marshall  13:53  you make a statement that is often like, discounted when it comes to advertising, which is you have to be known. Yeah. What is the VAT? Like the value is? People first need to know you before they could do anything, right. And if you're gonna ask me to pay 500 $600 million for a home, I would like to know you. Yeah. Right. I want to know that you're going to take care of mount a big decision. And that's the part where, because we're all in such a rush. And we're not thinking long term. I need a return right now today. And so you ended up doing a lot of these activities where you're like, oh, it's not working after 30 days. Well, who knows anyone after 30 days, you're talking to a cold market, who's also being tough. Imagine if, if you're trying to date someone, and they have literally 1000s of people all trying to date them. Every day every single day and every single person says they're better. They're richer their services gonna be the best of all, it's literally everyone's telling them that all day just picture that when you're thinking of trying to sell your customer in a service based business that's highly competitive. A 1000s of people are trying to date that exact same person. And so you have to figure out a way to stand out.
Blake Beus  15:16  Yeah, well, I'm thinking here locally in Utah. There are there is one realtor, and one lawyer who has had different people, different businesses, everything that has billboards up, up and down the main freeway here. I haven't seen any of their ads on social media, they probably run ads, I'm just probably not in their target market, which is fine. I'm not looking for either of their services. But the thing is, is they've had those billboards up switching places slightly different for easily 15 years. Yeah. Why Why spend that much money if it's not working? And why is it working for them? Like if I put up a billboard right now, I was a realtor. And I put up a billboard right now, I'd spend, I don't know, 5k a month, 10k a month, depending on the location, and I probably wouldn't get a whole lot out of it. Yep. But these guys have multiple. And it's not because they're selling different houses. It's because over time they've consistently shown up. And literally, you can't think of choosing a realtor without thinking of this particular person's name. In this part of Utah, you might not go with them. There might be but but you're gonna think of them, are you and you are no, you know, and same thing with the lawyer if you have, if you have a need for a defense attorney, there's the one lawyer you're gonna know, because they've been showing up for two decades, on on billboards or just in different places. Yep. You have, you have to do that you just have to the cool thing with social media is is that you can do you can show up, especially in a local geographic area, you can show up cheap, yep. And let everybody know who you are, without spending five grand a month for a billboard in a single location for five for five grand a month for a realtor to show up in front of a lot of people like that. That goes,
Greg Marshall  17:10  it goes away very long. Yeah. And it's social media just doing just, if you look at it, and you remove the emotion, he just said, another marketing channel is faster and cheaper than all the other marketing channels.
Blake Beus  17:24  Yeah. So even in 2023, because we're in 2023. Now, even with all of the craziness with social media, and all of the people predicting that, you know, everything's gonna collapse, Twitter's gonna burn and crash and ground, whatever. And that might happen. But even with all of those things happening, it's still worthwhile showing up on social media. And if you don't have the energy to do organic Throw, throw some money into the paid ads. It's, it's maybe a little bit more intimidating to get started, but I swear, it's easier than trying to come up with really creative viral is all. So yeah, let's wrap it up. How can people get
Greg Marshall  18:03  in touch with you, Greg? marshall.co. You can book a free strategy call.
Blake Beus  18:07  What about Blake beus.com?
Greg Marshall  18:09  All right, so next time see you later. Okay. Bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  You were talking about hustlers mentality marketing plan. Yeah. All of that, like, yeah. Well tell me what you're thinking. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall  0:08  I think having a marketing strategy is important and kind of knowing how to get your messaging out there. And one of the things I was saying is, even if you don't have a large budget, I think the overall idea is you have to have a huge budget, in order to make marketing work. And that's not based that's not the case, that's not the full story, you either have more time, or more money, if you can do both. That's the optimal. But if you have less money, put more of your time. And if you have more time, he's more money, right? So you try to do a good trade off, and what you're doing but hustlers mentality, I was saying, a strong strategy that works really well from a tactical side is manual outreach, if you're trying to promote an event, or a service, right, and this manual outreach, I actually use this in the beginning of my couple of businesses, and it works like a charm, what you want to do is you want to find people who have the audience you already want, and you just start reaching out every day, you create a spreadsheet, put their name, phone, numbers, emails, and you essentially start working that list. And you want to have an offer that makes sure that the person you're talking to gets a huge benefit. In exchange for sharing the product serves that you have to their particular audience, one of the best ways to do that is to demonstrate how by them maybe donating a product, or a service, or sharing this their audience, they're also going to get in front of the audience you have right or will be going after it right. And it could be kind of have a joint promotion, and everyone wins there. Because every business is lead generating, trying to get more people to write their business. So it allows it allows you to add more resources to a marketing plan on both ends,
Blake Beus  2:00  right? Yeah, that's, uh, yeah, that's, I mean, I've participated in some of these, you know, business, lead groups and some, some things like that. And I think that's, that's one of the ways a lot of businesses are trying to do that. But the reality is, is you doing something like that for yourself, or like, owning that whole process, instead of just showing up to a lead generation group is going to be much more beneficial to you and everyone else? But I do, I do want to jump back to what you said, you know, you got either money or time if you have both. It's great. My observation, though, is that there are quite a few times when an organization or a person has money, yep. And then they go out and market because they're like, Well, I've got some money, well, let's do this. But they're not being smart with that. And they burn through a ton of cash, because that's the asset that they have a lot of Yep. And they end up getting kind of poor and miserable results. And honestly, if it's if someone had a stack of cash, and they're just starting out with a business or something, or a new venture, or a new pivot, say they made money in this business over here, starting out with the hustle mentality is still probably a better way to go. Yes. Then it is to drain your reserves upfront.
Greg Marshall  3:19  Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I think about is a story Daymond John shared where he said, like, he made all his money and FUBU. He was a multimillionaire, he financed that new project through only through money into it thought of no marketing strategy. And he said, he blew it off. And he said, he thought, because he had the money, that that would solve the problem. We all deal with speed up the failure, right? So I like to take that lesson that he shared and think like, even if you have millions of dollars in reserves, you still should have the hustle mentality of test quickly, and in small steps, where you're not risking it. All right, so you're saying, well, let's first figure out if we do some outreach, and maybe some lower budget test, to even see if we can gain traction and figure out messaging. And you still use the same fundamentals. And I think it's the same in like, let's, let's use basketball, for example. Basketball is a very easy game, you just put the ball in the hoop, right? But there's a lot more that goes into that. But when people start to get overly fancy and focus more on half court trick shots and dunks, I mean, that's not the best way to go about it. Because if you focus more on that, those are a lot harder than just doing the fundamentals of putting the ball in the basket. It always goes back to the fundamentals instead of trying to get fancy, and do all of these fancy things. Do the things that are not as attractive, which is know how to do your bounce passes. Know how to make a layup, a regular layup, not a reverse layup, not a dunk for the free throw line. Just get very good at that and then slowly expand and that's how I kind of equate He's using a lot of money is the focusing on the slam dunk before you actually focus on learning how to do the layup
Blake Beus  5:07  Yes, yeah. Small little tangent. Yep. To, you know, hi, everybody shoots their free throws. Yes. Did you know that statistically, if everybody shot underhand free throws, you would get about 20 to 30% more free throws made in the basket, which is crazy, but no one will do it because they don't want to look, Grant shots. But but because of the motion, you're actually closer to the basket because of the rope, you're able to get a better rotation to roll it in. And it's been proven over and over again, but no one has asked because they want to look, they don't want to look like that.
Greg Marshall  5:38  You know what you actually bring up another great point, which is the perception how you want to be perceived by everyone else. Right. So don't make the mistake of trying to be perceived more like different and almost value that more than the results that you would get, yeah, that's more effective, yet, you don't look as prestigious.
Blake Beus  6:02  And the thing to remember in your business is you don't have 100 cameras on you, you're not being watched by millions of people. Most people in their everyday lives aren't really paying attention to your your business and what you're doing. So really, if you're concerned about your perception with I don't know, your peers or your neighbors or, or even maybe potential customers, I wouldn't worry about that so much as I would worry about what's working. And what's working is oftentimes not flashy, not sexy, not high budget, whatever video marketing, whatever, not not so bringing in celebrities, as a sponsor, usually what works especially at first is the basics, right? You're you're talking to bounce passes, or, or creating a list of people you can reach out to and form like a good relationship with where you can trade each other services or something like that, that is boring, all marketing. But that's marketing that is highly profitable for the amount of effort and cost.
Greg Marshall  7:02  Well, and the other thing, I want to really harp on that because I liked the point that you brought about perception. Most people don't want to do the outreach, because of the perception, they perceive it as below them, right. I'm a business owner, I shouldn't have to do that. Or my product is so good, I shouldn't have to do that. And that's really a limiting belief. Because most of the time, I know for me personally, most almost all of my biggest deals have been from outreach. Yeah. And it's, it's simply just networking and developing a relationship and not having the ego to think I don't need to be doing that, or I'm so important that I'm not going to send out reach someone else has to do it. Right. That's, that's where I think you can get a lot of trouble as you try to remove yourself just from the day to day, you know, things that businesses need, just don't worry about what the perception is get the results real
Blake Beus  7:57  well. And that is so interesting to me. Because every single business that grows from nothing to whatever, there's huge, there's almost always a strong leader, whether it's the founder or the CEO or something. But that person is oftentimes the one that's closing the big deals and building those relationships. And the nature of the deals change, right. So when you're first starting out your deals, our sales or a partnership where we can help sell a related product or service or something like that. But as the business grows, the deals now turned into well, we need to deal for our warehousing or whatever or our, our supply chain. So now you're making deals with those things. And the reality is, is as a founder, as a leader, as a CEO, whatever of your business, whether it's small or large, you're going to be making deals through outreach. And so you might as well just get comfortable right now. And it doesn't have to be a super intimidating thing. But you shouldn't ever think that doing outreach is below you. It's your business. That's because that's kind of what your job
Greg Marshall  9:11  was. And in a lot of ways too, coming from a sales background. It's similar to how a lot of people view sales, right? Like, I shouldn't have to sell my product because it's so good. Or they just don't they they almost disrespect the sales position in a way, right. I mean, I've had business owners actually telling me like, the most valuable people in organization are not sales, but that that message almost implies that salespeople are worthless or less than and I think that whole belief is just incorrect sales are just as important as every other part of the business. And, you know, in order to set selling should be your selling to help right yeah, at the end of the day, your product or service should really benefit the customer in some capacity. So why should? Why should there be a negative belief or perception of sales? When it comes to all you're really doing is helping people understand that there is help available?
Blake Beus  10:12  Right? Yeah. And the whole, like, the most important part of the business is this or this or this, I find that so crazy. It's all there. It's one, when I get in my truck in the morning, and I drive, there's a bunch of things that have to be in place, in order for my truck to get me to where I need to build. I can't go there anywhere. If I don't have tires. I also can't go anywhere if I don't have gas. Yep. So am I supposed to say, well, gas is the most important thing that you need for a
Greg Marshall  10:50  truck to work to see how far you go if you have gas, but I take the right wheel. Yeah,
Blake Beus  10:53  if I don't have one of my tires, right? It's, it's so weird. And as, as you know, a business owner, you need to be thinking about the system. Yes, right. And all of these systems, and you need to think about how these pieces need to work together and where those bottlenecks are. And I think that's a good segue to kind of go back to what we first started talking about is marketing plans. And I wanted to talk to you about that, because marketing plans is essentially creating a framework or a system for the marketing and sales of your product. So going back to that, what, assume I know nothing about marketing, what would you recommend? I do? Because I know it can be an overwhelming thing where you dump all this time and effort into it. And you get locked into this mindset and idea, and it doesn't work. Yep. Right. So there's clearly ways you can dump too much timing too locked into a way of thinking, or you can just willy nilly leave free, you know, just figure it out. And if it that also doesn't work. So yeah. So what do you need to know?
Greg Marshall  11:58  Well, number one, I think the biggest mistake that you can make, is to start at distribution. So you're so how you're going to distribute your message. The reason why I think that's a big mistake is because you don't, you haven't thought through enough of the who, who you want to get in front of. So I see business owners oftentimes go right into, I'm going to do Facebook, or Instagram or LinkedIn, or Tik Tok, or whatever, and he thinks or events. And you think, Well, where did you come up with that idea? And why that versus something else? And it's usually Well, I heard somewhere that this is great, or whatever. And all channels are great. It just they need to make sure you they have your customer. Yeah. So the first part and a marketing plan, I believe, that you should start off is creating the emotional message and trying to match that with the person you're going after. So an example would be your messaging, let's say you're going after moms. And you historically, after looking at your past customers, you notice most of it is moms, or dads or whoever.
Blake Beus  13:08  So there's some data behind Yeah, you're targeting? Yeah, so there's just guessing. Well, some data races for the person
Greg Marshall  13:14  who at least has a business already developed. They would use that data of who's already buying, why are they buying? What are their greatest pain points, their fears and desires, then you would do negative visualization. And think of all the reasons why they wouldn't buy so that you can do the polar opposite with your messaging, and develop a whole messaging plan first, what are we going to say? Why? How will we trigger them emotionally? How will we help them justify logically? And then once you have that, then you move into the distribution plan. Where do they spend these people? Where do they spend most of their time? And is that platform, a platform that I am able to distribute this message in the way that it needs to be distributed? To get a response? That's the first place I think you start is data messaging distribution. That's how I believe you should start a marketing start
Blake Beus  14:20  with your marketing plan. Okay, interesting. What if I'm brand spankin? New, I haven't sold a single one of my widgets yet. So I don't have past customer of data. Yep. How How would you recommend someone like that get started on developing their messaging. So
Greg Marshall  14:39  I recommend you come up with two to three broad audiences that you would test. Then you would start doing outreach and figuring out who responds, right. Once you figure out who responds. Then you go back to the data, the messaging distribution, yeah. And that's essentially what you want to do is you want Keep testing to figure out who responds to your message and why. And then do your own research so that people that are responding to your messages, ask them, what about this product or widget attracted you? Why didn't like it? What do you do for a living and you start figuring these things out, because if you dig deep enough, you will fit most businesses, I think, don't believe that the same type of person is buying their product. But when you start to dig in, you start to realize there's a lot of similarities to the people who keep responding to your message. And then you can really like hone in on that one segment, and make it better and better and better and speak more like clearly to that audience, and you'll get better response rates.
Blake Beus  15:45  Yeah. And I think it's good to note here is the similarities don't have to be split down with standard demographics, that's the easiest way for us, yes, to split up a population is, you know, men, women, age, location, ethnicity, things like that. And, yes, sometimes that's important. But sometimes what brings people together is none of those standard demographics. It's an idea or an interest in something or a passion about this, or that or whatever. And so it's easy to get locked into the simple demographics. But you got to dig a little deeper and do that. The other thing I would say is, if you're just starting out, you have not sold a single product whatsoever, you can take a few guesses. But then I would recommend reaching out and trying to get on the phone with a couple of people that you don't directly know. Yep, that are in that and just ask them. And the easiest way to do that is to say, on Facebook, or something like that, hey, I've got this product, it's I think it's best geared towards this demographic. Yep. Does anybody know someone who fits in that that would be willing to hop on a quick phone call with me for 1520 minutes. And I can ask them some questions. And specifically, look for someone you're not friends with or family with. Because there's an inherent bias there. Yeah, they can be as honest as they can think they're being as honest as possible. But the reality is, like, we want our friends to succeed, so go for it. But in order to actually succeed, you need to get some honest feedback about about those things. And that's a good way to, I mean, you could get some data, some meaningful actionable data, without spending a dime that way, and only putting two to three hours worth of work into that you can get some meaningful data that can then shift your efforts to say, Okay, here's who I'm targeting. Now, here's what their interests are, here's what their fears are, because I ask them those questions.
Greg Marshall  17:51  Well, I think it's a very, so a marketing plan should be extremely customer centric, right? Meaning it's not what you think they want to buy, or what you want to sell. But providing them what they give you, right, the feedback that they're actually giving you. So if they, they liked this product, because of XY and Z, and you want to sell your product because of not that you need to give in to the XY and Z because that's what they want. Right? Right. So for example, if you're selling a product, and everyone says, I like this product, because it's easy to use, it's lower cost. And it's very efficient. But you want to position the product as high end and different from everyone else. Well, I've seen businesses get so kind of like stubborn with I want to sell it this way. Even though the language that my customer who is paying me is saying this. They don't they keep pushing this marketing message. And what did they end up like, pounding their head against the wall? Because they're like, No, but I want it to, I want it to be this and it's like, but the customer, not just one customer. Many customers are saying this phrase. Yeah. Imagine if you use this phrase in your marketing, the response rate you get, yeah, and how much easier life was become. So this is a part to not be stubborn. When it comes to your messaging and branding, let the customer almost do that for you, not you.
Blake Beus  19:23  And if you do that life's a lot easier when you don't have to you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about messaging, you're more going with the flow and the more you kind of let go and go with the flow of what your customers are saying and keep kind of gearing towards that they the actual people that are actually giving you actual dollars that you act actual bank account are the ones that are dictating your marketing message because it's actually working, as opposed to me trying to like paddle my canoe up river, because I want it to be positioned like this. Yep. And I think just just last week, I was speaking with someone who wanted to launch a podcast So as part of their marketing plan, and so they know that I do a podcast and so they're asking me some questions and, and I said, Well, okay, so what's, you know, what's your audience and things like that. And they, their audience are business owners, and they're typically busy, whatever. And so he said, I really want my podcast to be maybe maybe two, maybe three minutes long each episode, because I don't ever have enough time myself to listen to anything longer than that. And he said, Well, is that what your customers want? He's like, Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Have you asked any of them? And they have existing customers? And he's like, Well, no. And I said, Look, I typically podcasts that are most popular are between are between, you know, 20 minutes and 90 minutes or the three hours long, right. And I said, and that's that highly specific to industry. But there are almost no podcasts that are popular that people listen to that are only two to three minutes long each episode. So what you're doing is basically projecting the way you feel about podcasts onto your customers. And this person doesn't even listen to podcasts. Yeah. So I was like, and that's fine. You don't have to listen to podcasts to produce a podcast. But you don't know how people are consuming podcasts because you don't even like listening to podcasts yourself. Yeah. Right. And so I just had to be frank with him said, You need to just ask some people, what, what types of things would you be interested in? And how long are is when you listen to a podcast or something like that? How long is the podcast? And? And, you know, we'll we'll see, we'll see when he gets back to me on on what he's found out. But yeah,
Greg Marshall  21:41  and I think that's very valuable, because that also goes into the the mistake of assuming everyone consumes buys or behaves exactly like the business owner, right? Are you? And that's just simply not not true, right? I mean, you have to test and see what do customers look like? What do they respond to? You need to reach out to them? How can I make this better? What don't you like about this, so I can get rid of that. And it's a never ending, like, you really have to cater to your customer base, to give them the best experience if you want any chance of referrals, organic growth, and higher profit margins, because if you don't do that, it's gonna be churn and burn. Right? You might be able to get people to do stuff, but then they leave. They don't stick around. They don't tell anyone positive about you. It's all negative. So you're really like making this harder on yourself versus if you become the company or the brand that's known as we're going to take care of our customers by any means necessary. And their feedback means something. Right, right. That starts to travel on quicker than, No, we just do our way. And that's the only way, you know, and try to kind of pigeonhole that.
Blake Beus  22:54  Yeah, I remember very, very early on Netflix used to do this. This very simple survey strategy that I'm sure sure worked really, really well. And I was I was on Netflix, way back when they they didn't even really have a streaming offering. So I was a very early adopter on that. And they said, Ed, I had a two disc plan that anyway, but about every other month or so they would send me an email with three links in it. And a simple question it was, and the questions were sometimes like, how, how was the the quality of the DVDs? And the answers would be like, it was great. It was scratched or, but still played, or it was unplayable. And if I had one question in there, and three links, I would click and I could click on one of those links. And it would say, thanks for taking our survey. That was it. And they would log that data in the background. Very, very simple. But they could have also been things like, what new feature would you like to see next? This, this or this? And I would click on one of those links. Yep. survey done? No extended survey, no, nothing, but because they I was a customer of theirs. They already knew my contact info, they could track which link? I clicked. Yep. They could say, Okay, this demographic wants these features, this demographic wants these features. And it was a very simple survey tactic. But the thing is, is you don't need this massive infrastructure to do the exact same thing. You can do that exact same thing by just calling up a handful of people. 510 people don't have to be a huge, statistically significant audience. And just ask them, hey, what new features I do you use XYZ products that's maybe a competitor or something, what features do you wish they had? Okay? Then you go and make a product or a service that fits that gap. And you just let your customers dictate your next line of products or whatever.
Greg Marshall  24:49  Yeah, and I think you know, if you just want to make your life a whole lot easier, just listen to your customers and then adjust things as you go. And I think one of the challenges that sometimes It's hard, right? Is you personalize your business, you know, you put your blood sweat and tears into it. So when you're almost afraid to hear something negative, but if you can remove yourself from whatever they say, is not a reflection on me personally, it's just a reflection on the experience the service they're getting. And I can change that, then you'll be able to get much greater growth because I think there is a level of you don't want to hear anything bad, right? Or that's, why would I ask if there's problems, but that's every problem that I've ever run into with a customer. I've always been able to use that data to go, Okay, we need to get better at this, right? Or we need to prove it that and that's just quality feedback. And that if you care about providing a good service, or a product or whatever this is, you want that, right. You don't want to put stuff out there and, and secretly, everyone's like, I really wish we had this or that. Versus you knowing that they want it you can like delightfully give it right. Yeah. It's so much easier to sell something a product or service
Blake Beus  26:10  to someone when they've told you exactly what they want. And then you give them that exact thing. Yep. It's it's like it's it's like Christmas shopping. Yeah. Right. Like when someone says, Hey, I want a red Ryder BB gun to compass in the stock, and you get them that literal exact thing. They're happy. Yep. But if you're like, Well, you know, what if it's not a read writer, but it's this, this brand, and it doesn't have a compass in the stock, but it's got a scope on top, and you give it to them? And they're like, it's okay. Yeah, that's not what I want. But that's not what I really wanted. It's so much easier to have happy customers, when you just literally give them exactly what they want.
Greg Marshall  26:51  That's a great analogy, because it'd be the equivalent. I really want that, but you should, but you think I would really, if I was a kid, I would really love this right? And then you give them the place that they're like, I don't even like video games. Yeah. Now you've alienated? Yeah, exactly. Even
Blake Beus  27:08  if you've spent more money on it, and it's like a way cooler gift. If it's not what they want. They're not going to be happy.
Greg Marshall  27:15  Well, I think that's the perfect analogy. They're asking for stuff for Christmas all the time. Let's let's let's be a good Santa. Yeah. And give them what they want. They
Blake Beus  27:24  want. So yeah, well, I think now's a good place to kind of wrap that up. We kind of put that a nice little neat bow on that. Yeah, everybody. So Greg, how can how can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall  27:36  Greg Marshall Dotco. And you can book a free strategy session. And just Blake Beus TOCOM All right, so next time, we'll see you later. Okay, bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  q4 advertising like Black Friday just happened. Everybody's gearing up for q4. And you you were saying? You're getting asked a lot of questions about how to plan and prepare for the holiday season?
Greg Marshall  0:15  Well, you know, in a lot of ways we all of us adults never quite fully grow up. Now, let me explain to you how I remember in school when you had a paper and you knew that paper was going to be due months in advance, but then you wait to the last minute to do it. Similar to the advertising strategies, and q4. If you're trying to do it in q4, it's too late and too expensive. No. And I actually recommend if you're going to do you should be planning your q4 advertising. Now for next year, yeah, right. So I usually advise my clients, they should be investing the most money possible in the month of January to about June to July. And the reason why I advise that is because that's when ad costs are the lowest. And ad costs are the most expensive, and q4. So what you want to do is you want to invest heavy early on, build up a big email list text messages, customer base, retargeting audiences. And then when q4 comes, you can keep your ad spent either the same, or even drop it and invest more into sending out the texts and emails. That's how you'll get fantastic returns.
Blake Beus  1:28  Right? So and a lot of people don't don't think about this and don't think about what you're how our ad costs calculated. And so I always tell people, it's kind of like the stock market if you're bidding on on sets of eyeballs. Yep. Right. And so the more people that want those sets of eyeballs, the higher the cost is because you have to bid more. Yep. To get that attention. And so if you understand that concept, then you can plan based on seasonal thing. Yeah. But so yeah, you're you're saying spend more, put your dial in your strategy. Do all of that from July, with January, sorry, January to July ish. So you have everything down? Exactly. build your email list, because email, email marketing is cheap. Yeah, this is why it has such a high ROI. Yep.
Greg Marshall  2:17  And email, text message, all that stuff, drives the most repeat purchases the most sales and and you pay the lowest amount. And you have to look at as you're investing for q4 early on. Yeah. And if you wait too long, your list will be too small. Your retargeting audiences will be too small, and you won't be able to capitalize on q4. And this is when most people want to really make things happen. So I feel like investing heavy, January especially, is a good idea. So yeah, I personally think January investing in January is the most important simply because that's almost a hangover, all the spin of q4, everyone leaves the market. And so then this your CPMs your ad costs will go down. You're just not competing with as many people as you are, right now the month of November and this specially November, right? Because of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Blake Beus  3:23  So what do you like? Like, because the other thing I talked with people about? And I want to get your thoughts on this? Because I don't think we've talked about this specifically. But should should part of your planning process include what offers you're going to offer in q4, and then also in q1 next year or whatever. And yeah, what do you recommend people? How do you recommend people think about those offers? Everybody's looking for a deal on Friday? What like How should people structure
Greg Marshall  3:49  those? Well, I still think you should come up with your offers, and then that will actually drive who you want to advertise to anyways, right? Because you want to make sure you have the list of people that would be attracted to those offers. And then when you think about offers, you have to think like, you know, let's say you're in retail, right? Or you're you're you're selling clothing or products, physical products, you have to think like Okay, can I get shipments in on time? Yeah, to make sure I have enough volume and stuff to sell. What is seasonal? Like, what is popular during that time? What are people like, willing to spend more on or less on? What are your biggest profit margins and really think that through? Because if you do instead of a last minute trying to think of a deal, you never make your best decisions. Last minute, like thinking about, I need to hurry up, put some out there. Instead, think about the offers away in advance and just think, what is it that I if I had like I have a client right now. I did a great job over the summer of planning on getting the inventory that she needs now to sell to basically not prevent her from scaling it up. And she's out At this most you did $100,000 in sales with this product. And before we've kind of done that multiple months, multiple times in the past, but we couldn't because we didn't have the inventory. But we use this strategy of planning out our offer is going to be this product when Black Friday heads on Christmas heads. And we did all that over the summer. Right.
Blake Beus  5:23  And I think that's even more important now. Because ever since COVID, kind of hit we've had domino effects in lots of different areas in supply chain. Yep. Like getting products in and orders in and it hasn't been just COVID. It was. It's, it's been a bunch of things. But I mean, even even now I walk into Target. They're fully stocked here, Utah, except for there's some things they just don't have. Yep. And so yeah, that's that's a really good point to think about. What do you think about the people that do will do anybody? Does anybody ever come to you and say, hey, I want to want to run these ads, it's going to be a loss leader item, I don't even care if we lose money on this offer in q4. Is that a good strategy?
Greg Marshall  6:07  Well, I mean, it'd be a great strategy. Not too many people approached me with that idea, because most people are thinking more short term, which is usually the problem. But I think it'd be a great strategy, if you have a product that's very popular, that you could use as a loss leader to prepare you for the following year, where you have a huge customer base of people that you know, buy these types of products, and then you're able to market to them next year, make your profit. But like I said, I think it's a good strategy. But you do have to have a strategy during these times. The companies that crush it, are the ones that have a strategy way in advance of thinking of all the clients that are doing very, very well, this month, and most likely next month. We have talked about their offers, like like I'm recommending over the summer, right? Like, what are we going to do during these months to absolutely like, yeah, crush it. So if you're not doing that, start now. Like it's not too late to start for next year, even though that feels like a lot of years go by like that.
Blake Beus  7:08  Yeah. And I think like, I I struggle preparing and planning long term. Sure. Right. And so one of the tricks that I do is, is, when I whenever I think of I wish I would have done that for this year, I write that down. And then I scheduled an appointment for myself, a few months down the road when I need to, like address that. But But then I remember the things that that I should be doing. Yeah, I
Greg Marshall  7:36  think it's also important to think long term, you know, I'm constantly preaching that because long term will be more cost effective for you as well, because then you're not wasting money, which is a lot of advertisers fear, you're not misusing it in a way that you're getting the lowest amount of returns, or you're just not positioning your company in the way that is best. Right? So if you plan and think about long term, you'll save a whole bunch of money, and a whole bunch of stress because then you're not stressing. Yeah. And the fourth quarter with oh, man, I have to do this. But I don't know if I have the funds or I don't know if I have the list or I don't know if I have this right.
Blake Beus  8:13  Well, in total, the one thing I wanted to say in regards to the loss leader is if you don't have a plan to make the money back a loss leader is a bad idea. Yeah, like a really bad idea. And traditionally, Black Friday sales, I went Black Friday shopping, literally one time in my life, and I'm never doing it again. It was awful. But the companies that do the loss leader in it works is they know, I have this product that will get people in the store and then they'll buy other stuff where my profit margins are way higher, and it will work out. Yep. Whereas a lot of smaller advertisers, they think well, hey, Target and Walmart Costco are doing that. Yep, I should do that, too. Again, we talked about this all the time, there's different strategies for for different stages of business. Yep. And if you're a small business, and you're still working up your your, you know, strategy your offers and things like that, I think, I think something like a loss loss leader is a bad idea. Unless you have enough profit runway to make something like that work. You can do flash sale for a couple of days or something like that. But you you have to have that plan. And if you want to do a loss leader on Black Friday, or Cyber Monday or whatever, I would plan on then following up via email or something else with another great offer. That you could also have deeply discounted but since you're you're emailing it to people, instead of paying for ads, your margins are going to be significantly better. Oh, yeah.
Greg Marshall  9:44  And I think it would do you it will do good to just start today, obsessing about repeat purchases. How do I get people to buy more often and more stuff? Because that's where other money is made, it's not on that first sale. Anyone who's trying to make profits just on like one sale one offer only, you're gonna have a very difficult time. Because at cost just, you know, you just do the math, it's just not going to work out. You have to have a game plan on how can I sell these people over and over and over again, think about like, Starbucks people go there every day, right? And so what's the lifetime value of that customer? Who knows they're spending $10 per day $70 to 80 a month, that's 3360 a year 10 years? That's $33,000. That person just spent just on coffee, right? And maybe you acquire it for 250 bucks. It's a fantastic investment. Yeah. If you think that way, how do I just keep getting people to, to do repeat purchases, that's how you're going to make your money, it's not going to be off of one offs, like, Hey, I have a cool deal. Sell this. And let me just try to sell this, you got to have a plan. And you have to be thinking of structuring your business to like, I know a lot of I've heard podcasts is and I agree. If you only have one product or offer, you don't have a business, you just have an offer of businesses, can they buy more and more stuff from you? Over and over again? Yeah, that's, that's, in my opinion, what you should be focused on. So become obsessed with repeat purchase,
Blake Beus  11:20  right? And keep in mind, like if this is your business, you get to make your own rules, you can create new products all the time. Yep. If you're, if you're an E commerce company, that doesn't mean you always have to only sell physical items, you could maybe make an offer for some sort of a digital item, or it doesn't mean that all of your items need to be custom, maybe you make, maybe you find a way to bundle your items with something that's high value, but low effort for you, like I don't know, um, stickers, right, or maybe a digital add on for free that that they get with their purchase or something like that. There's lots of different ways to think about it. I was talking with a guy here locally that he has a CNC machine, right, so we can load up things and haven't carved stuff out. And he's done some really cool stuff, some some relief, 3d Relief maps and stuff like that. But he found this way, he can make these kind of ski signs and he can customize them. And he developed a system to do it very quickly, without a lot of effort on his part, the CNC machine does most of the work and the the materials are pretty low, low cost. And even though he does these really big expensive things he can sell these for for relatively cheap, making for people make them really quick and they're low, low effort, but high value for people because people love love having them in their in their home and everything. Get creative is what I'm getting, because this guy has traditionally done metal prints of his own photography on creative works, which is a lot of effort, but he does well at it. But he found a way to use us to use a similar, you know, creative outlet to make this thing that is low cost, low effort. high margin. Yeah, for him. Yep. And always keep looking for those kinds of things.
Greg Marshall  13:18  Right, I think. And higher margins, obviously always help when you're doing advertising. And I was just thinking of a client and we should definitely do an episode on the benefits of high ticket when you're doing paid traffic. But this gentleman, I won't say the exact product. But he had a very high price product that he intentionally price it that way to knock it down during this time of the year. Okay. And it's a nice product see? It? It did awesome. Bunch of people bought a very expensive product directly from ads, just because it was knocked off at 50%, which was part of the strategy from the get go.
Blake Beus  14:02  Right? So he's showing these ads for people at the regular price. Yep. And then come this time of year 50% off so all the people that didn't buy Yep. are like oh man that I've been seeing it for this price. And I know this is actually a good deal.
Greg Marshall  14:17  Yep. Yeah, so basically prep them right all year, prep them to see this price point. Then Black Friday came and we cut it in half. Yeah. And the conversion rate was like, yeah, like everyone, like as soon as they saw they're just buying it because they just do it's like anything else. It's like someone said I have a 2023 Ferrari on sale for $22,000. You better believe that definitely is gonna sell out like this, right? Because it's perceived value is really high. So you knocked the price down really low for a limited time. You're gonna get a lot of action,
Blake Beus  14:50  but you got to know your numbers. You've got to know your margins. You've got to have a plan
Greg Marshall  14:54  and he also did it to where the profit margin even at 50% off was massive. Yeah. So it was still a huge problem
Blake Beus  15:03  and you in you can definitely do that if you have a plan and you think it through. So anyway, let's wrap this one up. Yeah, right here. Greg, how can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall  15:12  Greg marshall.co. You can go ahead and book a free strategy session call everybody,
Blake Beus  15:16  just Blake beus.com.
Greg Marshall  15:18  All right, so next time see you later. Bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  book a call funnels. You said you want to talk about that. But you didn't want to tell me before the phone before we turned the podcast? Yes. What? What? What about book or call funnels? We want to talk about Yeah, I
Greg Marshall  0:10  didn't want to forget, because Because fresh off my mind, I was just talking with a client. And I was like we I feel like we always talk about, there's always like value before we hit the record button. We probably share that too. Yeah, so with the book a call funnel, essentially, if you're in the service industry, and you're trying to get more sales, right? You're gonna have people book a call. Now, the question I always get asked, and what I recommend, is, Well, should I just put a phone number on my ad? And I typically say no. Because if you have, because you're making yourself subject to having the customer call you, which is the last place you want to be in the sales process. Instead, I recommend, of course, you can have the phone number available, but I wouldn't make that your number one objective, I actually would make the objective, have them fill out a form name, phone number email, so that you can control the sales process so that you actually have their lead information. And you can reach out to them versus hoping that they call you or let's say they click your call button, and no one answers. Well, there you go. You lost them, right? Like there's no other I mean, you can't follow a retargeting. But to me, the best for retargeting is having their actual phone number and email to reach out to them. And so with the book a call funnel, there's several things that are important when it comes to this. So I was speaking with a client and I was explaining how the assumption is, you run an ad and the ad kind of does all the work for you. Yeah. And then they buy, but it's actually not, there's actually several steps to measure. And this is how you know, the journey of your success to your book, a call funnel is working. So number one, you have to obviously, and these might seem like not important, but they're extremely important. Okay. All right. Number one is, first, you have to get people to actually click your ad. Right? Yeah. So so if you're getting people to click your ad, that's step one of success, right? And I recommend you break it down in stages. Step two, is, once they click your ad, can you get them to fill out a form? Okay, so until then, if you're getting people to click your app and not filling out your form, work on getting the form better, right? Step three would be once they fill out the form, can I get them to respond in any way back to me via email or text? Right? Okay, that's step three, then you go step four, which is, and to me, this is the most important part of the process is step four. Getting them from responding back to actually on the phone. Yeah, that is the most important part of the process. Because everything else you can fine tune. But if you cannot get them on the phone, nothing's gonna happen. Right. And so that's, that's the next success. And then obviously, the next stage would be get them on the phone, have your sales process. And then after your sales process, what are you trying to move them to next? So a true book a call funnel? Although it seems like it's just add to book a call is a lot more steps than just that. What are your thoughts? I
Blake Beus  3:31  think you covered it we're good.
With with any sort of a sales process, so many people, and I'm guilty of this, too, we take too big of logical leaps, right? We think our customer is going to do this, and then they're going to enter, they're going to book the call. Yep. There's it the smaller the incremental steps you can make it, the easier it is. And see, I would me personally, I would recommend, most people, if you're paying for ad traffic, don't put the phone number there anywhere until after you've already collected their information. And which is pretty similar to what what you said, I think we're very much aligned on that. But and the reasoning is, is because, well, we were talking about this in a different way right before this is and then I'm gonna get nerdy but asynchronous communication. The whole point of running something like an ad is you want to basically multiply your effectiveness and your capabilities. I'm a human and I only have 24 hours in a day and I have to sleep for some of those hours and I have to eat for some of those hours and and I want to spend time with my family for some of those hours and do something outside of work for some of those hours. And if I am pushing people to a book a book of you know, call and my phone number is on there, I have to be available or else the ad fails. Yep.
Greg Marshall  5:00  And that's a great point, I didn't even I forgot to bring that. And so
Blake Beus  5:04  and so you what you really need to do is find a way to work in parallel, you're building some systems to basically increase your effectiveness and multiply your ability to do stuff without you having to actually do the stuff there. Yep. And so if you have that phone number there, you have to always be available. And not only that your mental energy is always going to be there is I got, I got a family dinner, well, I got I need to make a phone call comes out, it might be that $10,000 Deal. Yep. And that's just simply not worth the mental drain, your life should be getting easier not by running good systems, not harder by running systems. And so really, you want to collect their information, and then give them an option to pick a time during work hours for a phone call or something, you can use Calendly, there's lots of other options out there, you could have a custom built system, you could even just have them on the second step of the form, after they filled out their name, phone number and email address on the second step of the form. Just it could be as simple as selecting what day and what time works best to give you a call. And you limit that to hours of that, you know, you're already available. It doesn't have to be a sophisticated system. But you just say what times are good for you maybe even just write a little message, if you don't want to hook in complicated systems where they could just say, Hey, I'm available Tuesdays from this time to this time, and then you just call them on that time. And you know, in advance, you can kind of schedule around that. But yeah, the other problem with having a phone number in there is now your ads are basically ineffective during certain times of the day when you know you're asleep at night, or yeah, whatever. So now you're thinking, Okay, do I shut my ads off during those hours? Or should I leave them on? If I shut them off, we start to lose, you know, algorithm effectiveness if you really need those ads to work all the time. Yep. And so the phone number is just is not great. I've even tested this with some of my clients that had some high ticket kind of monthly offers. It was it was a subscription service that started at $1,000 a month for E commerce businesses. And it went up to five $6,000 A month or whatever. And they would have phone numbers, they had phone numbers on their site, phone numbers in their sales process, everything we tested ads to phone numbers. The reality is most people just don't want to call if they're looking for a solution. They don't want to call right now they're usually have five minutes before their next meeting or something if their business owner or whatever. And, and it asking them to fill out a form with name, phone number and email is is a big enough ask already in the app takes 20 seconds, asking them to call right now and dedicate who knows how much time to this phone call is is a hard pitch.
Greg Marshall  7:52  And I think you know you speak about time. I think the biggest thing when it comes to time is when you're asking them to do a phone call. Because this is a common misstep I think people make or salespeople make excuses is they do not they? They say hey, when do you have time to book a call or to get on a quick phone call? Versus giving them a specific, very short amount of time as a small tycoon. So like, Hey, do you have two minutes or three minutes or five minutes to just hop on a quick call? So that they can see like, oh, yeah, five minutes? Yeah. If you say do you have time for a call? In my opinion? The assumption is, oh, this might be a long call. Yeah. Right. Like when people say can we do a call typically calls at least 1520 30 minutes?
Blake Beus  8:39  Yeah. Yeah. And that that's a really good point, you could remove the mystery of what the call is like, even when they're selecting a time or whatever want to one of my favorite things. I heard years and years and years ago, I I mean, I don't think this works all the time. But when it was the this person was giving advice on how to connect with other people that were busy or whatever, and how to stand out. I think it was on a podcast about productivity or some something like that. But they basically said, if you're reaching out to someone, and you want to connect with them, and you don't know them very well, or maybe you don't know them at all. But you know, they're a busy person. Ask them if they have some kind of a non typical timeframe to make a call. So for example, do you have 11 minutes for a quick phone call? Yep. Right? Or do you have seven minutes for a phone call? Not 10, not 15? Not 20 or 23 or whatever, whatever you think is appropriate? The reason is, is it stands out. It gives a time timeframe for them to think, Well yeah, I could do two minutes, three minutes, seven minutes, whatever. And I think that's helpful. I think the other thing you could do is you could detail out in the seven minutes, or 10 minutes or whatever it is. We're going to do this, this and this. And then I can go back with the information you've given me and work up A quote or whatever is appropriate in your sales pipeline. But you can say I need these things, these pieces of data, and then we'll work up a quote, and I'll get back
Greg Marshall  10:09  to you on it. But I think that's super important. And I do think that works is because it kind of breaks the rhythm as far as you say, three minutes, 11 minutes 13 pattern interrupt, we're gonna kind of like, wonder, has someone asked me if I have 13 minute? I think I got 30 minutes. You know,
Blake Beus  10:25  I don't have 15, though. Yep.
Greg Marshall  10:29  So I do think but a lot of it's just like, you know, I would use this in sales strange where I say, you know, one of the worst questions, I think you could ask when you're, if you work, like, let's say, in a sneaker place in the mall, right? Do you need help with anything? No, I'm just looking. That's like an automatic response that says, I say that all the time. If you if you ask twice. Or even more specific, you'll get a different answer. Hey, looking for something. Now I've just taken a look. Is there anything specific that you're looking for? You most likely will get an answer because you broke the pattern of not just looking? Well, actually, that works
Blake Beus  11:05  on me all the time. Yeah. Meeting all the time. That's my, my automatic response without even thinking about it, even if I am looking for something specific is no, I'm just looking. And if they follow up with a second question, is there something specific you're looking for? I almost always answer with what I'm looking for. Like,
Greg Marshall  11:22  yeah, I'm looking for the new Apple Computer. I just came out yesterday. And it's like amazing how specific you can get right like, for me, like if I want to see this? Yeah, I'm looking for the size 10. New Ken Griffey sneakers. Like yeah,
Blake Beus  11:35  that's such I did that exact same thing. When I went to an office supply stores looking for some colored stickers, circular, nothing fancy. I walk in there. And then I say, Can I help you with anything? We looking for anything? And I'm like, No, I'm fine. I'll just look around. And then I spent 10 minutes looking for the stupid.
Greg Marshall  11:49  If he just followed up, he or she, you could have literally gotten the hell that you want it. So I had to
Blake Beus  11:55  walk up in shame and say, I can't find this. Yes. Can you tell me what
Greg Marshall  11:59  you should ask? First, you should ask me a follow up question. So I think the importance of a timeframe, specific questions, breaking pattern, you know, pattern, interrupt, those are all keys to making a book a call funnel work. Because if you don't do that, you're not going to get people on the phone, people are going to avoid the phone call, because they're going to feel like it's going to take too much time or the sales pitch, right? That pretty much everyone knows getting on the phone means I'm going to be sold to, but if people don't mind being sold to for five minutes versus an hour. So if you make the timeframe really small, then they're not, they're not going to feel like they're being hooked into what's the timeshare sales pitch where you have to take your whole day basically, for a salesperson that's like, does anyone really want to spend their whole day getting sold, you know, so that's what people are really trying to avoid is essentially wasting their their hour or time because it's the most valuable asset to most people with a sales pitch. So if you can shorten up the duration, they'll feel a lot better about moving forward and getting on the phone call. And almost every time someone says I only have a few minutes, they if you do a good enough job, they always have unlimited time to be on the phone and talk about solving a problem that they have. Because at the end of the day, that's why they're on the phone, they have a problem that needs to be solved.
Blake Beus  13:23  And if your sales pitch I mean look a hard sales pitch works. That's why people do them. I don't like I hate if I'm ever in if I'm ever in a hard sales pitch situation, I instantly am trying to get out of there as fast as I can. However, if your sales process is very much a conversation, and we're on the same team, we're trying to see if we're a good fit for one another to help you with your specific problems. And if you're honest about that and saying you know what we we are a great fit or I don't think we're the perfect fit but here's a couple of things I would look at which I know you do with with some of the people that reach out to you to be to be clients with you there have been times you've told me that that you've you've said look I could take your money but we're just not a great fit because you're not to this level just yet so you would be better off instead of paying me to do this and this put some money in ads so you understand the process better and dial in your sales process better and this and this instead of giving me money you'd be better off to do that yourself for a little bit and feel free to reach back out to me in a couple of months of doing that and we can have another you know book another free 30 minute call to just chat about whatever see how things are going you're very much helpful to them as opposed to trying to get them to make a solid commitment and by now is
Greg Marshall  14:40  by now I forget everything right forget
Blake Beus  14:43  so but yeah use I mean your main process. Your main sales process for your getting your clients is basically a book a call funnel in lots of different ways through social media, organic stuff, or through ads or whatever. You use this all the time, and I've
Greg Marshall  14:56  been using Bucha call funnels for probably 10 years. Be honest, because like previous to my marketing business, I was in the gym and fitness space, and people wanted to book a call to come check out the workouts or the gym facilities. And so I'm very experienced in the kind of book a call funnel. And what you need to do, and these are just, I'm just sharing the things that have worked consistently, for 10 years, that will get you from someone on the internet, to getting them on the phone call and turning a stranger to a customer, which is the goal, right? And I've never gone as in depth with this actual way of doing it. Because I sometimes assume that everyone knows that's how it works. But when I talk to customers that are trying to book calls, I noticed that there's a big gap. And like, kind of like you said, the ask that they're doing is too far, like you want to get married today. That's too much of an ask when no one knows who you are, it's more, do something smaller, you kind of work your way up. And that's kind of the same thing that you really should be thinking about when you're going to book a call Funnels is how do I develop the relationship? And how do I remove the fear of being sold to for too long, for something that I don't want to be in and like you and I and probably most people, we don't love high pressure sales pitches, it doesn't it's not a fun environment to be in. So people that's the core objection is like, I really don't want to hop on a call and get told why I'm making the biggest mistake of my life by not buying your product right now. Yeah, right. I mean, because I hate having to tell someone. Yeah, I just right now, it's not the right. Well, I thought you were serious about doing this or doing a lie. Now here,
Blake Beus  16:42  I have been known to literally just stop talking and walk off. Like,
Greg Marshall  16:46  I've done that, too.
Blake Beus  16:48  I just can't. Yeah, but so yeah, so So quick question. I know, we wanted to wrap this up, kind of kind of, we're gonna make this one a little bit shorter today. Say someone has a book a call funnel? And it's not working? Yep. What are some things that you would recommend they look at and do to try to diagnose and fix it?
Greg Marshall  17:09  So a couple of things. So this is good question number one go into? Are you getting people to fill out the form if not fix the form. But typically, people are not getting them on the phone. That's why I said that's the most important stage. So I would actually look and go, What are you saying? Or how are you following up once you get the lead? Nine times out of 10? People follow up with Hey, do you have time to do a quick call, they're not building the relationship and having a conversation before getting them on the call. That's, I can almost, I don't want to guarantee but high probability. Anyone who says booking and call funnels don't work for me. It's that stage right there. It's yeah, I get these leads, but they never respond or whatever. It's because they're not. They haven't fine tuned what to say, between form fill out and getting on the phone. Right? And so that's the number one place I will look at. If they're not getting for Philips, then it's through traditional Well, what's your ad saying? targeting the right person. But most people have that part down. It's it's the book getting them on the phone.
Blake Beus  18:17  It's like that transition from the cloud. Yep. to the real world. Yep, is a bit of a disconnect. Because people I do this to I feel like I can understand the cloud, I understand the real world. But like Bridging the Gap sometimes is a little bit hard. I just had a thought based on kind of what we were talking about before this. I have seen people do this, I don't see very many people doing this. But I've seen people do this with the right kind of offer is once they get the lead and everything and then they reach back out to try to schedule the time. I've seen people actually record a little video using a service, the one I was telling you about is one called Jump share which favorite serve. It's a it's a time saver. You could record a little video and say, Hey, I just made you. I wanted to introduce myself, so you get to know me just a little bit better. So here's some things about me my background, I don't know much about you and your business yet because you just barely fill out the form. But here's a quick little video and then you can dump that link into the into that and it could be a 32nd video introducing yourself. The one thing I've realized, and this is one thing I love about this podcast is and why we do this podcast is the single best way to build trust with potential potential customers or just people out there is video or audio. They get to know your tone of voice. They get to understand you they get to feel like they really do know you. Yep, as opposed to just an email or whatever.
Greg Marshall  19:39  Yep. Well, I agree. And I think I utilize that as part of my strategy. Thanks to Blake. You know, bringing me on to different software's that really help and because it's it really at the end of the day, it's all about building the trust and building relationship with the customer so that they feel comfortable to even talk to you. Right. So that's the key. Yep.
Blake Beus  20:00  Alright let's wrap it up well how do they people how do people get a hold of you just go to Blake beus.com and you can reach out to me there
Greg Marshall  20:07  and if you want to get in touch with me Greg Marshall Dotco and you can book a free strategy session call all right
Blake Beus  20:13  we'll catch you guys later bye