Zen and the art of ads EP-018 | Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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Transcript

Blake Beus 0:00
We're recording now. And it is moving now.

Greg Marshall 0:03
All right. We just had a wonderful experience where we record a beautiful podcast for you guys. But for whatever reason, technology just paused on us. So

Blake Beus 0:12
I was the best one. It's, but it's gone. It's it's gone forever. But But we got this and we'll, we'll do it again. And I think we'll we'll make it even better.

Greg Marshall 0:22
Oh, yeah. 100% agree. So basically, our last podcast was about essentially, you know, when people people want to change, what they do that's already working? Well, you shouldn't write like, a challenge that I have, with a lot of clients, as I actually talked to them about, I have to talk them into not changing what's already working, because they're becoming bored with their own marketing campaigns. And so they want to, like, shift them, or let's try something new, or everyone in the whole world is seeing this, or my customers are too bombarded, which that typically is more about, we're thinking about ourselves too much right thing like, because I saw this 20 times, because I'm on the back end of my business that everyone else saw 20 times. But trust me they have. Yeah, because you got to spend a lot of money.

Blake Beus 1:13
Yeah, well, and what kind of sparked the whole conversations before we started recording the first time that didn't record correctly? You made a statement to me that kind of just really caught my attention. You said, I can't tell you how many times I have to have conversation with clients telling them not to change things not to make changes that that things are working. But they they want to like keep switching steps. Right. And we went off on a big tangent about why people do Yeah, some of that is never going to never going to be heard ever. Yeah. But I do remember some some bits of it. And one of them we were talking about? Well, let me let me tell you, you have some great ideas on why you think people want to change something that's working. They're spending, you know, $500 a day and they're getting $2,000 A day back. Yeah. And they want to shut the campaign down and try something.

Greg Marshall 2:08
Yeah, yeah. So those are basically the reasons why people want to do that. It's fear based, right. And we all run run into this, we're not excluding us, we're just saying, this is something that we all have to constantly, you know, be aware of, are we making decisions based off fear, or actual data, a lot of times, people present data in a way where they think it's data, but it's actually fear based. And they've just come up with a great argument, right. But really, it's two fears of fear. Number one is the fear of kind of looking like played out, like people see your stuff too much. Or like, you know, they've already done that there's no creativity in that. And, you know, creators pride themselves on having new stuff and coming up with new ideas. So it goes against their internal kind of makeup, to keep showing the same thing over and over again. And so one is they don't want to look like, you know, they're played out or going out of style, because they keep doing the same thing. And number two, is the fear of lack of resources, right? So they believe that, well, if I add on to what I'm already doing, I may not have the money, the mental capacity or the time to actually do this. So they want to cut things off. And another kind of reason for that is, when there's more things happening, there tends to be a feeling of loss of control. So the fastest way to kind of feel like you're back in control, is to stop something, or cut it off. And so that's, that's where I think a lot of that comes from,

Blake Beus 3:29
yeah, do you? Do you think that sometimes there's like this pressure from peers, or even a perceived pressure or pressure that doesn't really exist other other than something we put on ourselves, or the business owner puts on themselves? That, that I want my peers out there that are also business owners to, to respect me and think that I'm innovative or think that I'm always reaching certain levels or doing things and I'm worried that they're going to think I'm boring and lame, if I keep selling the same T shirt over and over and over again, even though it's making me loads of money. Yes,

Greg Marshall 4:03
yeah. So I think that definitely comes into play, especially when you have, you know, I had this situation happen to me before, where you have an outside adviser that doesn't actually have the experience yet. In this field, they're very skilled, but they don't have the actual experience yet making suggestions that are the right decisions, and another business model, but not in this one. Right. Okay. So I'm not saying this person does not know what they're doing, or that, you know, their their advice is, like, done with ill will or even not credible, I'm saying is the advice is applicable to that particular industry, but it doesn't transfer over 100%. So, my example would be like, I can't say because I understand, you know, digital marketing that I now know how to do heart surgery. Because I've had success of digital marketing, right? My advice might be keep doing the same thing in the digital marketing world. But that may be terrible advice. If I'm like, operating on someone's heart, right? I mean that that could be, you know, catastrophic. So what I mean is, typically what happens is, outside noise definitely impacts how people can behave, particularly if they're tied emotionally, to what the product is like, they made it, they tend to, they tend to, if anyone kind of goes after, they will actually take the criticism and try to change it. Mm hm. Because they're like, Oh, I can't be I can't have people viewing me this way, or thinking about things this way. So I need to change it. So you're absolutely outside forces all the time. And of course, if you're someone who communicates with family and friends, and they see what you're doing, people are always going to give you that sideline advice on how to do things they've never done. We've all run into, right, where you have family members telling, you really shouldn't do that, like, well, how many businesses? Have you started? Yeah, because I haven't seen a single one. So how

Blake Beus 6:19
are you if they do, you know, do on a business, or whatever, your business might be totally different. And it's totally fine. I, I do understand very, very deeply the stress that comes from creating something yourself, yes. And then running your own ads. And that's something that I ran into. And that's really, that's literally the reason that you and I started working together. And we had met before that, but that's the reason we start working together. Because I had created my kind of initial product. I was running my own ads, and like, everything was so insanely stressful for me, because it was my thing, every time a negative comment would come in, I would be stressed because it was hard for me to not take that personally. Because this was all I had done. All of it. Yep. And delegating that to you. Took a lot of took a lot of stress off of my mind you didn't you say you had clients literally this week, reach out? Yeah, I can't take it anymore.

Greg Marshall 7:19
Yep. Yep, I've had in the last two months alone, I've had a couple of new clients come in, where they know how to run ads, they have run ads before they were running them before they reached out. And they've taken all the courses and everything. But when they when they get in the game, as I call it is a lot different. Because you're not actually if we were all cold and emotionless, then the it wouldn't matter. You can step in and do anything, right? The problem is, when you're practicing, and you're not in the game, yet, you don't feel the pressures of when you actually have to go at your product. Now you're spending your money, and people are commenting, or not buy or buy and whatever. And now that you feel like that's a reflection of you as a person on your character. It starts to play games with you when you run an ads because you start to get emotionally tied to you know, is this going to work? Am I doing the right thing? Do people hate my products? Do I need to do this, I just switch it up. And it reveals a lot about how you handle a lot of other problems in your life, right. And I can speak from personal experience where it's like, you take these and you're like, if you have a tendency to go, if things aren't working out, you just scrap everything and you start all over again, that's essentially that's going to show up when you're running your ads. And that's not the best strategy. The best strategy is not to act, overly impulsive. And emotionally, the best strategy is to kind of like, change course, slightly, slowly, don't take anything personal, and make your decisions off data. The problem is when you get too close to it, your emotions are tied. We're all susceptible to this. This is like I said, we're not excluding ourselves. It's just now delegating it out will help because it allows you to stay in your strong space, and, you know, event essentially not ruin the part that needs to be run a certain way by getting overly emotional about it.

Blake Beus 9:19
Yeah. Yeah, so one of the things and I liked your response to this in our previous one that no one's ever going to hear ever. But But I asked you, you know, do you do you feel like there's some sort of daily spend threshold are some arbitrary number different for everybody where, where they hit this certain spend and all of a sudden the anxiety goes goes through the roof, right? Because and I said this last one, I have worked with people where they think you're spending $100 A day in ADS. That's crazy. And then I've met other people worked with other people where they're like, I don't Don't even turn on a campaign if it's not at least 150 or $200 a day. And then, you know, and then you have people that are comfortable spending 1000s a day. Yep. Right. But you feel like people have some sort of threshold that they don't know about. And all of a sudden they hit it and, and shit hits the fan and anxiety goes through the roof, and they're freaking out?

Greg Marshall 10:19
Oh, absolutely, there's no doubt about this. So every single client that I work with has their own threshold daily, that they can operate under and be just fine. Even though the number that they're deciding is not actually accurate. Okay, so for example, you'll have because it's all based on expectation levels, and the thing that will kill you, when coming up with a budget, the thing that will absolutely destroy is doing the what I'm spending today, times 30 times 12. And what that means is, if I'm spending $100 a day, if I spend that in 30 days, that's $3,000 a month, because what happens is you overly focus on that number, wit and what you're actually doing subconsciously that you don't realize is you're actually making the assumption that you're going to spend this money and get zero sales bet. That's actually how you decide you're not deciding, oh, if I spent 3000, I get like 2900 and sales. And I have 50% margin that really only spent like $1,500 out of pocket. It's $1,500 loss. It's not a $3,000 loss.

Blake Beus 11:26
Right. Also, you're not going to keep spending a loss day in and day out of the campaign is literally just turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, because it's not working. But you're right. We like mentally, consciously. We're making the decision based on zero sales. Yeah. Why? That's why the hell do we do that? Like, I know, that's what my brain I've done. My brain does.

Greg Marshall 11:49
And I know and that's why you laugh. I said, what you do is you take the daily times 30 times 12. Right, because you understand exactly, yeah,

Blake Beus 11:57
I mean, in the last one you asked me, you know, cuz we hit we hit about three grand a day in sales on not in sales in spend on mine. And, and that's when like, I got it, I got ridiculous. Yeah,

Greg Marshall 12:10
it was? Well, of course, because that's that's, you know, you you shared the story of like, you know, you're spending $3,000 a day and what does that mean? You're not actually taking it day by day making assessments or even week by week, what you're doing is you're saying, well, 3000 times 30 times trial, that's a million dollars, Aspen, I don't have a million dollars, right? Well, of course, you know, because what we're doing is we're running ads to grow that and if it doesn't work, we turn it off. Yeah, there's always a way out. And that's, that's the thing, but we play this game of like, I'm going to spend this much. And then assume I'm actually going to get zero sales back. Yeah, which is totally false. Unless you're a store that has like just started, that's not going to happen. And if you've got long history of like, you're always selling $10,000 a month, I can make the argument you should be testing more aggressively, trying more, you know, more things harder with your ad spent to try to ramp that up. Because your goal really should be to spend as much as you can. But the reason why you're not is because everyone has a bad experience or something that causes them to not be able or okay to spend it. Right, right. And so I think in that last episode that we talked about, I shared an experience that I ran into which I almost can guarantee, you are also running into this without either acknowledging it or not realizing it's even there. I had experience in the past where I couldn't spend more than $50 a day and ad spent, like I literally, I couldn't get myself to press the button, to even at 51 I couldn't do it. It was literally like a mental block. Because I had an experience where when we were spending ad dollars, we were making great returns great profits, everything was going great. But the people that I was surrounded by did not feel comfortable. They had their own spent number that made them feel very nervous and anxious and scared and kind of go into survival mentality. And so what happened was, I would get on the phone after this and just get hammered about, well, why are we spending this money? Well, and then when sales go down, because we spend less well, why don't we get as many sales? Why do we stop spending that much and it was a constant roller coaster? And it's because there was emotion tied to that. And what what basically the reason I'm sharing that it's because it took me a long time to be able to kind of release the brakes to that because I understood the reason why I can't get past this level is because I need to be spending more but the reason why I can't spend more is because I've internalized as negative experience as truth as a can never get around that. So therefore I had this like this little block or ceiling that I put on myself. That shouldn't be there should be removed. But on the one actually key was older. So that's the experience of how most business owners that are running as are having some level of success, they could reach the number that they have in their mind, or that they're idolizing someone else for reaching, they could reach it right now, if they just removed that block of doing the daily span times 30 times 12 in their head, they could get rid of that, they will be able to reach the goal. And I can almost say this. If, if if I could convince a client, let's say that was just like, you know, I'm going to take a risk. And I would say, I'm going to be the analytical person, I'm going to not allow you to see what's going on in the ad account. Okay, at all. I'm just going to run it based off of the numbers you said you need to achieve. I'm going to block you from being able to see what's being spent, and I'm going to maintain that number and grow it. I bet you would grow way faster. Because you wouldn't know what's going on. You would just you would just be like, Oh, well, sales more sales are coming in. And then numbers are working out. Yeah. But because you can't see it. You will freak yourself out. You'll spook yourself by just looking at it. I go, Oh, man, what if this happens? And he started playing whatever game?

Blake Beus 16:23
Right. I think there's a caveat to that. Because with you definitely. But I think and this is something we don't talk about a lot. I think a lot of business owners have tried hiring someone to help them with ads. I'm guessing you are oftentimes not the first person they've worked with. I never have. And and many times you get someone that talks a big game. I mean, a lot of agencies do this. They they say yeah, we can definitely do this. They run ads for six months, blow other money. And then they say, well, it didn't work out. Sorry. Why? Right. And, and so and so I wonder if that's and this we have not talked about the last one. But I think I think that might be a reason why a lot of people are like, I need to see the numbers. Yep. Because they've been burned in the past. I know, when I was doing agency web dev stuff. Literally every person I talked with had been burned by a developer that had promised them they would get this thing done on time. And they didn't. And they were all super hesitant to hire me because I was way more expensive that I was like, I'm expensive because I deliver. Yeah, you know

Greg Marshall 17:30
exactly, exactly. That's, that's actually a good point. Because every conversation that I've had, I won't say every but 90 out of 100 they either ran ads themselves, or that they hired another person an agency or took a course all kind of the same, right? Where it's like, we can get you, you know, these unrealistic results. And that's the problem is, a lot of the issues that people run into, is there being sold on unrealistic objectives or goals. For example, you see the, you know, the course, if you if you do these hacks, you'll get a 10 return. So, this is a conversation that I actually have often happy brought this up, because we didn't talk about this unless there's benefits to this. So there's an assumption because of bad players out there. They, their programs say that you should be getting a 5678 10 return on adspend on your dollar. And not only that, when you scale up, it should be the same. Right? So the belief is, well, if I spent $10 a day, right, and I got a five return on adspend. Then if I spent $10,000 a day, I should be able to maintain that near five return on investment, which is absolutely false. Correct. But a lot of these programs they teach that they kind of leave that part out, like oh, when you scale up, you should get that. So a lot of the conversations I actually what have with people that are new that used to work with someone else, is they they like to say this? Well, yeah, if I if I spent 100 And I'm making, you know, and they'll throw a ridiculous number. If I spent 100 I'm making like $5,000 Then why would I not spend 1000 and make like 50 And I know that's because that's not gonna

Blake Beus 19:33
happen. That's because that's not realistic. And whoever told

Greg Marshall 19:37
you that's lying, right? 100% Instead, what you need to do is think more realistically, how because if you could do that, then why is it the person that taught you how to do that? Why are they not on the cover of force is the richest person in the world. Right? Because then all they'd have to do is just go, well, I'll just spend a billion dollars and then I'll be worth 500 billion Don't be rich and everybody, I'll be richer than all the people. Right? But that's not how it works. Right? So what you have to think about is do it more or less thinking, if I put $1 in how do I get like, you know, a 50% return on my dollar? Not, you know, 20,000% return, because that's just not that's not gonna happen. That's just greedy. Right? That's, that's,

Blake Beus 20:25
and you, I mean, maybe you get lucky, you spent $1. And you make one sale, and that's worth $100. So your return on investment is 100x, or whatever. But when you scale that up, it doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. Because you're reaching more people. It's just how it's mathematically how things scale in the ad world. But like we said, and all of all of you know, we'll say this, again, I'm sure. But the companies out there, you're seeing running ads all over the place, the big companies, right, they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. And in many times, they don't have a direct way to monetize those ads, think of like Pepsi and Coke, right? Like, these are massive brands. Yep. All of their marketing campaigns, you still have to go into a grocery store, buy, buy some and buy some coke, or some Pepsi, right? I'm not seeing a Coke or Pepsi out on Facebook and clicking it and buying coke to get delivered to my let me get a 12 pack delivered straight to my house right away right away, you know, let's do a try and ask me what's the return on adspend, I don't calculate return on adspend the same way you do, right. And so if you're comparing a company that's making, you know, $10 million a year, and your company is making $100,000 a year and you want to get to those levels, and you want to maintain the exact same row as you have right now, versus then it's not going to happen, you've got to explore other channels, and some are going to be more profitable, you got to scoop up a much larger market, and probably launch some new product lines, or some new product offers or something like that. You've got to explore these other things.

Greg Marshall 21:57
Well, and I think, you know, speaking with, you know, how to manage your your psychology when you're doing that, if you okay, here's here's why you become stressed out, is number one, the fear of losing money, right? But you're not thinking rationally that's only emotion. Like if you spent 100, and you only sell 80, he didn't really lose $100. Right, that but you think you did, yeah. Or your mind will trick you into believing that that's not actually what happened, you may have lost $30, right? 40 bucks, right? Because you've accounted for all the cost and all that. But your mind will make you panic and keep doing going into survival. Right? The other thing is, if you go into running ads with unrealistic expectations, you're actually causing your own anxiety. Because if I went on a weight loss plan and said, If I don't lose 100 pounds, and the less and the next 14 days, something is seriously wrong, then every day, I'm going to be stressed out to the max because my expectation is unrealistic. I'm not gonna lose 100 pounds for today. So therefore, I shouldn't be thinking about that. Right? Right. I should be thinking about just lose two pounds a week. Yeah, eventually I'll get there. Right, right, that's how you should be looking at your ad account is if I can get a 20 3040 50% return on my dollar. And I can do that over an extended period of time. That's how I'm actually going to become wealthier than if I try to hit homeruns. And go, I need to spend, you know, $100 and get a 1 million return back, it ain't it's just not going to happen. So that's what causes your own anxiety is your unrealistic expectation of what should be happening. And I don't blame anyone, because they just don't know. But my goal in this pocket is to explain to you how this actually works, right. And the way it works is you got to look at your ads as a way to get decent returns on the front end. So on the back end, your email marketing and your new product launches and all that can make you all of the profit because you've acquired those customers. Right? Right. If you look at it that way, you would be a lot more aggressive with your advertising versus thinking, my advertising suppose if I put $1 in, I'm going to get $10 back for ever at unlimited spend scale. Right, right.

Blake Beus 24:19
Yeah, so it's, I mean, we we talked about this in the last one but essentially two things. I think this episode should be named Zen in the art of advertising because it really is this this mental game and people talk about a mental mind shift whatever a lot, but I feel like a lot of the Guru's kind of missed that. Like, everybody has some sort of hang ups when it comes to running a business running ads, whatever. And this kind of exposes those things. And so the best media buyer is one that's also a good, a good therapist, and you know, so hat make sure you have those realistic expectations, make sure you're you're not doing something to try to just get rich and the next 30 days, the the courses and the people telling you that that's that's what they can help you do. It's it's a statistical anomaly, right? Like, that's not realistic the people that have the good businesses, the successful businesses that are working long term are those that grew steadily, slowly made smart decisions and kept doing what was working. Yep. And didn't just throw that out the window to manage their own anxieties to try to start something new. To bring us back to kind of our initial topic, I really do feel like a lot of people, if you're getting sick of running, selling the same coffee mug, even those make you so much money as a business owner, you delegate that out, delegate that off have, have your media buyer or your other team members work on that. And you work together putting another offer, whether that's a new product, whether that's a companion product, or maybe that's some sort of bundle, we've talked about bundles, we love bundle, yes, yes, they're the best. But come up with some cool, unique, interesting angle to then say, okay, media buyer, Greg, here's this new bundle I've worked with, you know, I've reached out to a lot of my customers, I feel like this is going to be the next kind of interesting combination to put things together or interesting companion product or whatever, let's test this while also keeping all that stuff running, because you've already got that stuff figured out. Yeah, well, we'll leave that going. And that's how you scale up a business, right? With stability, maintaining stability, without the fluctuations and, and into the long term, you know, kind of success?

Greg Marshall 26:36
Well, and the thing, if I can emphasize anything, there is a benefit of delegating as well is you can protect yourself from yourself. Because the worst thing you can do, when especially when running ads, but same in business and everything, you never make your best decisions at your highest emotional peaks. Right? You actually make terrible decisions, the more emotionally stimulated you are, right, because you're no longer thinking rationally, right? And you go into survival instincts. And so one of the things that, you know, I'm thinking of a couple scenarios that I've run into where things are working really well. But because we've surpassed that, like threshold, that daily budget span, threshold, the stories and falseness that we tell each other, while this happens to get out of it, just because we feel uncomfortable, we'll start manufacturing stories. This isn't profitable anymore, even though the numbers are showing that it is, it's just that you're trying to escape the discomfort of doing something you're not used to. Right, and you're going to the next level. So what we do is we come up with a story I like we try to nitpick it to say it's not working, but not really because any data showing that it's only because I feel very uncomfortable, I want to get out of this. Right, right. And I want to go back to where we were, where we can, you know, where I felt comfortable.

Blake Beus 28:03
But then I'm also not comfortable with how with with what our revenue numbers were right? So so there's this push and pull. And that's why the conversation needs to be had. And, and and I've said this before, I'll say it again, I'll always say it. I'm a big fan of therapy, there's occupational therapists out there that actually help deal specifically with professionals in the work environment, and how to manage some of these uncomfortable things. I think that's fantastic, too, to pursue that and explore those options as well. But, Greg, I think we should wrap this one up. And unless you had anything final you had to

Greg Marshall 28:40
say no really what I would say the final message, work on your emotional you know, your emotional intelligence, I guess, or focusing on how to manage your emotions, and be truthful to yourself when you're making decisions on if you want to grow, you're gonna have to do things outside your comfort zone and you will feel discomfort. So you have to do everything in your power to fight against the desire to go back to your comfort zone. Whatever it takes to not do that if you want to keep growing and so with that final statement if you want a free therapy session go to Greg Marshall Dotco book a free call with me But all jokes aside if you need help growing your business and you're not happy exactly where you're at and you'd like to grow it in a business minded mindset go ahead and book a call me

Blake Beus 29:32
late How to Get a hold he just go to Blake Beus calm I've got a membership on there where I basically help coach train people with social media marketing specifically like organic marketing. But I do answer questions on ads when those pop up. And or you can just reach out to me contact me and we can have a chat on whatever I just like chatting with people. Yeah. All right. We'll talk to you guys later. Bye. See ya

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