Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

Blake Beus  0:00  Google Analytics. So I've been getting a ton of emails about me to the changes on this. And I've actually converted a few sites already, from Universal Analytics to GA for Yep. is what they're calling it. But you had some questions about that.
Greg Marshall  0:14  Yeah. So actually, I had a client asked me about it last week. And I said, I'm not really the professional and this particular aspect. So I knew I wanted to ask you. So I'm going to literally ask you, because I don't even know what the differences are between, you know, the Google Analytics, and then g4. Yeah. So what is the main difference? Why, why is this shift happening?
Blake Beus  0:39  Because Google sets up
Greg Marshall  0:42  the Google gods. Google said,
Blake Beus  0:44  so I mean, every This is, I mean, it's called G a four. So this is the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. And Google Analytics first came out in probably the late 90s, early 2000s. And so in that time, we've we've had four iterations. And this is the fourth one. As far as why Google decided the way they were doing analytics needed to change. And so they
Greg Marshall  1:11  think this has anything to do with privacy.
Blake Beus  1:13  I mean, probably, it probably, I mean, you're seeing a lot more things. So the initial way back when Google Analytics use relied heavily on third party cookies, right, and as new privacy standards, get updated, and things third party cookies aren't a thing. So the last version of Google Analytics, which was I believe, they called it Universal Analytics, relied on first party cookies. And essentially, I mean, for most people, third party first party doesn't really matter, most users, but essentially, first party cookies mean that Google Analytics is installed on my site. And when I set a cookie, which stores some information about my session, that cookie is stored based on a domain name. So it would be that Google Analytics cookie would be stored based on my Blake beus.com domain. And as I browse to other sites, those sites don't have permission to read that cookie. Whereas third party cookies, Google would set those cookies based on the google.com domain, and then as a third party cookie, and then as you browse around, all the other websites would be able to see the data stored, or at least some of the data stored in that cookie. That's a very big generalization. But we're starting to see, we've talked about this too, we're starting to see cookieless the future right? Oh, cookies go away. And again, we're moving to a different type of technology that that offers more privacy and offers better isolation of data. Yep. You know, probably, you'll probably see more data being stored in an in an encrypted state, on your computer instead of just in a plain text state. Yep. And this is this is I haven't read their specific why. But if I were to guess these are all the things that you're starting to see.
Greg Marshall  3:05  Got it. So essentially, for a business owner, what is it I know, I've gotten those emails? What do they basically need to do in order to switch over? Does it automatically happen? Or do they need to go through a step by step process? Yeah,
Blake Beus  3:18  it does not automatically happen. If you have a very simple Google Analytics install, all you really need to do is swap out the tracking code. And it's not just a pixel ID, you actually because Google Analytics will give you some code to copy and pasted some JavaScript code, you need to swap out that code entirely. And you're, you're good to go. You can actually run them in parallel. So the site's I've converted, we just put both on there. Okay. So to start gathering data in one or the other, any cons to that to running both? Yes, you might have a slight decrease in site speed, but we're talking about that significant 10th of a second, maybe not Not, not a big deal. Okay. The other problem you're you're going to bump into is, if you have a complicated Google Analytics install, maybe you're tracking some values, you're passing some values from some event values from from Google Analytics into your Google ads, as conversions, or you have custom funnels built. And all of those things, then you're setting up Google Analytics for is going to take a lot more time. And some of those things you have set up don't have a direct translation from the old version to the new version got the concept of funnels, and these things are different conceptually from one to the other. So you're going to have to spend some time rethinking how you have that setup. That being said, most people don't rely on Google Analytics heavily like that, unless they have a tech team or marketing tech team or something like that, that knows what they're doing and is technical and can check and help with that implementation?
Greg Marshall  5:01  Got it? So are there any, I guess, new features that that are of benefit to a website owner or business owner? Or is it kind of pretty much the same? Just a different kind of layout or format?
Blake Beus  5:15  Yeah. So, um, I mean, if you go read their documentation on it, or their introduction on it, they're pitching all sorts of great new things. And honestly, I read through a lot of those, and it's just more of the same, okay. But you always got to put a positive spin on it, because because you're forcing hundreds of millions of people to change. Right? That's, it's a, it's a big change. of the people that I've worked with that are actively using GA for most of them don't like it. Really? Yeah, that and why is that? Well, first and foremost, the Well, first, you always have a learning curve. Okay. So the dashboard for GA four looks significantly different than the dashboard for the Universal Analytics. So it's a new dashboard. Okay. Second is an I agree with this. I mean, I like learning new things. But I agree with this part. They don't make it really very easy to say, what's the traffic look like on this page? Yep. You would think that that's in the old dashboard. And the old way of things that was, you would obviously, you looked at that all the time, you would just go say, hey, what's the look? What's the traffic, like on this page? And with this new version, they have it split up into different concepts that essentially talk about you know, we had this before, but But you have acquisition, you have different channels and things like that. But if I just want to look at what's a page doing, it's not easy. Yes,
Greg Marshall  6:52  you can still do it. But it kind of takes some work. It's really hard.
Blake Beus  6:55  It's like, they don't want you to do that. For some reason. I don't know. I don't know. It could just be that could be something that changes. Yeah. But again, most of the people that I've done conversions for they they needed the conversion, but they don't like what they're seeing. And, and and it's complicated to set up the reports and things got that that they used to, which has led to conversations with several people saying, what else is out there? Yeah, Google Analytics can't be the only analytics platform out there. What else is out there? So I've had some of those conversations,
Greg Marshall  7:29  which if you think about it, I don't know, I'm sure Google's done the you know, the benefits pros and cons. Because if you're gonna get a bunch of people feeling like it's too complex, or you're not getting the information that you want, it is gonna raise a question. Well, I've always used Google Analytics, but it's getting too complicated. So maybe I'll go use something else. And so they could lose, they could a lot of their data and our customers when it comes to that. So they
Blake Beus  7:56  really could and I mean, Google is a smart company, but also they're a big companies with lots of people making decisions. And when you have a big organization like that, it's completely feasible to make some decisions that impact a lot of people that are just not great decisions. That happens.
Greg Marshall  8:13  Well, what do you think about? What's a secondary option? Let's say someone doesn't feel like he's in GA for? Yeah, what could you use.
Blake Beus  8:23  So what I would recommend people do if you have a more complicated kind of setup, or whatever, I would look at some other options. But the first thing I would do is, because Google owns search engines backwards and forwards, Google is the biggest search engine out there. And if you find GA for too complicated, all I would do is I would put, I would create an account. And I would put the simple, simple tag on your site. And maybe don't even look at the dashboard at all, but putting it on your site, we'll help you rank better, because Google's going to know more about what's happening on your site, and, and all of those things. So I would put that on there. Even if even if you want to show up and be represented in Google Search, having that on there is going to help with them. Even if you don't look at that. So if you want to look at other solutions, other free solutions, you're limited gotta there's not as many free solutions out there. And oftentimes, the free solutions are going to require a little bit more technical setup. But I mean, let's take a step back and say why Google offers it for free. They offer it for free because it benefits them in their ad play or on their search engine. Yeah, out of the goodness, no, no, they're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it because it benefits their company. That's why it's free. It's it's actually kind of crazy that Google Analytics is free if it were a standalone product by some company. Yep. It's so complex and so many moving pieces and is updated so much and it would be absolutely insane for it to be free. You have to reason that they offer it for free is because of their ads platform and all these other things. So some free some free options out there. If you're looking at free options, if you have a high traffic website, I'm talking, you know, 500,000 page views a month, or viewer, or a high traffic would be that or more, you're going to probably end up paying because a free tier is not going to work for you. But if you have, say 500,000 or less, you can find some free options out there, right, because a lot of the other analytics companies will have a model where they want you to use it for free. But once you start using it to a point where you're making some money, they need to make some money because they gotta pay engineers, and all of these things to like, maintain it. And then there's some open source solutions out there. And open source solutions are oftentimes free with maybe a paid support tier or something like that. So one that I really like is one called post hog, that's an open source one they have, if you are a technical person, you can actually install it on your own server. So you can have your own analytics server, and your own code snippet that you can put on your sites, to look at how everything works there. And that would be free for you to do if you know how how to do. If you don't know how to do that, you can that you can use their hosted service, which is free up to I think it's like 500,000 pageviews, well, they call it 500,000 events is what they do. So a single page view is an event. But also if you're you can set it up to track button clicks nine. So every button clicked, every one of those would be an event. So a single person could have multiple events on a page view or a session or whatever. That's a really interesting one, it's a much simpler ad platform. But I I think most people would find that the the information in there is quite a bit more valuable. Got it. Because it's more consumable for a regular, regular regular user, I find it more consumable for me. Yep. And I find the data on that a much more actionable data because it's, it's simpler, and it's not superduper hard to set up, say like a simple funnel, and get a Funnel Report and things like that. But then you have some other platforms that are more geared towards enterprise users you have segment is one mix panel is another one, this is gonna cost you, you have Oh man, I'm I can see their logo, but I can't think in the name. Anyway, there's a bunch out there, you can just do a Google search for, you know, Google Analytics alternatives, and you'll find a list of them. And most of them are going to be paid. I think a lot of the paid ones start at 30 bucks a month. So it's not the end of the world. But they get more expensive. If you have more traffic, a large volume of traffic got it. But a lot of them will do extra things to they'll give you a heat map. So you can see where people are scrolling through on the page where their finger is pointing or things like that. So there's there's a lot of things a lot out there you can do above and beyond just what Google Analytics stuff got.
Greg Marshall  13:12  So I know we got to keep today's short. Yeah. Is there anything that were that were missing as far as the analytics? And what to look out for what not to do? Or any and maybe any pitfalls that people may run into? Anything like that?
Blake Beus  13:29  Yeah. So I mean, I think the biggest pitfall would be ignoring the fact that you need to convert the new, they're going to have a hard cut off. And you'll, if you rely on ads, Google ads specifically, or traffic from google.com, if you don't convert over, you're going to you're going to start seeing it to the quality of data, the quality of that traffic go down over time. So definitely convert over. Okay, if you do have a complicated install, and it's Phil's overwhelming to convert over, just literally copy and paste the code snippet on your site right now run them in parallel, and reevaluate if you actually needed that complicated of an install, got it, if you actually needed all of those custom events, and if you actually needed all of those custom reports, and actually needed those things, because most people over time, I mean, the old version of analytics has been out for over 10 years. So over time, you get all of these things. Yeah. And you're thinking, oh, man, we have all of this stuff. Now's the time for a little bit of housecleaning, yeah. Maybe starts from scratch and say, What do I actually need? And most likely, you only actually need one or two of those reports. One or two of those custom reports or custom events, covers probably 95% of the value you are getting out of the old thing. So I would use it as an opportunity to do some housecleaning and get that you know, getting that set up. And then remember over time, you can add more reports. It's not like you're not missing out right Now this minute, if you don't have all of the reports, and you have a gap in some of these reports, those things aren't going to impact your, your business dashboard much. Sure. So
Greg Marshall  15:11  So basically, in a nutshell, if you're not using it or haven't set it up yet, run them in parallel now, so that when the cut off period happens, you don't lose your building. You're building up some data. And I think that seems to me that's, that makes the most sense as far as what to do next. Because like you, I've been getting those email, Hey, this is going away. So I was like, Well, what exactly do they want us to do? So I wanted to pick your brain and see what should everyone do to keep their websites up to date? And so yeah, so that being said,
Blake Beus  15:42  I actually have one other smellies of advice real quick. The other thing I think you should do, you should take this as an opportunity to set up Google's tools. They're called tools for webmasters. Okay. And it's, it's an old school tool. Yep, I heard they still use it all the time. But basically, what it does is it monitors your site over time, and will email you alerts if it detects some sort of a problem, okay, for example, it will kind of get a baseline of your site, if your site normally takes two seconds to load. And then all of a sudden, next week is taken 10 seconds to load, they'll shoot you an email and say, Hey, we've noticed a couple of problems. And then you can go in there and fix and fix those problems. We have, oh, you know what, someone, someone changed our picture. And now and they didn't scale the picture down. So now they're trying to load a 10 megapixel picture on our homepage, and it slowed it down. Or it will alert you if you have a huge increase of like missing page errors or things like that. And then you can go in there and fix those, taking the time, once a month, or once every few months to kind of fix those things, helps. It's like a dental checkup for your your search engine results. It just kind of keeps everything good, fresh, make sure still in line with what Google search is expecting and with Google ads is expecting and all of those things. So I would take this as a chance to use this other tool, set it up set up a super easy, it's it's literally you just have to confirm ownership of the domain. And then it doesn't if you have Google Analytics already installed, you don't have to install any other code or anything. You just need to confirm I own this website. And you need to show me you know, monitor it for me and send me email alerts if there's Scott that's going on.
Greg Marshall  17:22  So tools for webmasters. Well, I think, and is there anything else? So we've got? I know in a mess, his name walltime, GA for GA for tools for webmasters. And then if you want to look at other alternatives, do a Google search. Yeah, there's lots of them out there, try them out for Google Analytics. And then is there anything else? Are we missing? Those three key points, I think are the main things that the email or the store owners or website owners need? Pretty much. Yeah. And then what if they need help installing this, can they reach out to you,
Blake Beus  18:00  you can reach out to me just go to Blake beus.com. And I have a way for you to contact me on that site. And we can have a quick conversation about that. And I mean, a lot of this stuff isn't super hard. If you really if you really need to, and I don't have availability or whatever. You can actually hop on, say Upwork or places like that. There are experts if you've never used up work have used Upwork before,
Greg Marshall  18:26  I think once like five or six years ago, so I mean,
Blake Beus  18:29  I have a profile on there. I don't I don't do any do much with it. But from time to time. If I want to pick up an extra job or answer client or something I'll hop in there and, and whatever. But you can find an expert in there that has good reviews that has experienced with GA for interview them make sure they actually know what they're talking about. Get a Quote for most of them will will quote you an hourly rate to do a conversion. But for someone who's an expert, it shouldn't take too terribly long to get you converted over it would probably be three to five billable hours tops. Got it? I would say unless it's a really complicated install. But yeah, so that's another way to get it done, even if you're not a technical person.
Greg Marshall  19:11  Got it. So yeah, so if you need to contact Blake, go ahead and visit his website. And it's Blake beus.com. And then if you want a free marketing strategy session, you can go to Greg marshall.co. And fill out the form and we'll reach out so until next time, we'll we'll see you later okay, bye
 

Blake Beus  0:00  So I don't even know what we're talking about today. You wouldn't even talk with me about it before we started. Yeah, that's
Greg Marshall  0:05  because that's because I wanted to make sure we didn't miss out on some of the Golden topics. So, today I had mentioned to you just last week, and in fact, it might already be active, because in a couple ad accounts yesterday, I saw, so Google has decided to remove on Youtube Keyword targeting, over asking me yeah, all really are content targeting. So you can't you can't do placements, keywords or topics for conversion campaigns. What's just weird? Yeah, they just removed that. So like everyone, and like, the Google ads, YouTube faces like, This is unbelievable. Like, how are you supposed to actually target if you can't target the content, you know, contextual targeting? And I thought, well, that's interesting. I wonder why they would do that. I have a couple of guesses. I mean, my guess would be probably that, if they're trying to increase revenue, and you take away like, high performing, you know, campaigns, then you have to spend more to get the same result. Right. And so that's my guess, I mean, and it's probably accurate. And so yeah, there's no incentive for, if you think about it, if you own that business, there's no incentive and having campaigns where you could get like, $2 conversions, because then you never spend more, right, you know, your budgets really low. But if you have to spend to get, you know, $100, get a conversion, then you have to keep spending over and over again. And I think that's kind of the same thing that they did with forcing Display Network ads, on the video campaigns, I think it's the same concept, like just, it's a way to get more advertising. And in addition to that, I had noticed Facebook has this new feature that says, Would you like your ads to be a multi multi advertiser channels or something like that, what that means is, if you don't uncheck that box, they'll put your ads like on Instagram next to other people's ads. So it's just like an ad feed. It's not actually a feed. So it's like you're competing against other ads, it's like a, I was thinking about it, it's like, like a swap meet. It's like, everyone's kind of selling the same thing. And you're all in the same area. So it can devalue your ad, but it can make it seem like it's being seen by a lot. And I thought this is interesting that they're making a lot of these changes. And then another change that I saw on Facebook was they changed, at least on my on all the My Accounts, which is a lot. They changed the default setting, to instead of like, especially on conversion campaigns, instead of showing costs or conversion, or leads or whatever. The default setting is reach impressions and engagements. And you actually have to like, search out how to put the conversion as the default setting to see your performance. That tells me multiple things. Either clients are starting to like fall off, because they're not seeing the conversions that they want. So it's almost like they're trying to convince you of something else. Yeah. But having that as the default. Yeah. And so yeah, so quite a few changes happening. And I know a lot of advertisers are like, What is going on? Like you're essentially taking away all targeting, but in my opinion, I think the entire time targeting is going to go away anyways. Yeah, like, if you think about it, the trend is maybe six years ago, five, six years ago, you can get ultra targeted, right. And then each year, they've removed more and more, you know, due to privacy. And really, it's just, I think it's a money grab. Yeah, but at the end of the day, you're gonna have to play by these rules anyway, so you have to get good at it. No matter what, it's not like advertising is gonna go away. You just gonna have to play by those rules and adjust. And I think I have seen quite a few comments with people online. Right, saying like, this is, you know, terrible and, and, in my opinion, it's just as far as part of the game. It's like anything else? Business changes. Yeah. And you just need to always know it's not it's not going to stay like this forever.
Blake Beus  4:22  Yeah. Oh, man. That's That's it. I mean, I have I have so many thoughts kind of surreal surrounding this, because, because I haven't, I mean, I haven't paid attention to that. And so this is kind of news to me. But it brings up a lot of a lot of things. The very, the very, very first thing is and this is where I take a step back and I look at the just kind of the industry, just the tech industry or even just like the economy as a whole because I'm, I'm a nerd in so many ways and economics isn't another way in which I nerd. I study that stuff way too much. Um, But one of the problems we have societally or economically and I'm talking kind of specifically the United States, this probably exists in other places too. But is is the way things like venture capitalists investing stock market. And these operate. So whenever I say I'm running a business, and I, I take some VC funds, how I used to work, helping businesses qualify for investor funds. So I know a bit about the it's not a ton, I did it while I was in college, but I used to work doing that. And basically how it works is we say, okay, we believe your company is worth $50 million. Yeah, even though your revenue is not there yet, and you're tight on cash. That's why you're looking for investors. And that's fine. That's like normal. But we think your business right now is worth $50 million. But we do think in the future will be worth more if you have the right money. So what we're going to do is we will give you $10 million, right now, for 1/5 of your business and you run the math, that's like it's worth 50 million we're giving, so we're giving you a $50 million valuation for $10 million. We as the as the VCs own 1/5 of the business. Yep. But because of the venture capitalists, I want to protect that investment. So the other part of the deal is, you have to have one of our board of directors or a person on our team, they need to, they need to sit on your board of directors, and help guide the company so that our investment is protected. And on the surface, that doesn't sound like too too bad of an idea. But the problem is, is that once you do that, as business, you kind of your customer is no longer the people you're trying to serve. It's the VC because you want to round two and around three and around forecasts. And so you're always trying to make those numbers look good. Same thing with the stock market. If I go public, once I go public, and my shares are being traded on the stock market, my customer is no longer the people I'm selling my product to it's the shareholders. And so I have to continuously show certain metrics. Yeah, which make my business look good on paper, but maybe alienating Yeah, your, your customer base. So we have this problem with both Facebook and Google. And basically every big company out there. I mean, you see this all the time, you have a great product, a great service that takes some VC money, and then all of a sudden, they're jacking up prices. Or they're saying, hey, buy an annual plan right now. And you can be grandfathered in this happened with a service I use recently. So they can pump their numbers, their revenue numbers really quick and show good on paper and do another round of investment. And so we have this all the time. And so companies are constantly not just sitting there saying, You know what, we're comfortably profitable. We don't need to change things, things are working. But instead they're saying, we need to show an increase in profit. And there's only two ways to do that. increase revenue, and decrease costs. And so you have these decisions that don't seem super logical. So this is one of those ways. Google and Facebook are so huge that they have so much market share. How do you increase that?
Unknown Speaker  8:12  I mean, last I looked, you gotta make more money. Yeah, last,
Blake Beus  8:17  I mean, you can't get more customers. They're so big. They have all the customers. So how do you make more revenue? If you can't get more customers? Well, I can't wait for more people to be born. I got to do it this this year. Yeah, I gotta do it this quarter investors
Greg Marshall  8:30  are waiting for their return. Yeah, the investors,
Blake Beus  8:33  they're not going to wait very long. And and so you start thinking of different ways you can do that. One great way, this is a behavioral economics thing is changing the defaults. Yeah, if I change the defaults, then more people will opt in to the thing that I want them to do. So we change the defaults. Yep. Right. And then after you do that, every everybody that's going to do that, that hasn't noticed or whatever they'll opt in. The next thing you do is maybe you make your services a bit more generic, people have to still they have to keep using them. And so you make them a little bit more generic. So you can kind of spread the revenue out on some of these channels that aren't as profitable for some people, but give more metrics. And then you start looking at different metrics. What metrics look way more impressive. CPMs cost per impression or just number of impressions. Yep. Which that one with the grouping with other advertisers? They basically every impression gets to yeah, go to to 10 different advertisers. So one set of eyeballs gives them 10 impressions to make their numbers look good. And I'm like, What the hell
Greg Marshall  9:45  yeah, that's that. So basically, and it makes sense. I mean, when you're the customer, it's easy to kind of like get upset, right? Oh, yeah. Because you're like, Well, I'm the customer. But if you were to flip the roles or Round, right? And you own Facebook and Google and you've got investors breathing down your neck, saying we need to have a profit that's bigger than last quarter, every quarter, forever. And you only have so many resources. I mean, you have to find a way to go, Well, how do I make more money? Because that's the only way to do this. And and in advertising, it's the amount of space that they force people to use. Right? And so it doesn't make any sense to have people figure out campaigns that will get them huge returns where then then they don't have to spend more, rake and just say, well, I'll just spend, you know, 10 grand this month, because I'm getting a 4x. I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, that's good enough. Yeah, it makes more sense for for you to say they have to spend 10 to get 20. Yeah, then they have to spend, because double
Blake Beus  10:53  is on their side of things. It's it's not necessarily on Facebook, in Google's best interest for you to get a 5x or a 10x return on any campaign campaign that Miles doing amazing, so good. And they shut it down. Because they're like you, it's too good. You guys are cheating. Somehow we weren't, we're not we literally weren't just perfect messaging and fit and everything, it's in their best interest for you to get a 2x campaign because that means more more revenue to spend more in Yeah, you got to spend more, but it's enough for you to keep spending Yep. And it can be wildly frustrating when this kind of stuff happens. But the reality is, is that whole system is not going to change. VCs aren't going to change the way that's happening, the stock market is not going away, right? Like none of that stuff is changing. So you just got to understand the incentives of these companies. And that makes sense why they're doing the things they're doing. And then you as an advertiser or a business, you have two choices, throw your hands up in the air and quit, go back to a nine to five, stop running your business, or adapt. And there will be people that will throw their hands up in the air and say, You know what I'm done with this. There's going to be media buyers and advertisers that will stick with it, but not adapt. And so they'll struggle and limp along. And then you'll have those that will put in the extra work, learn to adapt. And for those people, it's an opportunity.
Greg Marshall  12:24  Well, I think there'll be some big opportunities moving forward, because you can already see what this is going to do is take out people that really have no desire to do any work at all. Yeah, right and overly rely just on the machine. And I think like anytime things change, you'll see like a huge drop off. I heard a stat the other day, where they said, like, you know, we're in a recession. And they said, there was like a very huge number of real estate agents that have dropped out of the market. Because prices, you know, interest rates gone up, you know, blah, blah, blah, the same stuff that always happens every eight to 10 years, or whatever that number is. And what that basically shows you is there's probably an oversaturation, which means it was very easy. And then as soon as it gets hard, all the kind of that extra dead weight leaves, and only the people that are truly committed to kind of stick around. And it ain't easy for people to really commit to it. But they just, you just got to work your way through kind of that storm. And I think that's kind of what you know, I think there's multiple things going on with especially the ad changes, right? Recessions here, it's also fourth quarter. So they have to make their numbers, they know that average, a lot of advertisers are cutting their spend. So they have to figure out a way to get this revenue to go up. So they'll lean on pretty much the winners to keep spending more, because that's what they're gonna have to do. Right. Yeah. And I even saw some interesting, because you don't, I never thought of it this way. But I saw like, I follow a lot of YouTube creators on Twitter, just because I enjoy their content. Like I like to see what they have to say. And one of them who's kind of an industry leader, a guy that I respect, mentioned, he said, Yeah, I'm getting, he sent out a tweet, like a lot of YouTube creators have been kind of talking about how their CPMs have dropped by 30%. And that they're making less money because they're getting paid off of CPM. And I thought, that's interesting. It probably has something to do with the removal of content targeting because if you think about it, if these creators are making like, let's say one channel has a huge channel, and they have a specific audience and you're removing their nonsense people's ability to target that, then you're gonna get way less views, you're gonna get paid a lot less if it makes your channel less valuable. And so that's kind of where I think this is all going is one thing impacts the other. Yeah, so you're gonna see creators and it's always interesting to see how the businesses kind of adjust because I wonder when you're these app platforms. At some point, something's probably gotta give though, right? Like, if if you start to see that you're losing people in droves? Yeah, at some point, you've got to like, make an adjustment, because I would think the short term gain you would get from doing this long term, though, will hurt you. Right? Because eventually people will be like, well, if I can't target these channels is key. What if I can't target at all? And I have a very niche product? How will I sell that? Yeah. Using your platform? Yeah. Well,
Blake Beus  15:38  I mean, what you see is several different forms of consolidation. Right? If we, if we look back 10 years ago, this exact same kind of stuff happened with blogging, yep. Right. 10 years ago, someone could have a very comfortable business, blogging and just running Google ad, you know, AdSense, AdSense
Greg Marshall  16:02  fact, I had a client yet lived off this. Yeah, I had warned them about what you're really about to say.
Blake Beus  16:09  But the money paid per eyeball on your site will continuously go down. And that's the that's the exact same thing that will happen with YouTube creators, the money that they're making will go down. And the reason that happens is, is two different reasons. First, more advertisers are constantly hopping on board and you think, Oh, that would be great. But there's more advertiser competition there. Yep. Second, more creators are constantly hopping online. And third, people sometimes are just eventually kind of get sick of things. I, I've actually had quite a few people recently say, I am so sick of YouTube ads. Yeah, like yep, in YouTube has definitely been putting more out they have
Greg Marshall  16:55  on it. And it's significant. Now they have the two ads. And you notice I have like one hat.
Blake Beus  17:01  And then if you keep skipping, you'll get some Unskipable ones next. And that's frustrating to people. And so they'll say, You know what? Screw this. I'll go watch Netflix instead. Yep. Right. And, and so you're gonna see people doing that. So the reality is, though, is these companies are so big, that what you'll see is some consolidation, because those people are going somewhere. Yep. So they'll buy up something else. That's why that's exactly why Facebook bought Instagram. Yeah, people were more putting more time and effort into viewing Instagram than they were Facebook, or they saw that trend. Yep. So Facebook just bought. YouTube was a purchase that Google made. Yeah, Google saw a lot of people using YouTube and not reading blogs so much and stuff like that. And they could they, they were like, You know what, we're going to do this. So they bought YouTube and consolidated that, you'll, you'll see more and more of that, I think a lot of the top. So I think five years ago, the top creators on YouTube, were almost all independent creators. Now the top 20 creators on YouTube, almost every single one of them is a corporate entity, not not a not a person on the independent person or you know, a person who, whose business started on YouTube or whatever. So you'll see more and more of that kind of consolidation. But again, this is the this is the world we're living in this stuff isn't going to change.
Greg Marshall  18:29  Because you want it because you want it to.
Blake Beus  18:31  The only way this stuff would change is if we have some sort of government entity involved in saying, Alright, you guys need to do this and this and this, because of these reasons, which might happen, but we don't know. And if it does, it's going to be a very long process. And you can't, you can't wait and hope and hope that that that will change. Because it probably won't.
Greg Marshall  18:56  And I also think too, like, this is the nature of you know, because this is where I'm starting to feel old. You start seeing these cycles, and they're like, well, this happens to be you know, this has happened. I've seen this happen now like twice Yeah. Or it's like you there's a major powerhouse, the powerhouse goes away, then it's a new powerhouse. And then it always feels like that powerhouse will be there forever. But they're not. They get overtaken or something changes or they get bought out or it's just a cycle, right. And they I remember like when MySpace was came out, I thought that day was never going to end. And then Facebook came and I thought there's no way Facebook can take over and the Facebook did and now you thought there's no way anything could ever be faced with an Instagram shows up. And so this is a cycle and it's essentially like, you'll do yourself a huge favor. If you just assume that right now i will be doing this. And in the future I will be doing something else. Yeah, right because that will change and it's kind of the St. Like when you're talking about and you know, this is a marketing podcast, right? So we're talking about marketing, marketing principles stay the same always. It's just what platforms you use. Right, right. And you just got to know like platforms are always going to change, but the fundamentals don't. So it doesn't matter what the next thing is, you're still going to have to use same fundamentals that we've used for. I will,
Blake Beus  20:25  I would say the fundamentals become more important. Yep. And when we talk about fundamentals, and when we talk about it a lot on this, we talk about message to market fit. We talk about offer fit fit to the audience. Yeah, because here's the thing, people change much slower. Yeah, then these tech platforms change, right. And so as long as your messaging and your offer is, is good, and in line with what people actually want, you just got to get it in front of those people. And maybe that's getting it in front of those people is different now than it was a year ago, maybe you have fewer targeting options than you had a year ago. But you still just need to get it in front of the right people. And if you get in front of the right people, you've you've got a winner. I mean, 50 years ago, it was sending direct mail. I mean, that's still as a family, and still get mail, I still get junk mail in my mailbox all the time. And they literally wouldn't send it if it wasn't making them money. So it's still working, even though that was a way of doing it 50 years ago. Yeah, it still works. today. I'm not saying you should to hop over into that space, necessarily. But
Greg Marshall  21:41  I think what you're saying too, is skill set, right, like so, the people who are really good at direct mail, continue to use it, because they're very good. But the people who maybe if you hop on an opportunity early, right, you can kind of get away with like, not being very good. Because the opportunity is so new, it's fresh costs are down. As soon as those costs go up, though, you cannot afford not to be good. Yeah, like you have to think things through and actually say, like, instead of just throwing anything out there, I have to make a good app, you have to think like who is this? How do I make sure I repel the wrong audience attract the right one? How do I get a good ad? Copy out hook? How do I have the right offer some that? Sometimes I feel like is almost overlooked? Yeah, is having a good product. Right makes a big difference. If you're marketing, like a product that's bad, then you're gonna have best ad copy in the world, but you're just not gonna see growth. I mean, you have to have a good product. And so I think with all these changes, it's inevitable. And it's interesting to like, because I'm, you know, I follow all these people on Twitter and LinkedIn and stuff, just to like, keep a good pulse of the markets. I feel like that's my job. And just kind of looking at all that it's, it's interesting to see the reactions, the almost not victim mentality, but like, yeah, in a way, like, this is unfair. And it's like, it, there's nothing's gonna, you can't, you could call them 1000 times a day and say, This is unfair, it's not gonna change. So you might as well just adjust, you've just got to adjust to what it is and what the new way is. And anytime there's tough changes. I always see. It never feels good. I can't remember who I was talking to the last week. But I always feel like this is relevant, and never feels good. While you're going through the change. That's actually good for you. Right? It never feels good while you're going through. But usually, if you hang in there, and you kind of adjust things, nine times out of 10 It's actually a good thing. Whatever is happening. Yeah, it feels very inconvenient the moment. And so that's because I still remember during COVID times, yeah, I honestly, I was scared when that first hit because my first thought was, oh, no, everyone's gonna cut budgets. Business is not even open, how am I going to advertise? And I remember being really, really concerned about that. Because I was like, Man, this is such a change. And what ended up happening was the opposite. Yeah, things grew because everyone cut their spending and as became cheaper. And so I was able to take advantage of that. So that's kind of my rant is anytime something quote unquote, bad happens, it doesn't feel great while it's happening. But usually, if you focus on the opportunity, you can find a way to make it work better than the current way. Yeah, we're working on that. Yeah.
Blake Beus  24:43  Yeah. It's interesting, interesting to think about. I'm going to shift gears just a little bit because I just have this weird thought I, I think about I think about this kind of stuff all the time. From an algorithm perspective. This would never happen, but Oh, you were you were talking, we were talking earlier about how it's doesn't make a whole lot of sense for them to, to see that you're making 10x row as or whatever like that. I oftentimes wonder what would happen to their algorithm, if all advertisers agreed to report zero revenue back to Facebook and Google, he would throw their algorithm way off, and it would be very interesting to see, to see what would happen, it wouldn't that would never happen. But part of me thinks that that would be interesting. Maybe they don't deserve to see my revenue numbers. Yeah. Because when, if I can't target for conversions anymore, then you don't get to see my revenue numbers. And
Greg Marshall  25:37  I think, yeah, that you know, now that you say that, too. I wonder sometimes I wonder, because, you know, they're taking, aren't they taking cookies away to 23?
Blake Beus  25:48  Is it Yeah, but that's a that's a, that's a privacy thing. That's kind of more of like a regulation? Well, kind of a thing. But yes, that will impact advertisers. And these third party cookies are going away, even first party cookies are probably going to be going away so
Greg Marshall  26:01  well, which makes me think like, should you just prepare to like, conversion campaigns? We've talked about this before, but like, do you think eventually conversion campaigns, like selecting it as an objective could actually go away? Because how else would you track conversions? If you can't? It would have to all happen within platform, right? Because if it's going to happen on a website, if first party and third party data is going to go away, yeah. Then how would you track that?
Blake Beus  26:34  You would use something like their conversion API? Which sir, which is server to server communication, which doesn't rely on things like cookies or tracking pixels or anything like that. And so there will, there will still be ways to do it, you might just need to make sure you're on a tech platform that has an integration with Facebook's conversion API, or Google. I don't know, they don't have a fancy name for it. But Google has an API for the same thing. My
Greg Marshall  27:01  question, though, would be this. So for the lazy person who doesn't do that, not only does it impact that person, but wouldn't impact the platform because they're getting receiving less data. It would be advantageous if they want their conversions to basically make sense and use algorithm based to have everyone using this API then, right? Yeah. So if people aren't connecting their API's, what did they be losing a significant amount of data?
Blake Beus  27:31  They they would, my guess is, is that they probably don't care. And well, let me put it this way, they probably don't care about those advertisers. Because they're probably not the advertisers that are spending the money to make the real money. Right? The people spending the real money will take the effort and have resources to hook up to the API, which isn't that hard if you're a tech person, or you can hire a tech person. But if you're not a tech person, and you're doing this solo business thing, you're not spending enough money for them to progress even care.
Greg Marshall  28:09  Well. And I was just thinking not even necessarily, from that aspect. Meaning how, how accurate? Like, wouldn't even if you had a bunch of low spending people, and let's say that's like 70% of your advertisers, then you could potentially lose 70% data, does that make the machine less smart?
Blake Beus  28:31  I guess it depends on what kind of data you're looking at. And considering. So right now, the data you get from the pixel is pretty unreliable, anyway, yeah. Because it's not guaranteed data. And it's just because of how that works. So for example, the pixel is say, I'm on my computer, and I'm browsing on my computer, and I go to 10 different sites that have the Facebook pixel installed, I don't purchase anything or whatever, but I'm just browsing sites, that data gets sent back from my web browser, specifically, to Facebook. Yeah. And there's a lot of problems that can happen. My my ISP could be glitchy, or my Wi Fi could could be whatever, and those packets could get dropped. And that data could get dropped, or I might have an ad blocker installed, or something along those lines. So then that data doesn't get reported back reliably. And so unreliable data is hard to make the data meaningful at predicting, this person is going to be the next person to purchase your xyz, whatever. So having more perfect data, even if it's less data is probably advantageous to them. So it was it's less muddy, it's more accurate, even though it's less so they can rely on it better.
Greg Marshall  29:56  So I always think to Is it possible we've all become overly reliant on conversion campaigns? Like sometimes when you use conversion campaigns, you really are like leaning heavy on an algorithm? Yeah, right.
Blake Beus  30:14  Yeah. I mean, probably, but if it's working, it's working. Yeah. No, no, no saying you shouldn't do it. Yeah, just probably. But I would hazard to guess, conversion campaigns are going to become less and less in fact, effective. As as we kind of go on, you're probably not going to have a conversion campaign, that's going to be a 5x or 10x. Row as anymore, you can still get that. But it's probably going to be part of a larger marketing funnel with text messages or email marketing kind of mixed in there. And the campaign all by itself probably won't be getting the 5x row as the 10x. I was just thinking like that.
Greg Marshall  30:52  When do you remember what year like because I remember running ads, where there wasn't even a conversion objective. Do you remember what year?
Blake Beus  31:01  That was? Actually, before I started running ads, okay. Because yeah, yeah, I started. I mean, I had I had done so he
Greg Marshall  31:08  tried to make me feel.
Blake Beus  31:12  I mean, I had done some, some Tech Data integrations, from like, a software engineer side of things. But I wasn't actually running ads. I didn't start running ads until 2018. So wow,
Greg Marshall  31:27  that's Yeah, it's crazy to think because I think I've been running ads. And I never really think about how long I've been doing it. But it's, I was running ads, when you could really only get like, you could buy the right hand space. That like the desktop. And the only campaign objectives. At the time, if I remember, there was only like, have like two or three. And the highest level one was like engagement. Yeah, like you can pick the engagement objective. And that was like, and that was like next level, you pick that as like, wow, you can get people to engage on that. And then conversion campaigns came by, and I just, it's funny, because I don't remember what year, but all of a sudden, it became like, this huge game changer, like, people started using it, and it will get you these huge returns. And it was just just interesting how the evolution of all of it. And I wonder if there's like, there'll be this window and time, just like I'm talking about only doing desktop newsfeed or desktop, right hand corner ads, as like, remember that time conversion campaign. And I wonder if we're like living through that, like little window where like, it's a shift to something else, because it does change and it changes quickly. And I, you know, I just now that we're talking about these conversion campaigns. For the good old days, it's like, wow, that's, that's cool. So I think, you know, marketing, like, like we said, fundamentals don't change. For the most part, human behavior doesn't change that much. Or if it does, it's very, very slow. And the core motions, humans, I feel like will always have the same core emotions. And if you tug on those emotions, people react. And so I think if you just get good at the fundamentals, you know, selling for emotional, have people just find a logic, have a good offer, and then just adjust these platforms. Everything's gonna be just fine as long as you're willing to do the work.
Blake Beus  33:31  Yeah, I think so. All right, let's wrap it up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you,
Greg Marshall  33:35  Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session with
Blake Beus  33:38  Blake beus.com/sm3 is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall  33:41  All right. Well, until next time, I'll talk to guys later today. Bye bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  Okay, so we were just barely talking about. I mean, everybody talks about data driven and all of these things. But we, we were talking about some unique situations where a lot of business owners, they've been through the the brand voice message, the customer avatar thing that they they put in that work, which I don't think is a bad thing. But then it's almost like they get a bit locked in, in that area. Stubborn. And and convinced that that that because they did that work, which is great, that that's what we need to stick with when the customers are voting with their dollars in a different direction. Maybe you can clarify what I'm what I'm getting at? Yeah,
Greg Marshall  0:45  well, I think one thing, and you know, I've think we've all fallen prey to this before, but being too overly focused on like, what you want the message and the image to be versus what the customer reacts and pays for. Yeah, and some examples that I would use is, oftentimes I see. And it's normally the individual that's very brand centric, right? Especially if they want to present a high end brand, right, they become so obsessed with how everything looks and feels to them, that they're actually focusing on the wrong person. Yeah, you need to focus on the customer who's going to buy it. And where this is coming from is actually I've run a bunch of campaigns where I've seen where the business owners is like dead set on the vision and the brand, and everything has to look a certain way, yet those campaigns perform very poorly. And then when we switch it up and do it more in the way that the customer responds to, the business owner is unhappy with how the image brand and voice looks. But the customers are responding and
Blake Beus  1:56  buying and buying. And so they're, they're happy with the money coming in. Yep. But they're not happy with the images or the video because they're not pro quality. Yeah, or, or any of those
Greg Marshall  2:09  are, they don't look as a very specific way, maybe the way they envisioned and I go back to, when I when I first started doing my fitness business, we initially wanted to go after like this high end. And I think a lot of changes is high end highly motivated, willing to spend a lot of money type of client. And we kind of just kept pushing that over and over and over again. And we noticed we had no customers, no one would pay us even though we were like we deserve the high paying customer we deserved this is the best product out there. No customers where we had people like beating our door down, saying can you help us lose weight? Can you help us get fit, and this is the exact thing we were trying to get away from. And we finally caved in because we're like, well, these people are literally like throwing their money at us asking us can we help them? Maybe it's time to make a pivot and make a change. And when we did that, we started seeing great success. And so I say that because it is very common, in my experience, especially if it's a newer business owner. Or maybe someone that has the habit of comparing themselves to other bigger brands, where they get so locked in on how everything needs to look that they don't do enough testing, to see what gets the customer to buy. And then how do I do more of that? Right? And that's kind of the point of this topic is to almost tell you make sure you're not making this mistake where you're doing it a certain way, because you want it. But the customer or the market is not actually even paying for it.
Blake Beus  3:49  Yeah, I mean, this is when I went to college, I have a degree in Business Information Systems. And I had a bunch of business classes with that. And it was it was one on one, it's like, marketing one on one, you are not your customer. Yep, you are not the one going in there and buying this thing to fix this problem. You've already solved the problem. Yep. So you are a completely different person than your customer is. And so the best way to figure out what your customers want is to ask them and let them vote with their money. And this is where, you know, free market forces and we want to start using some economic terms free free market forces. This is this is how that stuff works. And you see this all the time in, in restaurants, right? If you have ever been to a brand new restaurant that just opened up in a dance, they have a menu and that menu is the chef's best guess what people might like right and and I've I've helped open restaurants before when, you know when I was working at the ski resort. And it is we have there's lots of meetings about you know what kind of food we want to have your meeting with the general manager of the resort and everything and, and I was in a lot of those meetings mostly because I'm I'm a tech guy, and I've got to be able to make sure their systems are selling and all this. But all of it is this big guess. Yeah. And then when people start showing up, you see what they're buying? Yep. And then you drop the things on the menu that they're not buying. Yep. And then you add more things to the menu to see if you can find a few winners. Yep. Right. But the ones that are selling, you know, get rid of those. Yeah, you never get rid of those. And in I don't know why in business in like, a more a non food business. This concept is, is is harder for people to grasp or something. And I think one of the things you said really drove the point home in that they're comparing themselves oftentimes to much bigger brands. Yes, right. Um, my, my wife, and I watched the house of Gucci, okay. And I have never owned any Gucci Mane, we've never. But you know, there's this this high end fashion brand with a specific look, and whatever. The thing is, if I were to launch a clothing brand today, it would be absolutely crazy for me to try to dump so much money into the photography and the videography and everything to match that brand. Because I'm not Gucci not yet. Like, if I wanted to be as big as Gucci, whatever, I think that's possible. But you, you aren't at that stage yet, where that even makes sense, you need to come down to this lower stage. And I think the waters get one last thing a little even a little bit muddier in that was social media ads, people want to see the types of ads that they expect to see in their newsfeed. Yep. So when you have a very organic looking photo of, you know, someone modeling something, and it's clearly not a pro photo shoot, that oftentimes can resonate better with your customers than a high fashion, very professional, highly edited, perfect photo.
Greg Marshall  6:48  Yep, I would agree. And in fact, not only will I agree, I can just tell you just from looking at data, that seems to be the case, the ones that are like very organic, and almost look like they're not an ad, are the ones that perform the best and what the way you can take that information is to essentially let yourself test different ways of communicating to your audience. And then focus on doing more of what works and remove your emotion from how you wish or want it to be. Right. Like, an example would say, like, I sure wish I was 610 and was in the NBA, but I'm not right, right. So I can't behave like I'm a six foot 10. And expect things that a six foot 10 NBA basketball player would expect, when I'm not any of that, right? And that's kind of how you have to view your businesses, you have to go where am I at right now? What is the customer really looking for, and then grow your way into a lot of the big brands that you see, or you know, aspire to be or emulate? Do the things that they did when they first began, for example, selling sneakers out of a trunk, selling CDs on a street one to one, actually knocking on people's doors to sell their shampoo. These are examples of billionaires that have a lot of money, that they have very extravagant marketing campaigns now, but that is the wrong stage for you to be following. You need to do what they did when they're at your
Blake Beus  8:21  stage. And you're always going to be frustrated if you try to follow the stage of a large brand. Yes. Or follow the strategy of a large brand, because it's frankly, impossible for a small business to do that. Yeah, why money? Like these, these, these large brands have marketing departments that are hundreds of people large Yeah. And then they have entire departments that are just for media production. Yep, where they have entire studios and everything to take all of these photos. And I know you can get a $2,000 camera and a nice lens and some decent lights and get kind of close. But this waste of your time to put all that effort into a couple of photos. It's just not worth it, you're much better off, snapping some photos, focusing on your brand message. And figuring out which of those work and in scaling up the things that work
Greg Marshall  9:12  exactly. I think messaging is more of because you can always fine tune photos and videos and things like that. But it's the messaging that actually matters the most because if you can resonate with the customer, then you can start making much more because you figured out what message works, then you can start making much more prolific type of campaigns with better pictures and better video and you can kind of upgrade that way. And that's exactly how the brands that maybe you aspire to be did it. They figured out what their market is what the message is, who's their actual customer and buyer figured out how to give them more that stuff and then build campaigns around that the messaging instead of guessing and doing these elaborate photoshoots or video shoots I have another big brand without even knowing what message works.
Blake Beus  10:03  Yeah, yeah, it's um one of my, one of my favorite brands on Instagram is a good example of this. It's, it's a brand that's targeted towards middle aged men, like myself. And the brand is called Sharpies, and they started off selling just swim shorts. Okay, yeah. And when they first started off, and their swim shorts are kind of like bright and loud and everything because traditionally, swim shorts for dudes have always been I don't know, camo. Yeah, we're blue with some stripes. Yeah, nothing crazy. And, and so these, these guys did this. But their brand messaging has shifted over time to apart a point where now it's pretty professional, but their messaging is dialed in, and people know who they are, and everything. But their messages are funny. They'll oftentimes take photos of actors in the 80s, like men, with their hairy chests, and whatever, and wearing really short shorts. So they're like, it's time to bring back the short shorts, you know, stuff like that. But it's, it's just a funny brand. But they didn't start off that way. If I were to launch a short brand a day and try to emulate what they're doing, it would fall flat, because there's already someone kind of feeling that knee. Yep. And but they had to, they had to go into that they didn't know exactly what they needed to do. They had an angle. Yep. But but they didn't know exactly. And then it took them several years of consistent marketing effort to do that. And now Now they do really well. The same thing can work with products too. But go ahead.
Greg Marshall  11:34  No, I'm sorry to cut you off. But I want to I don't want to forget this point you just made. The point Blake just mentioned is this company was testing and giving what the customer wanted. Yeah. Like they didn't say we sell shorts, this way. And that's the only way we're gonna sell. No matter what the customer says there, they adjust to what the market is telling them they want. And so that's, that's something that I wanted to interrupt and make sure you hit on that, because that's a great point.
Blake Beus  12:03  And that's, that's kind of like the whole point of a business in general. The great thing about owning your own business, is you can make your own products and services. Yep. And so because of that flexibility, I think a lot of people kind of forget this point, because of that flexibility. You can literally adjust your products and services to match whatever the customers want. And theoretically, this is super simple. Like, it's like, people like this t shirt. Let's maybe ask a few of them why they liked that T shirt. And then let's make some more that have those qualities in there. Yeah. Is it? Is it the quality of the fabric? Is it the funny message? What about the message? Is it the design is that the colors, whatever those are, and then launch some similar to that and see, see what people resonate with and then drop the duds and or bundle the duds. Yeah, bundle the duds to get rid of is a special flash sale
Greg Marshall  12:54  offers. Yeah, you buy this, you get these for free,
Blake Beus  12:57  for free, or whatever, you know. But you, you need to going back to what you said about removing your emotion. I heard this phrase this week, and I loved it. Some points in time, you just need to be a stone cold, professional, right. And I like I like being loosey goosey and running a kind of a casual business and things. But when it comes to ads and emotion, you got to be a stone yelled professional. And you have to look at which ones are working and which ones aren't. Because if you keep turning off the ads that are working, yeah. Because you don't like the picture isn't super professional, you just have a feel or you have a feeling. You're constantly you're literally shutting off your revenue sources. It's like I'm thirsty, and you keep turning off the water, the water spouts that are given me the most water. Why would we do that? Is it it's because of oftentimes your own post personal insecurities or visions or whatever?
Greg Marshall  13:59  Well, it's funny that you mentioned that. So just just yesterday, I had a call with one of my clients. And there's, they have a unique setup where it's kind of three owners and they're they're all very open minded and willing to try things, which is great. So we spoke yesterday. And it's funny how it was a good lesson in emotional decision making versus the data, right? Because two of the people of the three were felt that the ads were performing exceptionally well. And then one of them felt that the ads weren't performing at all. Which is interesting, right? So they were both trying to figure out why do you believe that the ads are not performing well at all and they're like, Well, I I just been here that people sales. And so think about this, she said I just been hearing about other people's sales and the sales or or this and that and you know, maybe it's a tough time And the other two are just looking at the data from the ad account and saying we're getting what we want. And they got 500 subscribers to see, you know, for 300. Something bucks targeted US Canada leads not, that's cheap. Yeah. And sheep it and it's to the exact targeted audiences that they want. Yeah. And so after we went through the numbers, she actually felt like, wow, this campaign is doing really well. We literally almost turned it off, because she was like, I just don't know if it's resonating, or this, this and that. Yeah. And so that's, to me a perfect example of how you can have, you can feel an emotion. And if you sometimes follow that emotion, you can make the wrong decision for your business.
Blake Beus  15:47  It, I think it's a bit of a catch 22 situation, because when you start, if you're a business owner or whatever, and you suddenly start diving into ads, you want to start learning about ads. Yep. And so you start learning about it. But then you start, there's no shortage of people out there willing to tell you how to run ads, many of them disagree with with one another. And guess what, we're here on a podcast telling you about how to run ads, right? Like everybody in their dog is going to tell you that. And you're going to have people that are going to say this is the only way I would run out right now. Because you hear that messaging all the time. And then you so you, you start knowing and learning more, and then you start second guessing what, what you know, is work is working? Yep. And so at some point in time, I'm a big believer, at some point in time, you need to kind of shut off the gurus, and trust yourself, you know, trust, like trust yourself, and the things that you've learned that are working with you with your, your business and everything. It's okay to learn a few things here there. And I think, I think in our podcasts, we're not super, super opinionated about, absolutely do it this way, do this one structure, if you do this one structure will work because it's not really sustainable. Things change too much. We talk a lot more about principles and things. So that's my hint that you should keep listening to this. But trust yourself, and what's working for your business and maybe shut off some of these other channels with these loud voices to trying to teach you how to run ads. And
Greg Marshall  17:18  well. And the other thing about you got to be careful with how much you can get information overload where one person will say, I mean, look at anything in life, how to make the most money, right, that's a subject everyone's probably looked up before. You got some people will say you should focus on one business. And he got some people say you should have 20 streams of income. Right? Which one is the correct way? Well, it depends. If you're already a millionaire 20 streams might make sense because you've already have a million. And you can diversify. If you have $10, it makes no no sense to have tried to attempt to do 20 different businesses. And so it really depends on each person. And so if you take information and you almost like just think, Okay, this is the way no matter what versus saying, How can I apply some of these principles into what I'm doing, you can get very confused. And what you're going to do is just be in a cycle of starting and stopping over and over and over again and gain zero momentum, right. And then because you don't gain any momentum, you're keeping yourself in the hardest stage of anything, which is the very beginning. You're literally keeping yourself
Blake Beus  18:29  going in the hardest, hardest part and you're getting burnout, because you you you're you're stuck in this loop where you don't get out of the hard part, you
Greg Marshall  18:39  still in the hard part. And the worst part is you're the one doing it yourself. You're actually resetting and restarting your progress over and over and over and over again, instead of looking at how can we build some momentum. Let the momentum work for me. And let me make adjustments as I go along. Instead of start, stop, start stop. And that's, that's something that I also see a lot is the starting and stopping you hear people say, Well, I've tried this, or I've tried that, and then you go, but for how long? Well, you know, I ran for three days I spent, you know, 50 bucks. And it's like, there's no I mean, you never gave anything a chance to build the momentum. The people who see the best results in any aspect, making money running ads, exercise and fitness, marriage. It's all the same long term, build momentum fundamentals. There's no tricks Yeah, to start and stop over and over again. Because if you get overly fixated on that, you literally will keep yourself and the hardest part of the journey over and over
Blake Beus  19:46  again. This is this is Greg's marriage counseling. We've We've turned it into this is no relationship.
Greg Marshall  19:56  This is marriage counseling.
Blake Beus  20:00  But it's true. Like, these are the reasons we talked about principles a lot is because a lot of these principles carry over into many different aspects and can be applied to to many, many different things. And, and it's so easy hung up on a lot of these details and everything. But when it really boils down to it, running a business, at least principles of running a business is pretty straightforward. You just need to give people more of what they want. Stop doing what's not working, and follow those numbers. That's the end the podcast. Well, there's that's it, you know, we're shutting shutting everything down. We buy, we buy our course. Yeah, that one sentence. Like unless of what they don't. Such a simple statement, but it's so hard to do. I don't want to minimize it. Like, I've definitely struggled with that. Right? Same here. We're emotional beings, like, yeah, we do that I've been so hung up on my emotions before, with various different aspects of my business and everything, I get it. So it's easy to say, and I know it's hard to implement. But it's one of those things that you should constantly strive to maybe gut check those emotions. Well,
Greg Marshall  21:06  you know what, speaking of emotions, this is why you have you should before you make any decision, take a step back with with, what am I feeling right now? And does this have? Is it real? And I'll give you an example. Let's say, you know, not that this has ever happened to me. But let's say you didn't sleep for a few days, because you're babies. And you're extremely exhausted, right? Well, sometimes when you're very tired, you start, like the little things that maybe don't bother, you will start to bother you. Right? Yeah. And but you could really make some really dumb decisions. If you let that portion impact your decision making instead you have to go, Well, this is probably fake. None of this is really that bad. It's that I just haven't slept for three days. Yeah. And so let me I actually exercise this a couple of days ago. And it was, I was like, I wish I knew this like 15 years ago. But it was. So I didn't have a great night's sleep. And then I found out some information, like some changes that we needed to make a certain campaign. And I felt like, you know what, I'm just really tired. And I don't want to say yes or no, or make any adjustments based on how tired I am. So I'm just gonna, and I would have never done this 1015 years, I'm just gonna not do anything. I'm just gonna go to sleep tonight. And then tomorrow, when I wake up, I'm gonna think what's the best decision, I waited one day and made the correct decision. And it was the decision that I would have made the day before. So even that taught me the importance of taking a step back, right, let's, let's say you're very tired from exercise or family, or maybe you had someone pass away in your family, or you've just got outside life factors. Sometimes those can transfer into, like, the one thing you can control your business, you're looking for a sense of control. So you control that, versus taking a step back and going. Is this real?
Blake Beus  23:13  Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I get that all the time. Right. And I feel that way, a lot. It's and not to get too much into you know, mental health or whatever. But when you're in like a mental health cycle, which everybody, everyone, I think more people need to talk about mental health. It's not it's certainly not a bad thing. We all go through stressful moments, or were moments where things aren't going right. But it's very easy to kind of get stuck in a cycle. And and when I do me personally, I get an inner dialogue that is negative. Yeah. And, and I have to gut check that, and my wife helps me gut check that which is great. But I have to gut check that and say wait, or is this inner dialogue actually reflective of reality? Yeah. Most of the time is not a couple of times. It is but it's too harsh. Yeah. Because obviously we have things to work on right? Yeah, every everybody does. But my kind of point in sharing that is we have that but a good way to kind of check those things is to have someone else you can talk to Yep. And I'm telling you right now most the time with Greg and his clients he's he's honestly more of a therapist but but no, you need to gut check yourself. And that's why it's that's why having I don't know a media buyer on your team or or a business partner or an associate or if you're just starting out. I don't know just someone that's maybe not just anyone that doesn't know anything about ads, because that would be frustrated. Maybe someone that knows a little bit about marketing advertising just to bounce some ideas off of them, and to gut check yourself, or whatever, but it's totally okay to think am I am I thinking About this correctly or do or whatever. And when in doubt, just follow the numbers. Yeah,
Greg Marshall  25:04  and I think to the importance of having an outside eye on things, or someone to bounce ideas off of is important because the likelihood that both of you are feeling the exact same emotion at the exact same time is highly unlikely. Right? Right. So if you're, let's say having, you know, problems at home, or you're having problems at work, or you're at work, you're having problems with your health, whatever that is, most likely, the other person you're talking to, is not going through the exact same thing at the exact same time. And so they don't feel as emotionally kind of boxed in as maybe you are. So they're able to give a little bit more constructive feedback on like, You should do this or try this or take a step back. And so that's where I see the value of having other people to bounce ideas off of, and really talk things through. And I know for me, anytime, you know, we're going into the emotional side of things, because that's probably the most important thing you can do for making the best decisions for your business long term is controlling your emotions and understanding them better. Because if you know your tendencies, right, like for example, I know if I don't sleep that great. Sometimes I get a little more anxious, more antsy with things. My maybe my, my fuse is shorter, right? Why know that? So if that happens, I know to go, Well, I'm going to back out of some appointments. I'm gonna go do something completely unrelated and relaxing, so that I can prevent myself from even putting myself in the environment of making a bad decision. Yeah. Right. Because because I know that's how I behaved Yeah. If I don't get any sleep, or or I'm just physically exhausted. And so do you have any kind of tactics that you'd like to use? When you kind of know you're at your threshold? And you're like, Well, before I do anything that I'm not going to be happy with? Let me go ahead and start with.
Blake Beus  27:04  Yeah, I have lots of first and foremost, one of the most consistent triggers for me to be grumpy is I'm hungry. Because I focus on I focus on work. Like when I sit down, I usually work really hard. And I've got, you know, juggling between a couple of different things. And it's very easy for me to forget that I need to eat and have water. Yep, drink water. And so first and foremost, I kind of prep for that. Yeah, I don't, I intentionally don't eat like snacks and things at my desk, because it's too easy, just cram and food. But I have them like away from my desk, and I'll go up and grab a handful and check the time. I try to be pretty consistent with meals. Like I'm like a little baby fat on time getting whiny. But the other thing I've been doing recently is I, I work in a remote office. And I have set up this cozy corner. Yeah, with a chair and an ottoman and some plants and a blanket. And I sit down. And I call it meditation. Yep. Sometimes it turns into a nap. Yeah, I set a timer because I don't want to sleep for like a month meditate. But it's it's I basically my the point of it is I sit there and I try to just kind of clear my head of thoughts. Because I, I have a lot of thoughts going on a lot of the time and, and there's a bunch of different techniques, people can like in their head, chant different things or whatever. What I do is I just count backwards from 100. Yeah, I need something more than just saying the same thing. Because my brain can think about things. Yep, saying something happened going autopilot. But if I have to count backwards, I have to think about the focus just a little bit. But I don't want something too complicated. But something that makes me have to focus enough so that I'm not thinking about this software engineering problem, or this customer problem that I'm dealing with, or whatever, I don't want those things to spin. And I do it for 2030 minutes. And it it sounds I don't know, it helps a lot. I think it helps a lot. I
Greg Marshall  29:00  think it's important to prioritize time like that in your day, particularly if you're running ads, or you've got anxiety about running ads, or you've got anxiety about just anything else that's you know, going on in your business. Because if you don't take that time out, you're setting yourself up for massive failure, because you're going to start to feel these emotions and they'll start to compound. So the anxiety starts to go into the depression, and the depression starts going into anger. And then it becomes well I don't even know if I should do this. And then before you know, it's like, but nothing in your business has actually changed. It's all your motions that have changed, right? And it's it's funny because there's so many times where you can you know, from running my own stuff for for quite a while now. I've learned a thing or two about self management for me and how I behave and I just try to really go alright, I have felt This emotion before, and the decisions I made in the past weren't always the most productive, right? And so, knowing that, what can I do differently? When this comes up again, and you just kind of like step back and try to learn from previous mistakes or errors, and at the time, you don't know better, but now you do, right? Like, now you understand how to improve these. I feel like, if you spend more time, here's, here's something that I don't know if I've ever actually revealed, but I try to spend more time, quote, unquote, like having fun than working. And I consistently try to keep that unbalanced. And the reason why I do that, because I have a tendency to want like, if I don't stop myself, I want to work the whole day. Oh, that's and and all day, and that's unhealthy. So because of that, I switched my thinking, I just said, I need to actually focus more on having fun, because I've run into the opposite problem of almost working yourself to death, right?
Blake Beus  31:06  Well, that's my default, my default answer to every problem is to work hard. And I don't love that. I mean, I'm glad I'm a hard worker, but I don't love the the older I get, the more I realized that's not a healthy trait. Now, you got to have you got to have a good, a good balance. And, frankly, I'm trying to teach my kids that as well. It's, it's hard, right? Cuz a lot of aspects of life. Yeah, in a lot of aspects of life like school and things. When when my kids are in school school is pitching it as this is the most important thing, you got a bunch of homework, these grades matter, especially my son is in high school, these grades are starting to really matter. Yep. And, and they're not wrong about any of those things. And I absolutely am a huge fan of being as educated as you can. Sure. But sometimes I feel like there's so much emphasis put on working hard and putting in all of this extra effort when our quality of life isn't there. So we get into these habits, college was very much stepped out for me, I was working full time doing school full time and had a family and, and that was you know, a few years ago, basically just kind of, I did it. I just didn't sleep a whole lot. But it kind of set this stage where my default solution of a problem is to work hard. And it's not fun. Yeah, when you do that, like it's not enjoyable.
Greg Marshall  32:26  Well, I think too, you can get a lot of the wrong messages from you know, making things quote unquote, matter. One of my things that I've learned over time with making things matter is when you attach too much of a meaning to something, I find in my own experience that it creates a negative thought pattern, a negative cycle, you're no longer doing things for enjoyment, or to improve yourself, you're now acting out of fear, right, and you're acting out of fear that something bad is gonna happen. And then you're basically robbing all the enjoyment out of your life. And because you make something matter more, doesn't mean you will actually perform better. That's kind of the irony of it is as a good point. A lot of times you perform worse, yes. So you're making you're increasing the meaning of something with the kind of thought thinking that if I make it matter more, I'll perform better. But the irony is you don't you perform worse when you make it matter
Blake Beus  33:35  more. Yeah, there's a lot more stress, anxiety, you know, mental energy needed to to this thing that's like super, super, super important. I think that's, we're getting philosophical. I think. I think that's, uh, yeah, I do. I think that's one of the reasons why I struggle with a lot of when, like, someone who's wildly successful, writes a book. And they're like, here's how you do a startup business, or whatever. It's like, you don't have a lot of the anxiety and stress because you have this massive cushion, shirt and blanket and everything. And so I don't think your information is actually that relevant shirt to your average everyday person, because they have a different set of circumstances. And of course, you can run 2030 businesses because you have a team helping you with this and, and all of these things and payroll of $20 million. Right, right. And that's all fine. Like, I'm not saying that that person is bad. I'm just saying, I really struggle when someone who's up here is telling people down here, how to get up here because most of the time, I don't think they actually know how to do it. Yeah. I think they know how they did it. Yep. But I don't think they know how to teach others to do it because the circumstances are so different. Yep. So I my very first example of like, really this thought thinking sinking in is when I read Elon, Elon Musk's autobiography and it was written back in 2015 and He's much more famous, famous character now than back then. But the book was talking about how he, you know, he was one of the founders of PayPal sold that had a lot of money. But he dumped it right back into starting three different businesses, if SpaceX Tesla and solar, solar city or whatever the solar one is, and slept on people's couches, because he did. He dumped all the money in there. And he was working 130 hours a week and all of this stuff. And I was thinking, Well, that just sounds terrible. Yeah, that sounds absolutely absolutely terrible. And and I, I just didn't think that that was realistic for literally, your any average person. And that doesn't mean that someone like Elon Musk that was able to do that is has more mental strength and more grit or whatever. It probably means that that aspect of his life was quite unhealthy. Yeah. And people that have a more healthy, well rounded aspect of life, probably would choose to not do that. I know, it doesn't mean you're weak or whatever. You'd be like, I don't I don't see that. Well,
Greg Marshall  36:12  and I think the you have to want you have to make agreements with yourself. Right? One thing that over time I've come to, I guess peace with is not necessarily okay, what are you willing to sacrifice for your life? Not for someone else's? Or to impress someone else's right? Meaning? Yeah, we can also you're not weak. If you say you know what? I am, Greg. And that's Elon. Okay. Ilan is wired to want to do that. Greg is not I have no desire to run $3 billion companies, because you know what that means? No free time, a microscope only 24 hours a day. No privacy. That just sounds horrific to me. I would much rather do a whole lot less, and have massive free time, financial freedom, not so much in the public eye, and just be able to live my normal life. We only live once, right? So it's like, I don't want to create a jail for myself. Because a lot of things that people may not realize is like, imagine being someone like Elon, or Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, where your every move is calculated, you can't go to the movies, and watch a regular you can't go to the grocery store. You can't do a lot of things, right. So there's a price for this. It's not all you know, all good with nothing, you know, being taken away. A lot of your freedoms are taken away. You think Mark Zuckerberg can just walk down the street with no security, go play bass, all people just start shaking hands with people just go to random church and hang out. There's no chance in the world. He could do that. No, he has. He'd have to call his security people and set up all of these schedules and time to do so. So there's a price to be paid. And I think growing up I always thought I have to be willing to pay the biggest price no matter what or that means. I'm weak. Right. And I don't think that's true. Like now that I'm getting older. I'm looking at it like, well, that's actually not true at all. Yeah, it's, you decide what you want to do. Yeah, sacrifice.
Blake Beus  38:32  Yeah, it's, um, you know, I had a ton of thoughts while while you're going on that rant, and I, you know, we'll we're kind of getting long winded. So we'll definitely wrap this up here. Just a second. But I think I have a question for you. Do you know the name of the person who started my MySpace?
Greg Marshall  38:50  Oh, yeah. Tom. Tom, right.
Blake Beus  38:54  Do you want to know why most people don't know Tom's name? Because he sold his business and retired I Yeah. I've never seen like, once. Yeah, he's just like, he he sold his business for I don't know, it was a lot of money at the time over I want to say over $100 million, where he sold MySpace to YouTube. I think they drove it into the ground. But but whatever. But here's the thing is like Tom got to this point. He's like, I think I've made it. Yeah. And I think he does personal projects and things. He's a tinkerer. I wouldn't be surprised if he's out there under some pseudonyms on I don't know, Reddit, or on GitHub writing code, because he likes to do that kind of stuff. But he's not in the public eye. That guy is the genius, right? Like, he did the thing. And the thing is, is, you know, gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, all of those guys, they all could have done that. Yeah, they all could have done that, but they chose not to. And so I really struggled, like Holding, holding a lot of those people up into high esteem. And even really even listening to their tweets or what they say like ever because I just They are so much different than me my core values are so different that let's say we wave a magic wand and and Blake Beus started Amazon in the 90s. Yeah, I guarantee you, I would have sold that business way sooner and then you would have never heard of me again. And I would have had a peaceful life. They just like dads, I probably would have, yeah, would have done philanthropy or whatever. And there's so many things in my life that I would find much more fulfilling than trying to take a business from being, you know, a $200 million business to being a $200 billion business. I like that doesn't even sound fun to me. So I don't want to like listen to what they have to say all the time, because I just don't think they are even close to sharing my values. Yeah. And
Greg Marshall  40:46  I think, you know, it's funny you brought up Tom because I just remember him because he was my friend for so long my space. And but that's, that's a great example. And I think, you know, overall, pretty much this podcast episode, we wanted to go over something that I think a lot of business and or marketers don't really ever talk about, because it's like kind of that taboo subject, which is looking at your emotions, and kind of really making quality deals and agreements with yourself. Not because you feel like you have to do something because it matters. What matters
Blake Beus  41:24  or you're emulating this person. Yeah, it business that's up here. Like literally put in the work. Trust yourself. Don't over exaggerate the worth of something. Follow the data. Be a stone cold professional. Yeah.
Greg Marshall  41:39  Do it, do it your way, do your way. Find what works for you and do that versus trying to do what you're supposed to do. Right. So I think outside of that, right, we got long, hopefully was wrapping up. This is valuable. So Blake How to Get a hold.
Blake Beus  41:55  I just got to Blake beus.com/sm3 and
Greg Marshall  41:59  get a hold of me at Greg marshall.co and you can book a free strategy session with me. And until next time, we'll
Blake Beus  42:04  catch you guys later.
Unknown Speaker  42:04  Bye bye
 

Blake Beus  0:00  It's been a couple it's been a couple of weeks. Yeah. You've been traveling. I got COVID. Yeah. And then we're back. But yeah. So you you read something on Facebook's documentation. Yeah.
Greg Marshall  0:14  And I surprised you and I never redacted.
Blake Beus  0:17  Yeah. Because usually their their advice is bad. Yeah. Every time I've talked with a Facebook rep, the advice has been at the grid has not worked and when I've tried it, but so I wanted to pick your brain on what this was, well go over it, it
Greg Marshall  0:32  almost. So basically, what it was, is, in the documentation, I was just making a training video for our clients to help educate them. So when they onboard, they understand what to expect when they're running ads, because a lot of our clients either have run ads a little bit in the past, or none at all. They've just started running businesses, and then know that they need to advertise on social now. So what I looked up was interesting. So the in the documentation, I read it said, you should only have one ad per ad set. What? And I so I had to check a couple times, because I was like, this is facebook.com documentation. And I had never seen this before. And so when I was reading it, I thought, well, this is interesting, because a lot of the accounts that I've had the most success with, I've always used this tactic, but did horizontal scaling, while using the existing post IDs, we even did this with you. Yeah, yeah. And the interesting part was, in the documentation, I should find the video that I created. It said like, the problem, especially when you're running the ad is, the more ad you have, the longer it takes the algorithm to learn, because it has to it just has that many more testing points. Sure. And so what I thought was interesting about that, though, was when I first started that, I was like, okay, that's the opposite of what I've heard, in many ways, cases, where they say when you're testing ads have multiple ads running to see which one works. Give it enough information. So the algorithm has something to work with. Right. And I thought, That's interesting, because that's essentially mostly what I thought and mostly what you hear. Yeah, right. And so this is like a contrarian thought. And the funny thing is, as I started analyzing a lot of the accounts that have scaled really big, we actually used the single post id and did heavy horizontal scaling, with no multiple ads in the ad sets, only one. And so at one point, I remember getting yelled at actually by a client, because they didn't like how I set it up. But it was working, which is I had a campaign. And I had like, 20 ad sets in there. Yeah. But all the same ad. Yeah. And it was running, and it was absolutely crushing it. And I was, but they're like, well, people are gonna get tired of seeing this ad or whatever. And they were overly concerned about this. And so I stopped doing it, right. And then the account starts and not, you know, goes well. And the sad part is this has happened multiple times where clients have this same objection. And then we try it, where you got a bunch of ads in there. And it just, I've just never seen it work when it's like a ton of different ads.
Blake Beus  3:31  First of all, it it always kind of blows my mind when something's working. And the clients like, Oh, I'm afraid it might stop. Yeah, maybe work. So instead, let's turn it off in advance some
Greg Marshall  3:41  all. Let's make sure it doesn't work.
Blake Beus  3:45  Make sure because the most surefire way to make sure your ads don't work is to turn them all off. Yeah. Right. Like, and I just don't get it. Taking a step back with with messaging. I know a lot of people are concerned Well, what if What if people get sick of it, and they get annoyed? And I think that's a very common thing that business owners think they constantly think I don't want to be that annoying advertising person. And we take a step back. I don't know if you've you've probably seen these, but in Utah here, there's this one legal firm that has this phrase, one call that and they've done it on radio, they have have it on billboards. And they've done that since the earliest time. I mean, I moved it to Utah in the 90s. Yeah, they were doing it in the 90s. Yes, same phrase. Yep. And we're recording this in 2022. So we're thinking, you know, this is 25 years of the exact same catchphrase. Yep. And is it annoying? Absolutely.
Greg Marshall  4:48  But do we remember it?
Blake Beus  4:50  Is it working? Absolutely. It's working. You've
Greg Marshall  4:53  moved here. You said at the 90. Yeah. I'm not even from Utah. And I knew that Fraser
Blake Beus  5:00  Uh, it's, it's it works. And and so I think I would probably say first and foremost, just just from a business owner perspective, you're listening this, you're thinking about running your own ads or whatever. If the ad is working, don't worry about being annoying, especially with online ads. If people find it annoying, they can actually go in and say, Don't show me this ad anymore. Yeah, because and they're not going to be your ideal client. Anyway, people have control over seeing those ads online now. And so I wouldn't even worry about that I would worry about is this working. And if you're running an ad, and it stops working, maybe at that point, test a few new creatives, and then scale those new creatives. But if it's working, yep,
Greg Marshall  5:46  let it let it work. Well. And here's here's the other thing. So that was one. And then I'll go into the theory, kind of what we started talking about the theory of why people always do the opposite. But the second thing that I saw on the documentation that I had never read before, like I said, I will be a front. I never really read documentation, I just test to figure things out. But I was just doing this to help the clients was it said, whatever your target CPA is, make sure the budget is 10x, for your daily budget of that CPA. Oh, really? I've never seen a specific number. And I remember in the past, I used to look for that. Yeah, and I've never seen it before, but in the documentation says, multiply your target CPA by 10. And so that your deal so let's
Blake Beus  6:34  let's break this down using like, just kind of regular folks language, CPA, cost per acquisition, what does that actually mean to someone that's just new getting into ads.
Greg Marshall  6:43  So So means every business is trying to do two things, one of two things, when they're running advertising, get a lead. So someone's name, phone number email, or something like that contact info, or get a purchase someone to buy. Now, most people really want that purchase, right? Because that's why we're running ads. So if your target cost per purchase was, let's say, $20, then your daily budget should be $200. Right?
Blake Beus  7:09  So cost per purchase, purchase cost per acquisition, they basically mean the same thing, except for acquisition could include a lead, if that's the your ad objective, what you're trying to get out of the app.
Greg Marshall  7:20  Yep. And so they basically said, that's the recommended recommended daily budget for when you're setting up your advertising, which makes sense. That's what made me kind of go deeper into like, the whole single ad thing, because then I started thinking, well, when we're duplicating ad sets, we're still running more money towards that ad. Yeah. And there must be some level of learning on just an ad level. That it the more you invest in it, the more it knows exactly who put that ad in front of. And so I noticed when we were really scaling at one point, we were spending $1,000 a day with one ad. And it was like, previous, or at least not even at the time. I just knew it was working. So I just kept doing more and more of it. Yeah. But I didn't actually have the answer. Like, why is it that there's a single ad, and it almost didn't matter who I targeted? He just was generating buyers? Yeah. And now I look back at it. And it's like, okay, well, that makes sense. Because that ad is getting funneled so much money into it that it has it just figures out who put that in front
Blake Beus  8:31  of well, not only that, if you think about it, you're also generating some social proof. So we were doing this strategy back with one of my products. We had the one ad you remember this app, it had 135,000 likes on this one app. And so you're seeing this ad and it pops up in your in your feed. And it instantly grabs your attention because it had 135,000 likes. Yeah. And that ad was just absolutely crushed it and that was our number one moneymaker. It was it was and it was a super simple ad. There wasn't anything unique or particularly inventive or creative about that ad. It just it just was solid, straightforward language clear offer. The coloring stood out in Facebook's coloring that was maybe the only really super creative, social proof and had tons of social proof.
Greg Marshall  9:22  And I think I've heard Molly Pittman talk about this before where she says social proof is a very big it's very important for the ads when you're running on Facebook. But you can never like see, like, well, there's no real explanation like why or how or whatever. You just kind of have to come up with your own theories. But when I saw this in the documentation, that's where I thought like, Okay, so there's there's something to that. Yeah, right. And even right now, a couple of clients that are really scaling Well, there's one in my mind right now that she's up 16 100% Since the iOS changes happen, year over year, and she's not doing small numbers, and everyone that's like part of her group that she's, they've all dropped big and sales. And there's one thing that I know about what those people in that group are doing versus what she's doing. And what she's doing is, without giving away the whole formula, what she's doing is getting good at letting them run, and then showing them to more and more people. Yeah, right. And it's gaining stability. And there's obviously other strategies, we're incorporating with that. But to me, that just shows iOS or not. Here's our theory that me and my immediate buyer were talking about yesterday, we started saying what so then why, why is it recommended? Because I'm thinking there's a specific I'm not gonna say their name. But there's a specific credible, so I'm not saying they don't know what to do credible, like Facebook ads expert, right, that would say, Yeah, we test hundreds and 1000s of different angles, and hooks and images and stuff like that. And I just thought like, Well, how do you do that? Because it seems like, I remember trying to do this technique before, for like a week. Yeah. And I saw some of the worst results ever got,
Blake Beus  11:23  I think, if I were to pinpoint it, if someone's a really well known, advertiser with courses and things out there, and they're well known, they have a big following all of these things, I think they're playing in a different sandbox than the rest of us, then people, they're, they're spending less. So for example, if if it's a particularly unique challenge to say, I need to spend $100,000, this month on ad campaigns, yeah. And I need that to be profitable. That's a very different sort of problem with a different set of solutions than someone that's saying, I need to get up to spending $1,000 A day profitably, those are very different problems. And I feel like a lot of times these bigger advertisers that have courses and things, they maybe forget a little bit that there are stages to this, and the solutions are significantly different. But if I'm spending $100,000 a month, and I only have one ad, yeah, depending on the size of your audience, you might not be able to spend $100,000, with one ad, unless you you set your settings in your campaign to show that to people, three, four or five times a day. Yep. Were the default setting, if I remember correctly, cuz it's been a while since I played with these things. The default setting in Facebook specifically is to only show that one ad to someone twice a week or three times a week. I think that's the default.
Greg Marshall  13:01  So the default and there's mold, and it changes. It changes. Yeah, yeah. But But yeah, that so? And that's, that's my point. My point is, what's communicated out there is based off stages. Yeah. Right. And what they're saying, is the message to the market they're talking to, is not incorrect. But a mismatch. Yeah. So they're teaching this, but the people that are doing it are not spending 100,000 hours a month, right, therefore, the vise is going out. It's not applicable, right to the audience that they're actually targeting. Right. Right. And so that's where I'm saying like, because in my mind, I'm talking about the regular business owner, that is going to spend, yeah, maybe $30,000 a month,
Blake Beus  13:54  right. I mean, we kind of gear this towards people. You know, we when we talk about who we're making this podcast for whatever, we're kind of gearing a lot of this towards people that want to get up to spending $1,000 a day, because that's a significant spend for a lot of businesses. And so that's what we get a lot of,
Greg Marshall  14:15  and that's what most businesses, most businesses are there. If you were to look at the whole market and slice it up, I bet it's 80% 85% of the people are not really ever going to exceed spending $30,000 a month, right on campaigns, because they're just not at that level. There's only a select few that are like, you know, they run into the problem. You know, Coca Cola. Yeah. And this, this, this guy that I'm talking about? He ran one of the bigger if not the biggest advertising budgets for tech, a very well known tech,
Blake Beus  14:50  right, so he's playing, he's playing in a different, a different realm, and he's probably really good at that and that's great. But that advice doesn't translate down to someone who's, who's spending three, four or $500 a day. On ads, the the advice is a mismatch. That's a really great way to put it.
Greg Marshall  15:12  And the interesting part about it is I'm looking at so all the people, this is funny, because I've never questioned this. And so I read this, all of the advice that I see out of the marketplace, and I'm sure there's things I'm missing, but the main ones I see is almost like they're only talking to their it's like rich people talking to poor people about rich problem. Does that make sense? So, so that's like, that's like the comparison. So like, for example, someone who just started off their business is not gonna understand, like, you know, my private plane just broke down last week, and I'm really trying to figure out how to, you know, like, not pay as much or lease it this way, or whatever it's like, well, that's not really applicable to most of the people. But I say that as kind of an extreme example, to be funny. But most of the people that are pushing out the content in the content creators that show you how to do that, yeah, they're really almost speaking to a whole different market than what the normal business owner is going to write their business
Blake Beus  16:18  like, especially if it's someone that has consistent content on multiple channels. So let's say, I'll pinpoint Neil Patel, he's been around for a long time. I like a lot of his content. But he has new blog articles every week, multiple times a week has consistent social media posts on basically every single platform out there. He's constantly a guest speaker at different things like that. You can't do that unless you have an entire team behind you. And I don't know how big his team is. But off the top of my head, if I were to guess, I would say his team includes probably 20 full time staff. Yep. And maybe up to 50, maybe maybe even more. And that's fine, great. Literally nothing wrong with that. That's fantastic. But you got to understand that some of the advice he's going to give may not apply to you, when you're setting up your very first Facebook ad campaign. And you're and you're, and you're going to spend $100 a day. Even if he says, hey, if I were to spend $100 a day, this is what I would do. The reality is, is he and his team probably haven't started $100 A Day campaign in years. And so he's been too rich for too long, right? And, and it's fine, like, Look, I'm not saying oh, it's bad, don't listen to anything he says I mean, either, but I'm saying is it's a mismatch for what you're trying to do. And he might be missing the point because he's lived in this realm for so long, that things are so easy to him. But he's also got this entire team behind him and a lot of momentum and name recognition. But if you're starting off, and you don't have name recognition, you don't have, you know, 100,000 million plus followers or whatever your your set of circumstances is, is going to be different, a lot different. And I feel like well, when I first launched my very first product, it was a product on how to post consistently on social media. And I launched it knowing I don't post consistently on social media, and I only had about 150 followers at that time. But I am really good at creating systems. And so I made this system and put it out there. And the first month I sold it, I did $37,000 In sales, which was fantastic to me. But those problems that I faced in that, you know, growing that and everything was significantly different than you know, Neil Neil Patel's problems, he's got great advice, listen to his stuff, read his books, but filter that through, okay, how does this translate to me? When I'm just starting out and take that advice and say, Okay, maybe this is great advice, but not for me right now. Maybe, maybe in a few months, when I've grown things up, or I have a little bit more recognition, or I'm a little bit more advanced or something like that. You have to constantly filter that stuff.
Greg Marshall  19:06  Yep. And I think I'm also thinking of like, for example, you know, the content can Gary Vaynerchuk. Yeah. Or there's another gentleman that does organic, basically, the, the interesting part about so when they talk about content, right? There's several people that have great advice, Gary Vaynerchuk is one Yeah. And a couple other guys that are very credible, and I respect big time, but the advice that they give to maybe the beginner beginner business, it's not going to work as well. For example, one was like, Yeah, I've grown my my business using pure organic content. And then you find out you hear like through an interview, well, how much is that worth? You know, organic content costs? Well, I have a team of editors and a team of this people and I spent $45,000 a month so they need it well done. How does the small business who doesn't even make $45,000 a month. Take that advice at that stage, right? Because they don't even have their their revenues aren't even what you're spending just on editing alone. Yep. Each month and so sometimes it gives not and I'm sure it's not intentional, yeah, it's but it gives the wrong maybe idea or expectation where someone's like, Well, I'm a one man show. And I'm gonna start doing some organic content.
Blake Beus  20:29  It kind of reminds me of, and I don't I want to say this was Warren Buffett that says I'm probably not, but some some person that had done really well for themselves, had basically said, and you see people make fun of this all the time, but basically saying, hey, the younger crowd needs to maybe stop getting avocado toast and buying that $5 latte every day. Yeah, and start hustling so that they can be successful. And it's like, okay, yeah, maybe we need to save some money, avocado toast and lattes, that's 10 bucks a day. 30 days, that's 300 bucks. Maybe I could save 300 bucks by by, you know, making my own avocado toast or whatever. But that's not gonna make me a wealthy Wall Street. $300 is not gonna do it's, it's not it's not right. So that that advice, while maybe that can help me save me a couple 100 bucks a month? That's not going to like set me up for life. Yeah, it's really kind of unhelpful. And yes,
Greg Marshall  21:25  it truly is. Because you do hear that, you know, like, one of my favorite phrases that one of my mentors. I used to say, as you can't shrink yourself to wealth. Ooh, I like that. It's it's very, like, it's powerful. Because really, what he's saying is, you know, saving money and avocado toast isn't gonna make you millions. No, because the because the message implies, if I just don't spend money, then I'll accumulate all of this wealth. But if you think about it, if you don't spend any money, and let's say, let's say you make $3,000. And you figure out a way to live off $100 a month. Are you really gonna get wealthy just saving $2,000 a month for the rest of your life? No, no, no. Because what is that? That's like, $24,000 a year, 10 years, that's 240 is still not a millionaire. And you're living off $100 a month? Yeah, you've
Blake Beus  22:18  got, yeah, you've got you got nothing. Now, if you're bootstrapping, you've got a product, you've got a business, you've got a landing page. And you need you're pretty strapped, and you need a couple 100 bucks to run your first ads, skip some avocado, toast and coffee for a few weeks, and put that, you know, said save up that 10 bucks, and actually put it towards something. Right. That's, that's helpful advice, because that that ad budget could change your life, literally, a good ad campaign, and learning how advertising works, is a skill that can have massive impact on your ability to earn money over time. Yep. And I think so that's what worthwhile
Greg Marshall  23:04  and I think, you know, so kind of this, this episode is going into knowing where you are, at what stage and then doing the activities that are necessary just for that next step. Yeah. Right. Just like, you know, I talked to one of my clients, we refer to Nike. And we said, well, if you ask Nike, now how to market and yes, Nike, well, how did you get started? marketing plans a lot different, right, waited for the marketing plan, in the beginning was selling sneakers out of a truck, and just driving the places and pushing it. That's the marketing strategy. Now that they've grown using marketing strategies, build a $10 million commercial, and put it out there in the whole world see it right. Now that both work. But both are different stages of your business. And so I just found that interesting. It because it stuck out to me, because I like, you know, consistent self education and learning from other people. And it dawned on me when I read that, I was like, Wait a minute. All the advice that you get, though, are from people that are saying to do the exact opposite of what that just says. But then you have to take into context like, but where are they saying At what point of their journey they saying that from? Yeah. Because when you usually hear the examples, when they start asking people like, here's another one, I heard, yeah, we, we ran some ads, you know, we didn't spend that much. And we figured out what ads work the best. And then we started, you know, teaching other people how to do it. And that's what we did every month. And we spent anywhere between 50 to $60,000 a month to figure that out. And you're like, and the communications like, so you just need to figure out what ads weren't really. But you kind of left out you spent $60,000 to figure that out to figure that out. Well, first you need $60,000 to do that. Right?
Blake Beus  24:52  And, and not a lot of businesses have a $60,000 per month ad budget to just figure that out, even if there are Successful business. That's, that's hard. And frankly, I wouldn't even recommend that. Just saying, okay, are we're stepping into ads or very first ad campaign, let's slot 60 grand this month in ads, I wouldn't recommend it, we got to figure a few things out. So let's, let's circle back to kind of the initial talking point, a one ad in an ad set, pair that with a CPA of whatever, 10x. And then you want a 10x that as your daily budget? Yes, that's what it says. So let's say I haven't run any ads. I don't know what creatives work. I don't know what audiences are work work. But let's assume that I know how to set up ads. How would I go from there to having one ad, in a campaign scaling horizontally? And like, what what would you be your process to go from? No ads to? I've got a winning ad. And I'm running one ad. And I'm scale.
Greg Marshall  26:00  So once again, I think there's context left out even in the documentation. Yeah, I think they, the assumption in the documentation is you have figured out what ad,
Blake Beus  26:10  you figured out a creative and you figured out an audience match for that creative,
Greg Marshall  26:14  right. So I think that's like, the small details left out. So you know, start there, right? I would say, and you're not actually done. In fact, just yesterday, my mind, I'm thinking, I've been using this process for this one client, and it's worked out beautifully. You can start off as low as five $10 A day still optimize for what you want. Understand, you're not going to get these huge results from it, you're just trying to prove proof of concept with that accurate. Let's say you create a campaign, you create an ad set targeting that you think would work the best based on the ad, and you run one ad, and you run it for a week, you see if it ends up getting either leads or sales. If it gets you a couple of leads, or sales, and you look at the click through rates and all that it kind of looks like it has promise, then take that post idea, that particular ad and then now moving into trying to scale it up.
Blake Beus  27:08  Okay, that's, that's basically, you got to run some tests. And if you have, if you have the budget, you can maybe run a few $10 a day with maybe some different audiences, or maybe a couple of ad creatives, and you're running 30 bucks a day on three, yep, three campaigns to just kind of see, which is the best audience to add to offer fit. Yep, focusing on alignment, and the metrics that can show you the alignment, like click through rates CPMs, which is your cost per 1000 impressions,
Greg Marshall  27:40  add to cart carts, whatever any type of high level metric that tells you you're on the right path. But just
Blake Beus  27:46  don't expect at that budgets that you're going to see a 3x 4x 5x return because, as we've talked about a lot on the show with algorithms, you've got to feed a lot of data into the algorithm in order to get some significantly significant results. But you can run these, run these ads and say, Okay, I'm gonna slot a few 100 bucks to testing this out whether it gets some sales or not, I'm going to come up the other side of this with some knowledge about which target which targeting and audiences seemed to work best and which ad worked best. Now I can combine that together, and run it and run another test and then see if that's good to scale.
Greg Marshall  28:19  And that's, you know, and it's funny, because as we talked about this, in my mind, I can see a lot of these campaigns where reviews the structure, unintentionally. So it's not like I knew from some level documentation, some that it worked, I just was figuring out that it was working, and was just doing more of it now. But now after reading that, it starts to make a little bit more sense to me. Now why it was written, I actually knew the why. So the theory that we actually talked about today. The other thing that I think is important is if you get the recommendation of running like a bunch of different ads, sometimes that can cause you to make bad ads. Yeah. And this is where I mean, it's almost lazier, because although you're doing you know, technically more, you're not putting the necessary thought of how do I get the audience hooked? Yeah, because you have the, like, luxury, I guess that's what we call the luxury of like, I'm not paying a magazine or TV or whatever, you know, 20 grand is gonna show one ad, you pay a lot more attention what you're gonna say, yeah, when you do that, versus on Facebook, I can just spend, you know, 100 bucks, throw out a bunch of stuff and just see what works, right. And I think it would be in our best interest to just pretend like you're buying ads, to where like you're doing direct mail piece, like once you submit it, there's no changes. And it just, it's gonna go out there, the money you spend is spent. And now you have to hope that you get the results that you want. You think a little bit differently. Yeah, as far as like Well, let me make sure my that hook is good. Put a bit more effort into that. Yeah. And I think that part can't hit, you know, I don't know, I feel like that part maybe has gone away. Because we have the luxuries of technology where you can do so many things and test where you can almost use testing as a way to not think through what you're doing. Yeah. Well,
Blake Beus  30:20  I think it and we've talked about this before, we've had multiple podcasts recently on messaging. Yep. And with iOS 14, and now 15. And Google has announced that they're going to have an advertiser sandbox, where they're going to start blocking third party tracking on Android phones. The messaging, the psychology of the messaging, your ad hooks, your creatives, that part is going to continually become more and more and more important. And you're going to need to spend more time learning how to write good ad, copy how to write a good video script. And it doesn't have to be sophisticated, but it has to speak to your target audience. And you're going to want to spend more time studying ad messaging, and maybe looking back at the old school ad copywriters, Dan Kennedy, greatest of all time, plugged into that guy. And studying that, that kind of stuff, and focusing on your messaging, and then looking at the advice that is aligned with what stage you are in your advertising journey.
Greg Marshall  31:28  Well, and the other thing, I think that you'll want to spend more time on this, this is like how it makes you feel like you're going back to old school. researching your market. Yeah, right. Like the other thing that you kind of, can get almost lazy with because of technology is and algorithms do everything for you almost. It's almost like your mom does everything for you. And then one day, you're left alone. They're like, well, you need to clean your house wash it is no insurance, know what to do. And this happens. And you're kind of like, what, yeah, that basically that's my scenario, and I'm 70 years old. What am I supposed to do? Right? Yep. It's almost the same with algorithms, right? They have like, spoon fed us this whole time. And now, as they start to take away these things, you have to now you figure out like, okay, so I can't overly rely just on all these targeting options. I have to like, now know what I'm doing. And I
Blake Beus  32:20  think it's a good thing. I think it's a really good thing. First of all, I've it's weird coming from someone who helps advertisers, but I'm a big privacy advocate online, I feel like we need definitely more of that. And these are moves towards more online privacy. Yep. And then the second thing is, I think it's weeding out. A lot of the people that are gaming the system that are that are flash, you know, flash by night stealing ad copy, doing doing whatever, knowingly shady things, it's filtering those people out and making it so that the people that are passionate about their product, their audience, advertising, this kind of stuff, are the people that are going to shine and the other people that were just lazy and they knew a couple of tips and tricks to game the algorithm are going to go well. So I think ultimately, this is a good move, but it's changed and we you know, you raised
Greg Marshall  33:09  you just reminded me so I don't know if maybe my algorithm hasn't hit or what but I haven't seen any luck of those like guru type ads that I used to see all the time. Oh, really? Like I there's one guy but he probably actually knows what he's doing. Right? We'll just say his name Dan Henry. Oh, yeah, but he's
Unknown Speaker  33:31  legit I don't see his stuff anymore.
Greg Marshall  33:33  I see a lyric lyric well yeah, lyric I see I see his stuff a lot so he's great. I just like he just seems to be very excited. But But what I mean is like the pool has shrank like more than people that act like you know that they've actually made money you still see them but you don't see the almost like the no name or random people you're like who's who these guys?
Blake Beus  34:00  It was like what two three years ago you would see also I would call them dude printers Yeah, these guys that are just like standing in front of a Lamborghini they probably rent it and yeah, I'm going to show you how to do all this it's super easy Amazon FBA business was was a big one. I don't see I don't see many. I don't see very many of those anymore. I see. I still see a few of the quote gurus out there, but they're probably a bit more knowledgeable understanding Dan Henry his ad copy while some people I think maybe find him a little irritating. Yeah, I feel like his ad copy and his video scripts always get me sucked in. Yeah, I think he's does a really good job with the content in his ads. And I think he's done a really good with that for a long time. And I think that's maybe why he's still rocking it.
Greg Marshall  34:50  Well, that's why I said you see the same like, I've seen a Laird for years now. You know, I feel like I know, you know, I've seen some I
Unknown Speaker  34:57  know I feel like if I saw him on the street, choleric who was Gonna
Greg Marshall  35:00  go to my end.
Blake Beus  35:01  I know we've talked about this before we'll we'll sign off after this but one of my favorites with a lyric, because he kind of follows you all over. But it's not super irritating either, but I remember on one he's like, Oh, but you didn't think you'd see me. That's my favorite. And it was like a new retargeting ad. And I thought it was hilarious.
Greg Marshall  35:19  But But I think he has a true passion for I think marketing and stuff. And so that's why I think, at least for me, I don't get annoyed because I'm like, Hey, he's trying new things. He's always trying to get better. And so how can you not like that? Yeah.
Blake Beus  35:33  All right, let's, let's, let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch
Greg Marshall  35:36  with you, Greg marshall.com. And you can book a free strategy session. And me,
Blake Beus  35:40  Blake. beus.com/sm, three, four. The best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall  35:46  Yeah. So until next time, we'll talk to you guys later. Bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  scaling like everybody, every client there, they always get nervous. Yeah, anxiety when they when it comes to scaling, right? So you found something that works. You're spending maybe 100 bucks a day or something. And now you're telling them alright, let's do 200. Let's do 300. Let's, yes, let's do this. And then they have a ton of questions as they do do that. So what happens? Yeah,
Greg Marshall  0:22  so, and it's normal to be nervous. I don't think that's abnormal at all right? Right. Because no one wants to like spend more money and risk losing. So typically, what happens? So number one, scaling, all that really means is do more, right, get more sales than you're currently getting, or more leads that you're currently getting. And typically, what happens? So here's usually the concern or the misconception of scaling. So let's say something is working really well, like $50 a day, right? Really, really low spent, and you're getting a good return. Let's say you're getting a four return on adspend. No, nice, right? So let's, let's just pretend that's happening now, if you haven't scaled before, or you're new to it, and I have made this mistake, okay. So I'm not like excluding myself, it is very easy to believe as well, if I spent 50, why don't I just spent $5,000, and I should get the exact same return of what I'm currently getting now of a Forex, right? Unfortunately, that is not how it works. And it pretty much I don't want to say it's impossible, but close to impossible to keeping maintaining that ratio that return as you spend more. And the reason for that, and Blake can probably attest to this is the audience, right? So the way these algorithms work, is when you're spending low spend, you're like forcing the algorithm to work harder to find that little pocket. That's a perfect match for your offer. But then what happens when you expand that audience?
Blake Beus  2:01  You will you start, you start having to boil over into the the people that aren't perfect for the fit, and that's fine. Yep. There's more of those. And that's a good thing. Yep. Because there's, that's a much, much, much bigger audience. But instead of finding the people that are ready, right now, you're finding maybe people that are going to be ready, tomorrow, next week, or even a few or even in a few weeks, or maybe the offer is not exactly what they need. And they're comparing a couple of alternatives. And it takes them some time to make a decision. But all of that drives your costs up. Yep. And so people, in my experience, people start seeing the cost per acquisition go up, yep. Which means their row as return on adspend starts coming down, and they start panicking because they think this is a trend, that's eventually going to mean, I'm losing money. So I'm spending all this money and I'm losing money. But in reality is a good thing.
Greg Marshall  3:04  Yep, in my eyes anyway. Well, and one of the things you have to keep in mind is, in my experience, okay, so I'm just speaking, in my experience, when you scale you actually, so people, I think incorrectly focus on the wrong part of the scale. And you should be thinking about the second sale, you're gonna give them the upsell, how many more orders they can make, and really focusing your energy on that. Not the the advertising part. Because it's inevitable that the cost per purchase, and the row ads is going to go down, the more you spend, but if you if you only focus on the advertising part, what's going to happen is you're going to get scared every single time it goes up, and you're going to retract or, you know, go back to what you were doing. And you're not ever going to be able to grow that and get more customers that you're looking for. And so that's the mistake that I see constantly is when they're trying to scale going, what worked out for x and 50. How do we make it work at $5,000 a day for x? Let's just keep looking at the ads over and over and over again, which is actually the wrong place to be work. You actually should be working on how do I increase the average order value or get them to buy sooner or get them to buy more often. That's how we
Blake Beus  4:23  come up with more offers, like follow up offers, they bought this one thing, what's the next thing they should do? It was thing after that was the thing after that, if you have two or three layers of different offers, oftentimes they're going up in price. Exactly. Then you you actually have legitimate business there.
Greg Marshall  4:41  Well, the advertising tends to work out right then you're not as concerned. But there is a transition where you have to almost practice going through this. Because every single time I've gotten I mean, I can't think of many phone calls and conversations of this sense of panic. Yeah, that scaling brings to the business owner, once again, not saying it's not warranted. It's just because you start seeing, Oh, man, I'm spending $1,000 A day 2000. And what makes it scary? Okay, this is a psychological game. What makes it scarier is when you keep seeing the receipts from Facebook or Google or any platform, hitting your account, reminding you how much is going out it almost couple times a day, yeah, when you're scaling, you're seeing your account being hit over and over and over and over again, one day, and that. So without looking at revenue, the client will just keep seeing these, because a lot of them have notifications set up when they get like a spend on their credit card or something like that. And so when you're, when you're spending $2,000 a day, which we've we've been,
Blake Beus  5:51  and I think Facebook the most you can have it set out and unless you have an account, like a big account with them or something is to charge you every $1,000. So you're gonna see $1,000 purchase twice a day. And most people were thinking, Ah, and I'll spend 1000s of dollars, you know, $1,000 Twice a day on anything. And you see that, but then you don't see the revenue numbers come in. Yep. And, and so it's easy to panic. Well, and I've been there, and
Greg Marshall  6:18  I think it's totally normal. Yeah, we're not, we're not like downplaying, like, you should just let it happen and not be concerned or worried. We just want to prep you on, this is what will happen and make sure you This is like a psychological thing, to where you make sure you're not turning things off. Because I've had this happen before they are getting hit, we've got up to $3,000 a day, at at their threshold was $900. So that's three or maybe sometimes four transactions on Facebook a day. And what ends up happening is their return was working, everything is working, the numbers are working out. Nothing's really changed. But they shut it down, turn it off, turn it off. We're spending way too much. We gotta like reassess, yeah. And they lose that momentum that they're building. And they're constantly starting and stopping, not because of logistics, or looking at their numbers to see if it's working. But just because of the fear of seeing anxiety, the money come out over and over and over. And
Blake Beus  7:17  that's, that's real. And it's normal. I think about it this way. So a few years ago, I got into my wife bought me smoker, and I got into smoking, you know, briskets. Yeah. And pork butts and things like that. And there's a saying for anybody that that that gets into this. If you're looking you're not cooking. Yeah. And I remember the first time I cooked something that was long, it was gonna take 16 hours. Yep. So I put it in the night before. I didn't sleep that night, I have thermometer in there I will. And I had the thresholds on the temperature set. so close that it was going off every half hour, and I'll go out and look at it and tweak things. But every time you lift the lid, the temperatures, drop, drop and change. And it turned out in there. But now, when I do that same cook, I get the get everything up to temperature, I throw the meat on I go to bed. Yep. And it is what it is in the morning. And it turns out great. But if you're looking, if I keep tweaking, you, you lose, you lose all the heat. Yep. Right. Yeah. And so you're constantly cooling things down and resetting the algorithm benefits and, and things along those lines. And so I'm not saying that doesn't mean, you can't turn things off. But as part of a proper scaling campaign, you shouldn't really have these surprises. Because you're not gonna go from 50 to 5000. Overnight. Yeah, you're gonna kind of you're gonna make some incremental changes. And then you'll pause, not necessarily campaigns, but you'll pause scaling for a minute, sometimes if something doesn't seem quite right, and you'll massage at that point, but you don't want to keep just flipping things on and off swapping out things all the time. Because you're you're gonna stop cooking at that point.
Greg Marshall  8:57  Well, that's a recipe. That's a great analogy, because that is true, right? When you're smoking things. What we're really saying is, it's more about trust. Yeah, trusting the process. More so than trying to control too many things that ultimately because you're trying to control them makes it worse. Right? Not because of the intent that you have the right intent, I want to make sure everything works. But sometimes you have to let things run. And you know, they gotta cook, you gotta you gotta let them cook and you don't let it cook. You're gonna end up having not so good. Finished product and I think scaling is one of those. So here's, here's the base what you want to do number one, if you want to scale you should months before start mentally prepping and preparing what you will, how you, you will behave when these situations happen. I think it'd be very helpful because if you plan out mentally like okay, if I'm spending this much What are my by my logical cutoff points? And only measure of that and nothing else? You have to remove the emotion when it comes to so I recommend saying, what's the maximum amount of money that I will spend? And what does that ratio have to look before and a timeframe, how, you know, seven days or 14 days before I make this judgment call, so that when you go in, you're only you're doing it in a non emotional way. And you're just saying, if I spent $1,000, and I don't get at least $2,000 back and it's like, 1500, then I'll cut it off, right? Or if I spend $5,000, and I don't get 10,000. Back, I'll cut it off having specific numbers that you can just look at, and just say, Okay, I hit my threshold. And what typically helps I will have clients do this drill is to go if you were to spend, what X amount of dollars, you're not losing all the spend, right? That's the part that people like our minds trickers. So if you spent $1,000, and you get 1800 in sales, you didn't lose $1,000. Right, you may have just lost a couple 100. Yeah, based on whatever business model, and that's, that's the thing, like think about it that way. It's it's hard to say, Oh, we
Blake Beus  11:22  lost money. If I spent $1,000. And I only sold $950 with the product. I lost 50 bucks, and it's not even a lost, you learned a lot and gained a bunch of customers. Yep. Right, you gained a bunch of people on your email list and everything. You can't keep doing that, because you're gonna run into some cash, cash crunch problems. But if you have a day like that, that's not the end of the world, because I've blown $50 In a day on stupid stuff before. And didn't get any customers out of it. Because it was 50 bucks on I don't know, I don't know, food or something. I mean, it's cool toy at best bought by or something and then didn't make me any money back. I didn't get any customers or anything. So think about it that way. You are going to have some fluctuations. You can't have consistent days where you're under Yeah, where you row as is under one. Yep. But if you have a single day like that, but all of your other days are good. That's not time to panic. That doesn't mean things are going south. That means I don't know, maybe there was a big news story that day. Or maybe something happened in the lives of a lot of your your audiences, like those things happen if you had I mean, if you had a massive news story, like a war started or something like that the day Russia invaded Ukraine, I guarantee you everybody's ad spent was way less effective that day. Oh, yeah. Then then or other days?
Greg Marshall  12:48  Recession? Yeah, right, the talk of a recession. People cannot even I mean, everyone gets impacted by that. But some people may not even really have to worry about that. But just the fear that comes now we're going into recession will make people shrink. Right, right. You know, maybe I shouldn't buy that even though I can't afford it. Yeah, it's a natural, like knee jerk reaction, which, you know, I saw quite a bit with buyer behavior for like two weeks when it's just being pumped on the news every day, gas prices to all time high. The cost of meat is this and the cost of food design, and everything's gone up, you could see a shift in consumer behavior for a couple of weeks. But now, it seems like people are realizing oh, it's, it's hard to live, it's okay.
Blake Beus  13:35  There's, there's all there's always fluctuations. And oftentimes, like with a little bit of creative thinking, without turning off your campaigns, you could use those new stories, or use those concepts in some new ad creative and see how that works, right? There's lots of ways you can kind of manage that, but you're not losing money, per se, if you spend $1,000, and you only made 950 back, you gained a bunch of people qualified people for your email list for your next product. And that's not really a bad thing. Obviously, we you want to be profitable all the time. But if you have one of those days,
Greg Marshall  14:07  I'm glad you brought that up too, because the other almost unrealistic expectation is that every single day will have the exact same ratio of returns, which that's why I typically recommend look at seven days minimum, but more like 14 or maybe even a month to let it all kind of average out and go, What was our return? Right? Because if you do it day by day, what's going to happen is maybe one day at 5x And you're like, This is unbelievable. Then the next day dew point eight, you're like the sky is falling and you just turn it off. But if you just let it run and then another day three and others two and a half and others for you average that all out. It's actually a pretty solid campaign. But if you're looking at it like the stock market like your day trader and your cost is saying, Oh, we just lost money in the last hour. It's you're not going to get anywhere, because you're going to constantly starting and stopping. And that's not how it works,
Blake Beus  15:08  right? And I would tell you if you're going to put effort into something like if you have this nervous energy, and this is like stressful for you, and you're going to, like put the effort into coming up with a next product. Yep, that once they've purchased this offer, yep. What's the next thing, and that next thing doesn't have to be a big step up in price it can be. But it could be just a little mini add on that you can follow up with a quick email campaign, that will make you more money than trying to watch your ad spend hour by hour, minute by minute, and keeping an eye on all of that stuff. So put your effort into that. I would also look at shifting gears just a little bit. I think a lot of people look at the wrong numbers, advertisers, media buyers, we talk a lot about cost per acquisition row as return on adspend CPMs. Those are important metrics. But as you scale the the way those metrics should be interpreted changes. And so what I think a lot of people should look at is instead of looking at those metrics, because those metrics will get worse as you scale. Because they have to get worse as you scale. But I would look at the total profit amount. Yeah, not margin, not percentage amount, but like total profit amount. So for example, let's just say I'm spending $10,000 a month, and I'm making $10,000 a month on that ad spend. And so that's my row, as is a 2x. And that's great. But next month, we spend $1,500. And I make, you know, 12,000 13,000, on profit, my row as is less Yep. But the actual profit in the bank is more, and your overhead didn't go up other than that ad spend, it's not like you had to hire new staff to deliver or whatever, you just have that ad spin. So your actual profit dollar amount is more. And I would like to make $12,000 in profit, more than I would like to make $10,000 in profit, that's a bigger number. And so you want to kind of look at that, as well. And if you're and then you also gotta realize that's just the first part of your marketing machine. And we've talked about this several times, but you have email follow ups you have next offers, you have all of these different things. Where as we focus on this one piece, because that's where everybody gets started. And that's fine. But when you want to start building out the full business, the marketing machine, you have these other products, these other offers, more bundles, more promotions, holiday promotions, all of those things. And putting effort into those things are what take your $12,000 a month on your 15k ad spend and turn that into $24,000 a month profit on the 15k ad spend is that extra stuff that you're you're adding on because the profit margins on those things is significantly higher, because you didn't have to acquire through paid ads, you've already acquired them, you've already spent the money to acquire the customer you have
Greg Marshall  18:13  now. So that's the secret that a lot of the people out there that are scaling and scale big. That's what they're actually focusing most of their effort on. Because I've heard this before from clients like yeah, I talked to this one guy. And he you know, he he spent X amount of dollars and got a gigantic return right sounds like some outsize return. Did you go to find out? Well, he sent emails, and he's hitting a huge list of people that he already acquired. So that's why he's able to get such a outsized return, because he tells me already bought those cars. Yes. And so the numbers are gonna be skewed on that. And so you have to think that's how they're doing it. They're not, there's no secret way that you can unlock, you know, like a video game, or like a cheat code where you can go, Alright, there's a secret audience out there that if I just tap into it, I'll be able to get 1500 row as some that I'm doing unlimited. And if I can just find the pot of gold, that at my life will be saved. just doesn't work that way, no
Blake Beus  19:22  matter how many no matter how many, just this one quick tip or this secret or how many, you know, whatever secrets books, you buy it, those are hooks to get you to buy. But But yeah, just there's no magic code to that. And the people that are saying they have this massive row as they're using that as a hook to kind of get you in. Fine. But oftentimes, I was watching one where the person said, Oh, the row as was, I don't know. 10,000 Yeah. And when I dug into the story a little bit, they will Were running some ads to a small geographic area to get people to come to a seminar to buy condos in a new condo complex. Yeah. And so they needed, you know, they had 100 people in the room, they, they they ran ads, maybe they only ran $1,500 in ADS. Yeah. And they sell to condos. And they're low as $1,500 to a million because they're $500,000 condos. My row as was crazy. Here's the secret, but they
Greg Marshall  20:28  don't like, yeah, most people aren't selling condos.
Blake Beus  20:31  And that's not a pure row as because there's all this overhead and selling condos. Like, there's all of these construction costs and real real trophies, it's just not accurate.
Greg Marshall  20:42  So we recommend, build a business. Don't listen, anyone who says you're gonna get some outsized returns, it's not going to happen. You can get very solid returns from the business fundamentals, which is, of course, what most people do not want to hear. Just like exercise and eating healthy. There's no secret, there's no nothing. It's just basic fundamentals, you just got to do the same thing when you're building your business. So we really apologize to laying down that there isn't some secret trick or hack to get everyone. But if you just stick with the process, you can have a very successful business, trust me. Amazon is not hacking the system with some secret ad campaign. They've got a very strong business model. That's a well thought out from the acquisition all the way to fulfillment to return customers. If they do it, you probably should do
Blake Beus  21:37  well, and they didn't do that overnight, exact, right? Like it's gonna take you some time to get there. They built out they're still building out big sections of their fulfillment arm of the business. Right? And so you build those parts and you optimize those parts as you go. That's why it's called building a business. But anyway, let's wrap this up. Greg, how can people get in touch with you,
Greg Marshall  21:56  Greg marshall.co, and you can book a free strategy session. What about
Blake Beus  22:00  Blake beus.com/sm? Three is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall  22:04  All right. Until next time, I'll talk to you later. Okay, bye.
Unknown Speaker  22:06  Bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  I've heard this term float floating around zero pixel tracking,
Greg Marshall  0:03  or as you call it, zero pickle,
Blake Beus  0:05  zero. I'm full of it today, everything zero pickup pixel tracking. And I like I like that term. And it's something we've actually talked about, we didn't have this catchy term, sure term for it. But let's, let's take a step back and talk about the problems with iOS 1415. And upcoming 16, I believe, and why that's relevant. So what what, what problems did iOS 14 put in place that everybody freaked out about? Yeah, as advertisers, so
Greg Marshall  0:41  basically, you know, you just couldn't track as accurately anymore. And there was just so many targeting options taken away. So much data collection taken away, the reporting is way off. And because of that, that does impact advertisers spending, the confidence of how well your ads are doing. A lot of it can be psychological, if you're not looking at your actual numbers, and just, you know, change, people hate change. And I think iOS really put, you know, really put advertisers, businesses marketers in a tough spot, at least for a little bit, because of how everything was done in the old days, right, when the wild wild west of targeting and tracking and just plugging, there's just so many more steps now you have to do to try to get cleaner data. Yeah. So that's basically what happened.
Blake Beus  1:34  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I know, people tend to dislike change, or change throws people off. But especially in the advertising world, I feel like when change happens, it's, it's, it's a huge opportunity to level up, because, you know, some advertisers are not going to put the extra effort in to, to learn the new, learn the new way things are working, right, live live in the new world. And so they're gonna fall behind and new, you know, advertisers that are willing to be a little bit scrappy, and try new things, and whatever can contend to get ahead. Yep. So one of the things, you know, zero pixels. So I guess I'll talk really quick about the pixel just to give people a background and why zero pixel is even a thing. So how it used to work is you could install this tracking pixel on your website. And the tracking pixel was literally just a one by one pixel image, a lot of people don't realize that that's all it was. But when when the browser would load that image, you could also append some additional data, like which click ID they used when they clicked on the ad, or the browser ID of the person. Or if you've previously identified that person, you could even pass their email address and some other things back into Facebook system, or Google system, or whatever. And so you could connect the dots between data and events that happen outside of Facebook, we'll talk specifically about Facebook, outside of Facebook, you could connect the dots with what happened with a specific Facebook user and some things along those lines. And that was great for advertisers because we could track this person was actually the person that bought this thing, this person in Facebook world was the person that bought this thing over here, you could report that back, your ads reporting was nice, you could see how much you spent, how much you made, the dollar amount, amount, how many sales you had, or how many leads you had, and it was great. When iOS 14 came around, they said we are going to block third party tracking. And what that meant was any stuff that happened outside of Facebook, they're going to block reporting that back into Facebook, and it's a data privacy thing. In the grand scheme of things, most people probably wouldn't be okay with how much data collection Facebook was doing at the time. Maybe not even be that much data tracking they're doing now. But it was good for advertisers. Yeah. So when they did that mobile devices make up? I don't know why on it on most websites, I look at these days, I would say mobile iOS devices make up probably 50 to 60% of the trials gonna
Greg Marshall  4:22  say 70% 70% on many sites. Yeah, as high as
Blake Beus  4:27  and it's in it's higher when that traffic came from Facebook because I have something like 90% of users that use Facebook, use it on a mobile device, right. And so so the tracking just went through through it just hit right into the concrete. It was terrible. And everybody freaked out. Facebook kept promising. They're going to have a good way to handle it. Google was like, Oh, we've been we've been through this rodeo before. We've already got this figured out. Figured out but Facebook, freaked out and a lot of advertisers freaked out in the game. seem completely changed. But you've said before, it was it was so good back then that it kind of made advertisers lazy if they could just rely on, you know, campaign tricks and things and make money. Yeah,
Greg Marshall  5:15  just basically have just like a maybe have a good offer, you didn't have to do much to make it work. Because quite frankly, the pixel will do a lot of the work for you soon. So people can get away with just like throwing up an Amen, it's a couple of words, get some really, you know, dialed in targeting, and start making money. And that's it. And essentially, the iOS 14 changes have impacted that particular advertiser. One who didn't do the research, understand sales, understand that copy, understand the good offer, having all those in place. And those are usually those are the ones that panic the absolute most. And I think, with the challenges with the iOS 14, and me being a media buyer, I will constantly have to explain why the numbers weren't going back into the ad account and talking about essentially the good old days, right? Like, yeah, I used to run these ads. And I would get like, you know, fill in the blank 7x return on marketing. And now I'm only getting a three, right? And they would kind of measure the success on past old campaigns where it's kind of like measuring different things, right? So well, just because you got A's in first grade doesn't automatically mean you should be getting A's and 12th grade, you still have to do the word you still like it doesn't carry over, right? And so you have to adjust and get better each and every way of the of the journey. So that's basically what I'll have to always explain is, yes, it used to work that way. But it no longer does. And we need to adjust to that. Because if we, if you get stuck in that mindset, you can put yourself right out of business, because you're just like, stuck in the old days. Like imagine if you just kept thinking like, No, I want reality to be newspapers at my front door every day. Yeah. And I don't want to learn how to use a computer, or a cell phone or syntax, because I don't want to do that. Because I just, I liked how it used to be. Yeah, imagine where you would be today. Yeah. jobless,
Blake Beus  7:18  jobless. Yeah, yeah. So Sorry, I keep going back to the kindergarten grades versus 12 grade grades. And just thinking about coloring in lines and what you did in kindergarten to get your good grades, and 12th grade coloring in those circle bubbles just just fine. They might not be the right circle bubble, but at least you stayed within the lines. If it doesn't the skill doesn't transfer. You got it, you got to keep up with the times. And so, so yeah, it threw everybody through loop. Now let's talk about what zero pixel tracking means. Yeah, right.
Greg Marshall  7:52  Well, I mean, the way I would, so really what this is, is 00, I can send a zero pixel track pixel zero. Really what this is, is a matter of, you're not using the pixel or over, I guess, like, over relying on the pixel to do most of your work, or the tracking any of that, you're actually using things that are going to happen inside the app, where the data is a little bit more accurate. So for example, before we hit record, Blake was talking about video views, right, you can optimize for video views within the platform. And then retarget that people who've watched a are 90 or 100% of that video, and that data lives within Facebook. And that can't get lost because Facebook isn't charged? Correct?
Blake Beus  8:45  Yeah. And it's part of the terms that you agree to when you create a Facebook account. And periodically, they'll send you an email saying, Hey, we updated our terms, which we all read, right? Yeah, I don't read any of those. I just assumed that they updated their terms to be able to collect more data on me and I either need to be okay with that or stop using Facebook. Yeah. But that happens within there. So there's literally nothing that Apple can do to prevent or Google or whatever whatever device you're on to prevent Facebook can from collecting data that happens within their app, they have every right to do that. There's no legal issues with that. There's no the big issue was data from some other source transferring back into Facebook and allowing Facebook to be this massive data collection company. But if you're inside the app, all of that data is fair game. So the old way of of of running a campaign for four or five years ago, and this still works like this isn't an old way you see people do this all the time was to was to run a campaign. Drop people on a landing page to get a lead. And then you follow up via email and a retargeting campaign based on the page views on your website. But the retargeting campaign The audience that makes up your campaign had to be created by pixel data. Yep. And with iOS blocking pixel data, you missing still run that, but you're just not going to get anybody that viewed your page with iOS 14. Yep. So you might still get the leads, and you might not be able to still email them. But they're not going to show up in your retargeting audience. Yeah, but now, you can run a campaign with some sort of in app. Re targetable data. Yep. And build your retargeting audiences based on that. Yep. And those can be video views. Those can be on Instagram that can be business profile visits. Yep. Interacting with posts, lead gen. Lead Gen in app lead gen, right. Because Facebook has their in app lead forms. Yep. So they don't have to leave it. And I'm trying to think of other ways that like, I know, there's
Greg Marshall  10:54  a way you got post engagements you've got, you know, clicked on ADD, you've got I mean, you can do combinations of these. The biggest, the favorite one, a lot of advertisers uses the video views. Yeah, it's one of my favorites, because you can track how far people have watched the video and just speak to the ones that have someone watched 100% of the video. Yeah, they're probably more qualified than someone who watched three seconds. Right. Right. So it's a it's it gives you a form of qualification when you do this. So and in app is great. The other people who've messaged your business, that's another one. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Messaging.
Blake Beus  11:27  That's another one. Yeah. So like,
Greg Marshall  11:28  this is a great way too. If you do in app, one technique I used to use a long time ago, as funny as I kind of come back around, was optimizing for messages for people to send you a Facebook Messenger. Yeah. Responding to Your ad, and then go back and forth with them, and then get them on the phone and then sell them. And I think there's, there's really not that much of a difference between and you let me know, because this is where your expertise comes in. But it feels like when you optimize for different objectives for years, people have always said, under no circumstances authorize for anything else, but conversions. Right, right. And the I guess the the logic was that if you optimize for purchases, it hits a different part of the audience, that target audience than if you used a different objective. Right. Sometimes I wonder, though, if we've lost that data from from the conversion side, does that actually make everything kind of more fair game? Because if you're if you lost 80% of your data, then that targeting capability is not the same, right? Yeah. But I always found that optimizing for messages work just as well as optimizing for lead that then I just tried to book a call talk to him on the phone. Yeah. Given you have a structured follow up process. Yeah. And that's, that's just my experience. And I even used the engagement objective, and the messaging objective, and in many times, actually, the engagement objective worked better than that. So you always want to test it. But that's, that's kind of my thoughts. What are your thoughts about the algorithm hitting different segments of that audience, and how's it impacted now versus your past?
Blake Beus  13:17  So my, my guess, and I would love to kind of keep an eye on this over time, is the optimizing for conversion. If your conversion happens off site, off of Facebook, or your own website, if it happens on your website, optimizing for conversion, is going to continue to get worse and worse and worse results over time. And the reason it may not have happened right away is Facebook still had a lot of conversion data, right? It's historical data. But that data gets stale. It becomes out of date and gets moldy and old. Yeah, and, and over time, but if let's say you have an audience, that's 100,000 people, and you're optimizing for conversion, what Facebook is trying to do is say, Okay, which of these people which five or 10% of this audience is ready to convert right now based on their past behaviors, but if a lot of their past behavior data is now dark, yep, you can't get that past behavior, then the, they're going to have a harder time identifying the five or 10% of that 100,000 person audience that is ready for conversion, and how they can track what's ready for conversion and say I have I have an offer for a freebie that's that's like the the five best marketing strategies for podcasts. And Greg over here has been signing up for you know, podcast guru overhears email list, and this podcast person over here and Pat Flynn. I know he's great. I love it. But he's got a podcasting course and you sign up for his freebie over there. Well, Greg is really ready to sign up also for my free podcast. You know, freebie, and so they can clearly identify that Greg is hot, he's he's ready to, to convert, you're good to go, he fits in that 5% audience. But if they lost all of that data from all these other advertisers, because the pixel is not tracking Facebook no longer no no longer knows, and that data that they have on conversions is, is old. Yep. And so that's why I think optimizing for conversions is probably going to get worse and worse and worse over time, which kind of sucks, it was a nice week, we could just tell the algorithm we want, this is the thing we actually want, we don't need to beat around the bush, we can just tell you and be very direct, we want to conversion we want to purchase or we want to leave form, sign up and optimize for those conversions. But now, it's like, we've got to, we've got to kind of hint that that's what we want, we've got to use other signals, we've got to feed other signals into the algorithm to tell it, these are the types of people that we're pretty sure are going to convert. And obviously, we got to test that to see which ones are actually converting and then say, okay, we want more of
Greg Marshall  16:06  these people. What about the so in app, it seems like the cost per action in app is always cheaper, like the traffic is always cheaper than the conversion or off off app? data, right? At this point? Yeah. With the with the changes. Is that do you think it's possible that if you choose the conversion objective and has less data, that you could get a better result using a different objective targeting the same assuming the audience exactly the same? Simply just because there's more data on the in app versus off the app? Because, in my mind, it always feels like when you optimize for conversion off app, the CPM or the cost for the traffic is much higher than when you do it for inside the app. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?
Blake Beus  17:01  Yeah, I mean, I've seen that exact same thing as well, that the CPMs are always higher for some sort of offline conversion, or off site conversion, than it is for some sort of in app or in ecosystem conversion. As far as why I think it I think a lot of it has to do with, with just the incentives that Facebook has, or Google or we say Facebook a lot, but or Google, any of them the things, the incentives, they have to keep people inside their app. So So think about it this way, say, say you're now Facebook, and your job is to increase the profit of the company. Every time someone leaves our app, that's an opportunity that they won't come back. Yep. Okay. And so I think they are want to incentivize advertisers to say, hey, let's do everything inside our ecosystem. Keep you here, because if someone signs up using a lead form in ours, in our app, they're not leaving our app. And they'll keep scrolling when they're done, which means they they'll see more advertisers, and which means we'll make more money. I'm not necessarily saying that's a good thing. I'm saying that's where the incentives are for Facebook to behave. And that's the playground we need to play in the app. Because if we're going to play in Facebook's sandbox, we got to play by the rules. And unless you're a government agency, you have you have zero, say on how Facebook sets its rules. Let me
Greg Marshall  18:31  ask you, here's a question. What about my my theory was also a lot of people are going for a conversion, specifically, towards very popular audiences. Does that bid get higher because it's more saturated with people versus using another bid?
Blake Beus  18:51  Yeah, I would, you know, now that you say that, that wasn't something I thought about, but absolutely, I mean, we've talked about that. And in general, the people that are optimizing for conversions are willing to pay higher pay a larger, pay more money for those conversions. I know. With with running, if we skip over into Google, and we start talking about search ads, yeah, there's a whole methodology of keyword research, which keywords are going to be the ones that are going to get the conversions. And, frankly, for me, one of the best things I always did that seemed to work is I would put in keywords, I would sort them based on the average bid. Yep. And I would choose the highest bid amount and bid a little bit higher than that. And because those were the keywords that were converting, the reason people were paying high dollar amounts 2030 $40 A click a click on those is because they're buying those people are buying Yep. And when you have a higher priced offer, this particular client that I'm thinking of here had had an offer that the starting price was $1,200 a month. You know, $30 a click is nothing if your conversion rate is high. And for the right people, their conversion rate rate was really high once they sign up on the form, and they had a good follow up process, and everything. So it didn't, it was great for them, their ROI was insane. Because people would sign up for this $1,200 A month starting at $1,200 a month, and they would stay with them for years and years and years because it was a service. Well, I
Greg Marshall  20:20  think so bidding in different parts of the auction makes a difference. And I think within App, you really should test it because you can't get a lot of value. I know, at least for me, I've always felt like, I guess other people talking about bidding strategies and stuff like that have always made it sound like if you do in app, it's like garbage traffic, like Facebook has given you like, the lower quality traffic. I'm not always sure that's the case. I've run a bunch of campaigns with engagements and, you know, video views and stuff like that. And I've seen, like, I pretty much back check, like to see who's watching or clicking it. And it seems pretty much like the same type of person that I want to go after anyways,
Blake Beus  21:07  I think I think that stems from a people people's mis understanding of the numbers they're seeing, and I guess let me put it this way. So you're optimizing for conversions, right? Your CPMs are higher, let's, let's say your CPMs are 10 $10. Yeah, per 1000. That's pretty high for a CPM. Now, depending on your offer, whatever $10. And so you get, you get a click through rate of, you know, 2%, whatever, you get a conversion rate, and once people land on your on your page of, of two to two to 4%, whatever, and you're thinking that's pretty good. You know, I'm making my sales, I'm paying a lot, but I'm making sales, and I'm profitable. And, and that's pretty good. And then you have, say, an engagement campaign or a video view video view campaign, where your CPMs are, I don't know. $2 really low, like, way 1/5 what you're paying for? And so for the same dollar amount, you can get five times the traffic. Yeah. But then your click through rate is point five. Yeah. And your lead lead signup rate is, is one. Yep. And so they're like, Ah, this is just garbage traffic. Yeah. But the thing is, is you are able to reach five times the number of people with the same ad spent Yeah, and your end result might actually be more profit. Yeah. Because you're able to reach out to more people. And so it's easy to just kind of write that off as garbage traffic traffic. But the reality is, is, well, of course, the other traffic was better, because you were paying five times the amount for that traffic. But this traffic could be more profitable, because the numbers are your the numbers are working out. But because the percentages are smaller, you're thinking Ah, that's that's garbage traffic. I'm not wasting my time with that, you know, something
Greg Marshall  22:59  that Mollie Pittman, so that caught my attention last week. And they're very successful. And scaling campaigns. In fact, I would pretty much say that's their specialty, is scaling. She had mentioned though, she was like, Well, you can't always bid for like that final event, forever, meaning not like you stop it. But like there's only a certain percentage of people in market to purchase today. So when you're scaling she was talking about, you have to have other strategies. Yeah, that aren't like optimizing from. She She specifically said, from AD to product page. Seems like there's only so many people who will see an ad and convert a product page, at certain budgets, eventually, you'll burn through that audience. And you'll have to optimize for lead opt ins, and put them through a funnel or put them through content and convert them that way. Which I thought was interesting, because you almost never heard anyone talk about that. But I take their word for it, because I know that they spend huge amounts of of money scaling campaigns. And to me, it makes sense because you're like, Well, if I had a 10 million audience, and I'm going after purchases, I can't spend unlimited. Because if it's only 5% of the audience at any given time, and I'm spending a million dollars a day eventually, I would have tapped out. Yeah, that audience. Yeah. And so yeah, but But you know, there's more buyers in there. Maybe they're just not in market today. Right. And that was interesting. That's interesting.
Blake Beus  24:29  That's what a lot of people and that's one of the reasons I like a lot of Molly's stuff. People don't realize that these audiences are fluid. Yeah, right. When I say this audience has a million people in it. And they're thinking, aha, there's a million little Gregg's and Blake's and, and whoever's in there, but at any given point in time, people are leaving that audience and they're joining that audience. It's that audience is is like this bucket of attributes, and there's a stream of water of people moving in and out this little section and yeah, water is a great pace. place to do it. Like you have this fishing hole. Yep. Right and this, the rivers going down, the fish can stream up swim upstream or downstream. But they're coming into this hole right here at this point in time, there's way more fish in the river. Yeah. But
Greg Marshall  25:15  this part is only like three or four that come through this section. Yeah, that are ready to get her on today to bite sizes three, and sometimes zero.
Blake Beus  25:24  Right? And so and so if you think about it, too, you also have people that are in that hole right now. But they just ate Yeah, they're not hungry. Yeah, you know what I mean? They're, they're in the market. But right now at this instant, they're doing something else. And that's something else could be I, you know, driving my kids to soccer practice or whatever. And so what you need to do is think about this more holistically, which we talk about all the time, as is holistic marketing. But think about it holistically. Going back to what I was saying earlier about the cheaper traffic, the one thing that's hard to measure almost impossible to measure is you reached five times the amount of people with the same budget, that's five times the amount of wareness, which means that next time they see one of your offers for something this or that, they're way more likely to click to click on that. And everybody thinks about the end event. And that's what Molly was talking about. You can't always just optimize for the end event. And so having something where you are basically back to the river river analogy upstream, you're basically find some way to whisper to the fish. There's some real good food down there. Just don't eat. Don't eat right now. Yep, don't eat here. You need to be hungry when you're down there, because that's where the good food is. Right? And so you're, you're basically telling people, Hey, you know, there's good stuff coming up there. Get familiar with things. And then when they are ready, they're ready. They're ready, that people sometimes take time you have people that are fast. People that take a few weeks, people that take a few months. Yeah. And so you have to kind of think about that holistically. And I think I was gonna say that's why probably a lot of your campaigns, we've talked about this before, where you have an engagement campaign, a conversion campaign, a retargeting campaign, a video views campaign. And maybe none of those are actually spending 1000s of dollars a day, maybe this one's 10, this one's five, this one's whatever. But when you have them all together, you seem to be making way more sales, even though inside of ads manager, none of them seems to be doing that. Great.
Greg Marshall  27:26  And that's like, for me, like personally like my business. I always have multiple types of those campaigns running at any given moment, using reach engagement, video views and conversion all the time. Yeah. And then on top of that content marketing there. And the reason is, because for me, I understand that I'm in this for the long haul. And I know not everyone's ready to buy immediately, I get a lot of people who reach out say, Hey, I've seen your ads, and I watched some of your content for like, a year now. Yeah. And then they purchased. But if I just like stopped any efforts, because it wasn't like that person didn't sign up, like right away, then I would have never gotten a plus, over time. I like to look at it just as marketing momentum, like a machine. Yeah. Over time, it builds up and becomes easier, just like content marketing, the first day you start content marketing is the least profitable. Yeah, right. But over time, it starts to compound. Because if people have seen you for years, your conversion rates are easy, people are ready to buy. But it's very, it's very easy to kind of look at well, if I if I put some out today and didn't get it, and our Hi impulsive world now, then it doesn't work. Yeah. versus looking at it like this is this can be a process, you know, this is going to take time, but if you stick with it, your results will be much better. But that's that's mostly where I think pixel pixel data and stuff like that, really almost train the minds of everyone to think even more impulsively than we already do. Right? Because it's like, Hey, we've got this tool that can get you a sale today. You can put an ad out and get a sale now. Yeah. And that's trust me. I love that too. No, it's great. Like, it's it's a great thing to have. But I think what that also trains you is to think that's how it should be always and you always get spoiled. You almost think like, well, if I put $1 out now I should get $5 back now.
Blake Beus  29:23  Yeah. I mean, how many times? How many times did you know four or five years ago? Was Was the advice put up 10 campaigns, and then you just turn off those that aren't converting within 24 hours, and then they got to the point where you need to give it a couple of days. Still that's really
Greg Marshall  29:39  impulsive. You actually need to have a couple of days when building a business and a couple. Yeah, no.
Blake Beus  29:45  It's like, you've got to have this kind of overarching strategy and none of this has to cost you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day. You shouldn't be spending hundreds of dollars a day unless you have already tested some things in there working you've and you've scaled up you have a good strategy and a good strategy for Follow up for your, for your whatever. But But yeah, I want to shift gears just a little bit before we finish this one, there's one other pixel three, zero pixel pixel three pixel list, data point that we haven't talked about that you've had quite a bit of success with. That's offline events.
Greg Marshall  30:16  Oh, yeah, offline events are great. And I do believe that they have stabilized a lot of the ad accounts, since the iOS 14 change. And they weren't great. Simply because and I don't even know all of like the technicality of I just know it works very well, you just download the data from your store, or your CRM system, wherever you're collecting it, and then re uploading it back into your ads manager. Or off, I don't even know the correct name, the offline events manager, maybe. Yeah. And then what that does is it matches the data back to be able to see if that person was online on that. And my assumption is that they're using probability. Is that Is that how that kind of works? I don't even know how it works. Yeah, completely. I just know that it works.
Blake Beus  31:00  Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, there's, there's there's kind of two different ways to do offline data. And Facebook calls it offline data, but they also have their conversions API. But to take a step back how both of those work. And I actually think if you have the capabilities to do both, you should do both. But how the offline API works is, I have a store, you come to my store you buy but as part of the buy process, you have to put in, you know, your your email address, your phone number, your physical address, zip code, zip codes, all of that stuff, and then you buy. But now I have that data. I can download a spreadsheet of that data. And or the I'm sorry, the the conversions API, takes that data and uses a program programmatic way to push that back into Facebook, to basically say, here's the name, email address, phone number, address, zip code of this person. And then Facebook tries to match that data with what they know about their users and say, okay, cool. This was Greg. Yep. The offline event data is very similar. Except for that you essentially manually download a spreadsheet of that. And then you manually upload that spreadsheet. And it seems like the exact same data, but I feel like every time I've seen both be turned on, the results are better. So Whoo. They're trying to figure out who that stuff is. It has a lot to do with probabilities, right? Because there's multiple Greg marshals out there. I don't know if there's some with the same zip code or whatever. Or maybe you've never given your address and ZIP code to Facebook. So they don't know that you're that Greg Yep. And so they they will apply a probability saying we're pretty sure it was this person. And once it hits a certain confidence level, they will attribute that in your ads manager. Well, I
Greg Marshall  32:46  think one of the key pieces to this, this is why I said if they're using probability is the time of purchase. Yeah, because that seems to be a data point that if you upload and offline events makes a huge difference. And that time of purchase, that's where I think these probability because then they're like, this is his full name. This is the city he's in. This is the time that our system sees that he was on. While also this purchase happened on the same time,
Blake Beus  33:11  we see that he clicked on his ad at this time. Yep. And, you know, a minute and a half later, we get this purchase event with someone that has the exact same name, same zip code, same whatever. Yeah,
Greg Marshall  33:24  that's that's the probability part comes in is the time that the title was purchased. Because then that really narrows it down. Right? Because it's like, if there are, you know, 10, grand marshals all in the same city, you know, all using Facebook, but there was a purchase made at this time, and I was on it this time. And this particular city, then I think they narrows it down a lot it kind of makes towards like it most likely was him. Yep. Right. So I think offline data is very useful. Using as much data as you can. So like help feed your accounts, I think is very useful. Because from the technical side, I feel like it probably does help optimize it, because it's giving the machine more data to work with versus 80% less. And I found that with the offline events, it just seems to stabilize. Yeah. Like there's not as much up and down it feels like and that's just been my experience.
Blake Beus  34:21  And that's like, this is where we kind of come back to basics. I mean, we've talked a lot about messaging in past episodes. And this one, we're talking about these old school tactics that kind of fell out of favor once the pixel got so good, that they're now coming back. And you're using these old school methods. It almost feels like we're moving back into the direct mailing. Ah, yeah, the Mac admin age, Dan Kennedy, where you're you're focusing on these foundational principles of psychological selling basically using Using words and things to do things and then doing some rudimentary data analytics, ie uploading a spreadsheet, like how old is that that is, but well, you know, the spreadsheet and it gives us more consistent data
Greg Marshall  35:13  you just made me realize from after having this talk about this, really all offline events is is the same as like, back in the day when you you know, maybe running a direct mail campaign, and you sold 25 people. And you're like, Okay, so I sold 25 people, where do these people come from? And you're looking, you're really like, you're using Facebook, almost in the same sense that you would use this your own brain back in the day Ryoga? Wha had these two campaigns this person? It sounds like they saw this offer instead of that one. So that probably came from direct mail piece a Yeah, this one came from direct mail he's been and you're just kind of like mapping it together, figure out. Alright, it looks like these campaigns worked. Yeah, it I spent $2,000. And I got $8,000 back. Fantastic.
Blake Beus  36:04  It works. Maybe we we run another test to target the ones that we felt like worked best to see if we can confirm Yeah, that that creative or geographic areas area was hot, and tried again. But that's really not a lot different. And it's probably going to get more and more like that we have all these fancy tools. There's a lot of businesses out there that are trying to solve this data connection problem automatically. And, and all of that you've got high row seats, and all these others. But the thing is, is once once all of those get big enough, they're going to also get apples on Apples hit list. So they will work for a time until they get big enough. And then Apple will be like, Nope, that's third party data. Get over to here. Well, you flew under the radar for now. But now you're on our block list. And now and then it will stop working. Yeah. But a good old fashioned spreadsheet.
Greg Marshall  36:55  Yeah. It's I mean, testimony,
Blake Beus  36:58  it's your data. It's your data, I bought data, I'm giving it to my advertiser to connect the dots. There's there's nothing wrong with that.
Greg Marshall  37:05  So yeah, so I think outside of that, I mean, using an app tracking can be very helpful. I would recommend testing and using it. Especially if you're someone that's thinking about being in business over the long term, I think it'd be very valuable for you to utilize it. And one thing that I think works really well, when you do a lot of these kind of an app, or downloading spreadsheets and stuff like that, I think it's useful to help the business owner marketer truly understand their business better. Because you're not relying on a machine where you're not even looking at it. You're like almost forced to really analyze things and go like, why did this work? Who are these people that are clicking on this? What are they doing? I feel like it almost forces you to research your own company better, which is more effective, I think, just for your own good amongst like, really, at the end of the day, all marketing and businesses is understanding your customer on a deep level. Yeah. And being able to speak to them and give them what they need. And I think by doing these techniques, it helps you understand that better, in my opinion.
Blake Beus  38:14  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So let's wrap it up. Greg. How do people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall  38:19  Greg Marshall Dotco, you can go ahead and book a free strategy session and
Blake Beus  38:23  Blake beus.com/sm Three is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall  38:27  So until next time, we'll see you later. Okay, bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  So we were talking about going viral. And we we've talked about how going viral is not the solution, not the solution, right? Like, like, a lot of people want to, they want to go viral, viral and everything you want to have that content that just takes off. But I think the words you used were going viral is not what you think it is. Yeah. Or something along those lines, right. So like, why why do you say that? Well, I
Greg Marshall  0:26  think, well, it's, what I do want to say is, I don't think it's not valuable. But it's not what you think like, going viral is not actually going to get you all of the sales that you think you're going to do. But there is a way to use it. Right? So most people have the idea that, well, if I can get this video or this post or picture, whatnot, seen a couple million times, then that alone will generate more sales. And I just haven't seen that to be the case in many instances. But there are ways to capitalize on that. So I know you said you had someone that recently had a post go viral.
Blake Beus  1:07  Yeah, so I have an office at. They call it a creative studio, that it's an old parking garage, they've converted into a bunch of different studios for artists and things and I kind of got in super early on they weren't entirely sure if it what what if it was going to be for artists or something else, or kind of working spaces. And so I'm, I'm the soul, not like artists sculpt or whatever, I just have my corner office and I just work out of it. But I like being around the creative energy. And I oftentimes talk with him about marketing and things and they have questions about all of that stuff. And we'll one girl she does. She she does these amazing. One one of these artists in name's Sarah Austin. Anyway, I'll mention her because you should go like check out her stamp. But she had, she does these amazing wood colored pencil drawings. And she had a real that went nuts. And she had four or 5 million views. And I think when she had that post go viral. I think she only had a few 1000 followers. Yeah. Right. So that was a big deal. Yeah, she's super excited about it. Got a ton more followers, I think her follower count went up by almost 20 grand. Yeah, like that. Super cool, like very exciting. And I was talking with some of the other artists there. And you know about that, because they all want to go viral and everything. And, and it turns out, she didn't really, she got a lot of followers got a lot of kind of traction and things. But none of that really converted over into sales. Yep. Right. And so none of it turned into selling of her art or anything along those lines. And so we were just kind of chatting about that. And I mentioned this to you. And that's where we kind of came up with this, you know, idea. Now, now she's putting into play some, some sort of a sales process, putting together some offers that she thinks might resonate a little bit more with the Instagram crowd maybe be a little bit more of an impulse purchase. And kind of exploring that a little bit. So it hasn't been a bad thing. But it's also like you go viral is super exciting and cool and everything, but it doesn't, it doesn't always translate over
Greg Marshall  3:25  into sales. Well, it's actually a good lesson, too, for if someone goes viral, they themselves can actually see that just being seen more, doesn't complete the actual sales cycle. Right, right. And so here's here's basically what Blake was talking about. She's coming up with offers and things like that is now what you can do is retarget. So anyone who watched that video, right or engage, you can retarget them with an ad with a direct offer. That's that basically sells something related to what that video was. Because one of the things that happens, posts that go viral on social media are never sales oriented. That's like the opposite of what the platforms actually want. And so if you go viral, it's not going to be something where you say hey, by the way, I have something for sale, right? That will almost never if it might even be possible say that will never happen.
Blake Beus  4:19  It almost will guarantee that if you have that in there, you won't go viral.
Greg Marshall  4:23  And so with that being said, if you go viral, the way to take advantage of this is to basically create retargeting ads that gives a direct offer and retargeting ads are something you pay for on these platforms, but they're very, they're very useful because that's how you can take advantage of all of that free reach that you got, right? But if you don't do that, and you only try to go viral. There's pretty much the reason why you don't get sales because there's no sales language in it right of saying you have something to offer them,
Blake Beus  4:54  right. And I like what you're saying is it doesn't really complete the circuit. It's it's part of the puzzle and If you just kind of take a big step back and look at just marketing in general, the the broadest form of marketing you need to do is get in front of people that are interested in your product service, whatever you're offering, and get them to become aware of who you are, who your business is, and everything. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. And going viral is just one of those ways. But getting people aware of who you are, doesn't complete the rest of that customer journey. Exactly. And it doesn't mean that all of those people are ready to purchase or even interested to purchase, even though they're in that, in that industry. It's just like, you know, if you're a used car salesman, you have this lot with all of these great cars on there. But no one knows who you are, no one even knows that the lot is there, you're not going to make any sale. Correct. So you've got to start putting some signs up and some other things to say, hey, we exist, and we're over here. But that, too, isn't gonna guarantee any sales either. Because once someone walks into the parking lot, you have to complete the sales cycle Exactly. And so you have to have in place some of these other things. And I don't know, I think a lot, a lot of times people think, Well, I have some products and things for sale on my website. So once they get there, they they will
Greg Marshall  6:21  die. That's absolutely false. And it never works that way. And you have to really sell it. And you know, we've talked about this before, I've worked with influencers that had hundreds of 1000s of followers and can't generate any sales. And it's not zero, like literally 00. And it's not that they're bad people or even their audiences are unqualified, it's that they're not using the right messaging and language to get someone to actually purchase and there's a skill behind that it's not, hey, you know, I have this for sale, buy it, it's you have to really persuade and influence the audience to even want to buy and a lot of that has to do with transfer of energy and emotion and excitement. And that's kind of the the side factor to how to make this all work. Because I've noticed that people that are building followings online, they they're very good at building community. And they're very good at the awareness, building awareness, right, but you have awareness, nurture, close, that's actually how you monetize whatever it is you're doing. But if you just only focus on the awareness part, and you're not nurturing, and then you're not closing, you're not going to be able to see the revenue and sales that you're working so hard to get. And that kind of that that basically takes away the mystery of like, well, we've got all these followers, but people aren't buying from me. And why? Why is that? Well, because you're missing a key piece of you actually have to influence them.
Blake Beus  7:55  Yeah, and because I'm a huge nerd, one of my favorite things I do on them on social media. So I, if I ever see a real or a tick tock or whatever, that just has millions and millions of views or whatever, I will oftentimes just go to their profile, and see what their sales process is like. And you can tell very quickly, those people that are making money off of their viral, you know, strategy. Yeah. And those people that have are making no money. Yep. And it's almost always this, right. The people that are making money are those that actually have a sales process in place with a direct next step. It could that next step could be a small kind of impulse type purchase, or join my email list, or some sort of next step, because social media is very non committal. I'm just swiping through things. So you need to get a little mini commitment. And then they have that next step. And then I will sign up for the newsletters, and see what their process is. And they increasingly give me the next step, next step, next step to try to get into purchase. And those that make really good money will have their own brand surrounding. You know, there's one person that has her own hair product line, and it's like her product line. That didn't happen overnight. That was an intentional thing that took her probably five years plus of her social media journey to create that. But now it's I'm guessing it's an extremely profitable channel for her because it's easy. It's like an easy transition that
Greg Marshall  9:32  flow and social media is the perfect awareness tool. Right? So you drive awareness and then when you talk about nurturing, that's giving them a small commitment, like you said, joining an email list, a newsletter, maybe watching a webinar or maybe consuming some other content, but usually the nurturing of free call. Yeah, and usually that the nurture sequence, goes from social media and then tries to move them off of social media, that's typically how you kind of nurture them. That's how you can also pre qualify who is really interested. So it's like, you're taking an offer and saying, you know, hey, here's this piece of paper, go check out our, you know, restaurant down the street, you know that the person handing those out, you can get a lot of those out there for awareness, but only a certain percentage will actually walk inside the doors to your restaurant. That's nurturing right? Now they're actually taking a look to see what do you have to offer the closes then to go ahead and actually buy something? Right, right. So we've got all these different food products that you can try? Would you like to buy one? And that's essentially how that works. Look at social media is just the perfect awareness tool to be able to get yourself out there and to build relationships with people. Yeah,
Blake Beus  10:50  yeah, absolutely. I think about this a lot. I think a good kind of comparison is Costco, meal free sample, right? Like, it's not a new concept. But as as someone with kids, the number of times we're driving past Costco, I mean, this has been different since COVID, starting to come back. But we would drive past Costco and the kids are like, Can we get some free samples. And then I swear, every time you go in there, it's over here. So that's actually 150 to $300, you know, payment to do something because I always find something that I want. But they get you in the door. Because I'm not driving past Costco and thinking, I need to spend $300 at Costco. No, but I would drive past Costco and think I need that buck 50 Hotdog for my kids, because they're hungry. And it's fast and easy. And it's gets good southern nursery. And so you know, that's a small little decision, I make that decision. And then it's game over. Because they've got me real good with everything in
Greg Marshall  11:48  this new computer. groceries, you walk out 1000 dogs,
Blake Beus  11:54  or this new thing, they always have these things that are only there for a few weeks. But anyway, but it's the same thing with your social media, right? You're getting them in the door. The your social media is essentially the Costco signup. Yep, right? That's what that is the Costco sign, and then that little booklet that they send each month with those deals, that's your social media. Yep. But you got to get them in the door next, and getting them in the door on social media is those join the email list or book a free call, or maybe here's $1.50 hotdog, you can buy something, get them to engage in some way off of social media. Yep. And then take them to the next step.
Greg Marshall  12:31  And I think the big kind of learning lesson you can take from going viral isn't what you think it is, is to put more thought, don't neglect the thought of the nurture and the closing sequence. Most people only focus they put so much focus on just the awareness, and they wonder why they're not getting the results that they want. And that's because there's literally no thought and to the nurture or closing. And if you take if you're someone who's very good at getting a lot of reach, and getting people to engage and, and communicate with you, all you have to do is start to focus on Well, what should I naturally give them next to basically prequalify them to say that they're possibly interested in taking another action, so that once they're there, it's a lot easier to close them. But it's pretty hard. You can't skip the nurture part. Right? Right. The nurture part is, people want to go awareness close, and get eliminate the middle part. And that's, that's a huge mistake. Because people don't make decisions like that they're not getting married off of a first date marriage, right? It's the first day then follow up dates and a bunch of series to kind of develop a relationship. They don't just say, hey, you know, great to meet you. Let's get married tomorrow, right. And that's what everyone's trying to do is they use awareness to close versus awareness, nurture, nurture, nurture, then close. And so unfortunately, the nurture part, you have to do it. Right. Right. And you can't speed up speed up through customers by when they're ready to buy. Yeah. And so you need to be in front of them. So that when they are ready to buy, they choose you. Yeah, right. Same thing with getting married. They don't just get married because you feel like it today. And they're just gonna get married tomorrow. You actually have to like put in the work and you think about what you have to put in the world. Think about this with your wife, right? Or your or your marriage relationship. Imagine if you were just like, I'm only gonna, you know, be aware to you so I can close your eyes, I can get something. Forget about me helping with the kids or cooking or driving anyone around or having a job and paying for things. Forget about all that. I don't want to do that. I just want you to do what I want you to do. And I'll show it what I want you to
Blake Beus  14:48  do. It's never never never gonna absolutely not. So I mean, let's talk about maybe some some specifics. I think a lot of people there's a lot of great information on going viral. out there, and I have a lot of thoughts surrounding that. So if you're the kind of person that has done a ton of research on how to go viral, you know, the best songs or the hash tags or, or how to do these little hacks to make people watch your video over and over and over again, through engaging or whatever, all of those things. Like how can someone shift from that mindset, because that is a very kind of, it's a different mindset, a siloed mindset into the nurture and the clothes mindset, because it's really not a, if you build it, they will come kind of situation that you've got to shift into this other mindset. And if people are like me, I have a hard time shifting from one mindset like that, where I've been singularly focused into this other kind of mindset. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall  15:47  I actually think, though, the way to shift and transition from one mindset to the other, is to actually ask someone who's really good at the nurture or the closing sequence and ask them for tips such as, here's, here's a perfect example, I come from the sales world. So I have a better ability to close and nurture more than the awareness part. Right? And so I actually have to ask people, well, how do you get more awareness? Right, Rudy, what are you doing to generate more of this awareness that you're doing? Because once they get in, I'm able to sell them? Right? When you go into a different mindset, you have to almost think all of these people that come through, you have to start thinking about speaking to them one, one to one mentally, right? That's the shift. The shift is like, Okay, what's their kind of inner ecosystem? Instead of thinking of mass, right? Because that's what awareness is, yeah, it's thinking in mass, how do I get the masses to start doing stuff? Right? Now you have to start thinking one on one. And that mindset is all about, well, if I had Blake come in, after seeing something, how do I need to speak to him? In order for him to want to take the next steps, a lot of it has to do with power questions, asking the right questions, and pretending you're actually speaking to this individual, and saying, like, what are their biggest desires? What are the biggest fears? What are the biggest benefits they want to get? What What would they like to ultimately achieve? And then start speaking this language, right? And so that language is a lot different than speaking to the mass, right? And that's how you shift your mindset into the nurturing clothes as you start to think one to one versus one too many. Right? And that's if you can combine those two. That's where you're going to be able to have a ton of success.
Blake Beus  17:41  Yeah. Yeah, I think I think that's really key is just trying to figure out what they want. So back to this artist. Yep. When I was talking with some of the other artists that were asking me questions, you know, how that would work. If you went viral and everything. My first question was, well, people who follow what, why would they follow that account? What what do they want out of that? And the answer was almost always, well, they'd like to maybe learn a little bit more about the technique, or they or they think the art is, is interesting, and they're trying to learn more. But when you go to their website, they're selling pieces, like physical art pieces, which is great. But there's no learning technique if you buy this physical art piece. So if someone's going to buy an art piece, they're simply buying it either because they like it, or they're big fans of the artist. But those things take a lot of time to kind of build up at scale. And so the first thing I said is I'm like, why don't you pair a physical art piece with something educational, and after talking a little bit I recommended. Let's find something that's really easy to do. I said, just do a quick time lapse of a small because she she made many of them make these smaller pieces that are kind of more approachable. I said, just record a time lapse of you doing one of these pieces in one sitting. So and then if someone buys that art piece, they get the exclusive time lapse video of that. And now Now they own on that video, and they're the only person that they have gets that video. But now they're learning. It accomplishes a few things, they get the piece of art, and it's a small piece of art. So it's not crazy expensive. They get to watch some of the technique and they can just learn by watching the artists themselves. It doesn't have to have their creative process interrupted by trying to explain what they're doing. Because that's, that's a concern. Yep. Because it makes it take a lot longer. And now they have this thing that kind of bridges the gap between what they're trying what the their followers are trying to get out of the social out of hitting the Follow button on their account, and making that sale. Yep. And so they're putting together a couple of those offers to test them out. And, you know, we'll we'll see how that works. But my guess is kind of that's yeah, my guess is too But that's the thought process, you got to think about, you're like, how do we how do we kind of bridge that gap?
Greg Marshall  20:03  You just have to. And I think that's why I read, I do recommend you reach out to people that are kind of opposite minded thinking, right? So nurturing, closing minded thinking, because like, for me, I have quite a few influencers that reach out to me, to help them close the gap. Because they're very good. I mean, I've got a couple of clients that get millions and millions of views every single week, across multiple platforms. But they, they're not super effective on their own, and selling the stuff. And so they have me to come in and actually tell them say these types of things. And that, in fact, we just had one. The other day, we did and just a few days, we sold 50, I want to say $52,000, it's like two, three days worth of product, and we sold out. And we so now I need to get more. And I keep telling him that we need to get more, but because I understand they're very good at driving that awareness. And if they can close the gap to being able to sell, right and nurture and close them better, then that's where they're able to put money in their pocket. Yeah, right. And just think like if we had unlimited products for this, so 50,000 and a few days, we probably could end up selling a couple $100,000 worth in a month. But we've run into this problem multiple times. And so I'm trying to have a talk with it with with inventory with inventory, because that's a whole nother game is when you're trying to scale inventory becomes a problem, when you become very good at the nurturer and closing, because then you have to plan this out, right? Like how do I ship out this many products, and this amount of time. So this is like a big learning curve. This, I think on the surface, people think generated money is like like a want like a single activity, and you generate it, but there's multiple processes in there, right? Awareness, nurture clothes, they got inventory, shipping things out. So this is like an ongoing thing that you have to just
Blake Beus  22:03  Yeah, practically. So I think that demonstrates one of the misconceptions I see a lot when I'm working with people and chatting with people about how this works. And it's a misconception, I think it's very easy to have happen. And because on social media, you have a person, the person is the face of their business, even if it's it's their account under their own name and everything there that face. And so it's very easy to think, well, they're doing all of this pretty much by themselves, and maybe they have their spouse or husband or whatever helping behind the scenes. And it's simply just not true at all they have they they reach out to people like you and me to help bridge those gaps, because everyone has this specialty of their skills. And if if your particular specialty is getting that awareness, your specialty is probably not managing inventory, it's probably not even anywhere in that realm, you might not even know you need to manage, right. And that's fine. Like you, you shouldn't expect yourself to understand all of those pieces. If you're if your specialty is getting that awareness. Closing probably isn't a great specialty of yours, because they're they're still quite different. And so what you what you need to do is bring in some trusted people that could just be like a friend or an accountability partner, if you're a small business, and don't have the cash flow to hire someone or that's a consultant like you and me and that's what you know, we help a lot with or if you're bigger, that's when you start hiring full time or, or something along those lines. But I mean, I have a I have a client that I've worked with, that is really big and kind of the guru and success area. And they have on social media, it seems like it's all just them doing all these things. And it's because that's a simpler message. But behind the scenes say you have about 15 full time employees. Yep. And several contractors that help behind the scenes of that whole process of nurturing people writing the emails, getting on the phone calls to talk them about closing and then and then closing those those deals. But this is a company that does millions and millions and millions every year in sales, and they sell annual memberships and the annual memberships are anywhere from 10 grand a year to 250 grand a year. And and but on social media it looks like he's doing all this stuff myself. Not the case.
Greg Marshall  24:33  Well even I'm happy said that because that was one of my biggest misconceptions early on was you know, you see guys like you know, I think one of the big players has been doing for a long time. Tony Robbins you know, they call the the guru model right, which is you have the individual and then they have this huge team. They've got hundreds of people working for them. But on the surface it seems like Tony Robbins is the one
Blake Beus  24:59  doing it. Ever directing everything,
Greg Marshall  25:00  but he's not even close. And the same with Gary Vee, right? And Gary Vee is one that everybody knows. And he has, you know, he's got a videographer, he's got editors, he's got this huge team of people that are distributing his content. He's got certain networks,
Blake Beus  25:15  even coming up with content ideas. Gary Vee is not the guy coming up with all the ideas.
Greg Marshall  25:20  He's basically just a spokesperson, he really is. And that's what a lot of these businesses, that's what they are, is they, they're an individual, any personal brand that you see, it's not one person doing all of this. It's one person delivering the message, and a lot of people doing all the others.
Blake Beus  25:38  And so if you're out there thinking, you need to do all of this yourself. And you're asking yourself, why can't I ever get all of this done? That's why it's, it's it's a job for like five or 10 people minimum, right? But everybody's got to start somewhere. And so if you're, if you're doing this all by yourself, and you're looking for, okay, I need to bring someone else on, a great place to do is like I said, the accountability partner, find someone else that's doing something similar. If you're good at the awareness, find someone that's good at the closing and say, Hey, can we partner up and I will help you come up with awareness, ideas, and you can help me come up with closing ideas, and we'll meet regularly, and then maybe I'll even do some of your work for you. And you can even do some of my work for me, and do that trade. And then as that starts working, you can start looking into, you know, consultants, again, that's what that's what kind of you and I have have popped into space. And consultants don't have to be crazy expensive, it kind of depends on on the interaction. But sometimes it's like, Hey, I just need someone to meet with me once a month. Yeah, what's your what's your hourly rate for like a once once a month, phone call, that's maybe an hour and a half or two hours long, to help me organize some of these thoughts, whatever. Or it could be a full done for you kind of a thing. There's lots of different ways to kind of make that work.
Greg Marshall  26:54  But it's, trust me, it's worth it. If you're if you're investing in this for the long term, and you want to really grow a business. These are investments you should be making. And I know for my own business, I've made these investments and make them every month. And it's I would never not do it now. Right? Right. It's part of the business. And I know you cannot, you just can't get rid of it's absolutely necessary for growth, and it's very valuable. And people know, like, I have my assistant, she does a ton of stuff for me. And I can't now I can't even imagine trying to do all the stuff she's doing on my own. Like if I just can't even imagine it. So these are things that you have to think and structure. But you know, we started with going viral. It's not everything you need. This is a very valuable point. You need nurturing, you need closing and you need a team to help you. This is not a one a one person smooth, right versus this is you really need to have support and multiple ways. And you have to have strategy. And so really think about your business, simplify it first and go get the awareness, nurture close sequence down for your business, and then start thinking how do I amplify it?
Blake Beus  28:08  All right, there you go. Well, let's wrap this up. Greg, how can people get in touch with you?
Greg Marshall  28:12  You can go to Greg marshall.co book a free strategy session. And what about you know, just
Blake Beus  28:17  blink boost.com/sm3 is the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall  28:20  Great. Well Until next time, hope you enjoyed this, this nice combo podcast and I will talk to you later. Goodbye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  messaging 2.0. So last week, we talked about messaging. And we gave a lot of different ideas concepts on on messaging. And I know a lot of people think messaging. It's boring talk, right like to talk to me about algorithms or, or targeting or stuff like that. But as we've mentioned, many times messaging is becoming more and more, it's more important, always been important. Yes. But with changes in data collection and privacy rules, which are only going to get more restrictive things like targeting and that are going to become less effective. Yep. And so messaging, which I feel like we're seeing this all the time is becoming more and more and more important to you. So you wanted to follow up on on on what we talked about last week, with some tests and things you've run this week? And give us kind of a rundown on what you're seeing with messaging.
Greg Marshall  0:53  Yeah, so one thing, and the reason why we're harping so much on messaging, if we could sell you on messaging is king, you will actually be able to control your, your success, right in the future when it comes to your business. Because this is the one lever that if you pull it will give you the greatest return. Alright, so what I want to talk about as a client as a direct test, so $1,000, the offer really didn't change much. The targeting didn't change much. And they spent $1,000. Got no leads.
Blake Beus  1:27  Yeah. And so they brought you on to kind of be like, this isn't work. Yeah, like we spent 1000 bucks got zero leads. When you told me this, the first thing I was like I asked was, what was their lead form broken? Oh, that's
Greg Marshall  1:39  exactly what I thought I couldn't believe it. Because it is so unbelievable to think. Even the worst of that will get you one leave for $1,000. Right? Yeah. $1,000 like something's got to be brought. So the first thing I did was I looked at the targeting, are they even targeting the right areas? Yeah. Are they who are they targeting? Is it? Are they like their landing page? Is it working? Are they saying it to a page? Oh, everything worked? Okay. $1,000.00 leads. So what we did was we, we swapped out the what she was saying. And the ads so we still so ad number one was selfie style. And number two was selfie style. So at least our videos like style video. Yep, selfie, just offering the service zoek. We did that. And so there was no change in like how look, we didn't like increase the production, or make it look totally different. We same format. What we did was we changed the words on what we said. And we made one major shift that I think may have influenced the success of this. We made sure that the message was all about the feelings that the customer on the field versus ad number one was about what we did, okay, okay, which may seem very subtle, but it makes a massive difference
Blake Beus  3:02  was this in was was what industries it's a fitness industry. Okay,
Greg Marshall  3:07  so one, one add number one was about leveling up, we do CrossFit. We can get your nutrition plans, we can do all that, right? That's showing the business. And number two was about how they feel. So what are your customers always say when they come in? Well, they're looking for a place to feel included. They just moved here. So they don't really have a gym to go to. They want to be a part of a community. They want to be able to go with friends and family. And you know, so I said, switch all the messaging to that, and talk nothing about the other stuff. Yeah. So we made that shift. And to essentially put on steroids. What we did was the background of the video. I said do the videos in front of the places where your customers live, because this is a local business. Okay. So instead of just saying, Hey, do we live here? We said, like right behind right behind her was like the main shopping center. Okay, that's a very
Blake Beus  4:06  recognizable thing. Vengo ooh, that's cool. I have never thought about that. So I
Greg Marshall  4:11  said, say this the area of your town, and then have in the background, something that they would quickly recognize. Oh, that's right. My neighborhood. Yeah. And then we target that neighborhood. Right? That's awesome. What that did was we spent 40 bucks and got five leads.
Blake Beus  4:27  Okay, okay, so So you went from paying $1,000 for zero read leads? Yep. Essentially negative infinity Yep. return on adspend. And then you went to $40 for five like five
Greg Marshall  4:47  leads right seems like an improvement to me it's it's a huge imprint targeting was the same targeting was the same.
Blake Beus  4:54  Ad was obviously less but the style of the video style was the same
Greg Marshall  4:58  but the messaging because think about what I had in the background plus what she said, yeah. That's the change in the ad hook in the messaging. And that right there, even to me, someone who does this all the time, that was shocking, the the immediacy of the response, right, which shows it's more about what you're saying, than anything else. Right? He's setting. And so that's just one example. There's actually another example where a client, in fact, I think they did so well, they moved off. Which is the point, right, which is the point because they started getting so many sales, is they essentially hired me to do the same. So they were like, Hey, we've been running ads, on or off, he spent several $1,000.00 sales. So no sales from this, right?
Blake Beus  5:53  Can I just pause really quick? I, I'm always floored at $1,000. I do. Really quick, really quick. If you're running, if you're running a lead campaign, and you spent a couple 100 bucks, and you've got nothing to turn it off and reevaluate. Like don't keep running it for 1000 bucks. If you're trying to sell something, depending on cost, maybe like it kind of depends. But if it's leads, yep, you spent a couple 100 bucks and you get nothing, turn it off, turn it off and reevaluate. Try again.
Greg Marshall  6:23  Well, and I think you know, the belief is I think, well, Someone's probably telling me, you just need to spend more. So I think their belief is I have to be spending more and more. Maybe I'm just not spending there's a
Blake Beus  6:34  time and a place for that. But that's when you're scaling. And when you've already kind of got the system down, you've already got the messaging down. And then you want to like scale in a big way, then yes, you do need to spend more and yes, your cost per lead will go up. But you need to have some leads first. Yeah. Thank you got it. Yeah.
Greg Marshall  6:49  And then and that's the thing is you spend more once you have things that are proven, so that you can stabilize your accounts. But that's for another discussion, discussion came back, get back on what you were saying this right here is, so they spent 1000s of dollars, no sales? No nothing, right? They're using Google Facebook ads combination. Okay, once again, we changed nothing. As far as the fact I never even changed. The targeting, I changed nothing. Actually. Everything just kept running both the problem was what the landing page said,
Blake Beus  7:26  Oh, okay. All right, change anything in the app zero. So the ads, were getting a good click through rate and that kind of stuff. Decent enough. Good enough. Good enough. Yeah, close to 1%. So that's how you start targeting. And that's how you start identifying where the bottlenecks are, like, if you're getting the ads, and the click through rate is good enough, then the problem is probably not specifically with the ads.
Greg Marshall  7:49  Correct. And so the client when they first and that's a good point, because when they first came on, they're like, Hey, I gotta change my ads, I got to figure out what's wrong with my ads. And I actually had to convince them the opposite. Nothing's wrong with your ad. Because he actually did a good job with the ads. I said, it's, it's what they're seeing. Once they click on it, they're not compelled. So what we do is we change the messaging to have more social proof. More about, okay, this is not that I'm saying this out loud. This is actually a tendency that I find with driven individuals. They speak the language of themselves. So at the top, it said, it was something about how to be in the top 10% of your class, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? Uh huh. And I asked, I said, What is the person that's going to buy this? What do they want? Do they want to be part of the 10%? Or do they just want to be able to get hired?
Blake Beus  8:50  Right? And this was on like a certification program. So you take this course or go through this program, and now you're certified to work as XYZ job in whatever industry? So it's like part of part of a certificate. Okay,
Greg Marshall  9:06  exactly. So it's basically, these are people that are looking to build a career in this industry. And what I asked was, well, why does Why would someone who Why would someone who is someone wants to be part of the 10%? They're probably already motivated. So therefore, they probably won't even buy this. Yeah. Because they would have figured it all out on their own. You're going after someone that wants to start a career get hired, doesn't know what to do and needs guidance?
Blake Beus  9:37  Yeah, they're shifting industries. Right, exactly. They're their career changing. They don't know what to do. There's probably a lot of just uncertainty on how to proceed.
Greg Marshall  9:48  So think of this. So the psychology of that person is more of they're afraid they don't know what to do. They need someone to hold their hand, not be in the top 10% They don't have the happens. Yeah, yeah, just think I can be part of the 10%.
Blake Beus  10:03  So many of them probably just want to, I just want to complete the thing. That's all I want to complete, and be qualified to get the job and do a good job.
Greg Marshall  10:11  So when basically change the language to that, really what you just said, complete the thing and get a job. Yeah, you, you want to get hired, start your career, start earning a good income, and you know, blah, blah, blah, all
Blake Beus  10:25  this sort of time qualifier in six months, or however long it takes to go through the program. And that program takes six months. There you
Greg Marshall  10:31  go, we changed it. instantly started getting sales, he got no sales before. Day we changed it without i. We didn't change. Yes, I think he thought I did. But I did not because I knew the ads were not broken. We changed the messaging within a day he got to sales.
Blake Beus  10:50  So $1,000.00 sales, changed the message messaging, not even turning the ads off, nope, no change in ads, just change the messaging, changing, targeting no changing nothing, and gets to sales, the next step gets to sales right away. And I remember thinking,
Greg Marshall  11:06  wow, messaging is so important that it could easily be overlooked because of the new ad setting, or the new this or the new that. Or even just maybe if it's not even that you're just you're addressing the wrong problem. Your ads may actually be okay. It's your messaging after that, right. And half, half the struggle, I think, when it comes to small businesses and their marketing is how to identify which problem they should address, right? Because if you don't know what you don't know, you and you're just running ads, you're thinking, well, then I must have an ad problem. Yeah. But if your click through rates are 1% or higher, whatever. And like I said, he did a good job on his ads, I thought his ads are pretty good. Then if it's pretty good, then it's just what they're seeing your landing page and the offer. And so that to me, those are just two examples. Just how much impact something and like I said, I mean, being an industry and you'd probably fall into this before, too. It even surprises me at times. How much thought needs to be put into the messaging and how much it really does impact the conversion. Because sometimes you can think, oh, maybe if I tweak this a little bit of that a little bit, it'll make a small impact, but not that great. But then when you start tweaking, these are realizing it makes a giant difference. I mean, you're talking about same ad spend, same ads, same targeting, one got no sales over 1000s of dollars and span. And another got instant sales with I don't even think was a couple $100 or something like that.
Blake Beus  12:51  Yeah. So I mean, that's, this is how I think about and how I explain it to anybody I'm working with is like, look, we have all these new shiny toys for marketing. But marketing has been marketing for a long time. I mean, ever since people have sold things, there's been, you know, salespeople, marketing, whatever. The thing is, is technology evolves very quickly. But But human brains evolve very slowly. Oh, yeah. And so a lot of the marketing strategies that worked way back when, when there wasn't a great way to track data or to target geographically or whatever, will still work now. And what they did is they spent time focusing on dialing in the message. Now, there's going to be a ton of people that will say, and I tell this to people all the time that will say you need to really figure out your customer avatar, and all of that stuff. And there's lots of worksheets and courses and things you can do. And I don't necessarily think that's a waste of time. But I also think sometimes it's pretty restrictive. Yeah, in what you're thinking about and can be, it can be a bit time consuming. Yeah, I guess I don't think it's a waste of time. But if people are struggling creating the customer avatar, I would suggest and I would suggest everybody try this is go just talk to some of your actual customers. And just just call them up on the phone, even if you're whatever, like email them and say, hey, I want to schedule a 20 minute call or something and just ask them some questions like, you know, why did you sign up and then what did you think about it and ask them if you can record that. And then you can actually take some of their exact words switch it around into an ad hook, capture, look for those emotions, look at those things and then start using that language if you don't have any customers find a competitor. Yep, see what reviews they have? See what emotions those reviews have the positive ones Yep. And then use those emotions in your ad copy and your sales page copy. You don't need to rip off the quotes or whatever but but look for those emotions like look at a review and say what what did they get out of this? Oh, they felt happy because they were able to achieve this. Okay, my product helps achieve that. So let's, let's use those same kinds of emotions in our in our language. And I think that's a better exercise than trying to dial in your customer avatar way, way
Greg Marshall  15:13  better, I think. Because you have to speak to the customer, right? So it's about the customer, not you. Yeah. Right. Like, always remember, yesterday, I was having a conversation with a client, where I said, you know, a lot of the stuff that is I think, pushed by well meaning consultants and marketers and things like that is a lot about like, how do you want to position yourself? And then, like, how do you almost force the customer to mold to what you're doing, versus reacting to the market and giving the market what they want? Yeah, and what they're needing? And I think one is a me first thought process, and another is a you first thought process. And I think you first always wins when it comes to, if you're a business, your job is to solve problems, right? Well, you're not solving your problem. Right? The business's job is to solve the customer's problem, right? So therefore, you should be thinking about the customer. And doing drills, like Blake said, looking at reviews, looking at what is selling the most out there in the marketplace? And why? And what are they saying? What's the market telling us? You you want to have a pulse on? What is the market telling us so that you can provide things to help people? Yeah, right. And I think by utilizing language and the emotions that reviews show, and testimonials, and and any of those kinds of and you can use Amazon's a great,
Blake Beus  16:49  I was gonna say Amazon books, like, if you have a product that solves a problem, go to Amazon and look for four popular books that address that problem. Read those reviews, write down the emotions, write down some of the features, the benefits, not the not the features, like
Greg Marshall  17:06  121 pages, yeah, or,
Blake Beus  17:10  or how many calories you're counting, if you're not those things, but how they felt after they maybe lost the weight or how they felt after they solved this this problem or how they felt in their new T shirt like I was, guys were buying me drinks at bars, like I talked about last night, right? Something like that, right? Yep. That's a much easier way to do.
Greg Marshall  17:29  And I think the most important thing is to not underestimate the power of your messaging and to be willing to test your messaging. And to really think if whatever you're doing right now is not getting a convergence, I always suggest trying the exact opposite. Right? And it sounds funny, but you don't want to make a slight variation of something that's not working at all, you want to do a polar opposite. And start because typically, what I find is people, they have a resistance to testing new ways or new languages, for a reasonable fear, a fear of maybe the market will react negatively to them, maybe their spouse will react negatively to them. Maybe they were brought up to never speak in a certain way or to never, you know, showcase something in a certain way. A lot of these are internal, self limiting beliefs of selling. When you think about selling most people think negatively about it. Yeah, well, I don't want to manipulate somebody, I don't want to twist someone's arm to buy something. I don't want to be considered the fool because I'm a salesman. And that's not you know, a prestigious career compared to doctors, and all that's false. Those are just things that we think other people are thinking, versus if you switch your paradigm to sell to help, and to just really think how can I help my customer, my audience, my marketplace, that's when selling becomes fun. And it should be more natural. Because if you're in business to help people to solve a problem, and you're only thinking about how can I do that? Naturally, your brain will start to think of things, you're going to start asking your questions like, Well, what did they need? Well, if they bought this, what else would they need? If they bought this? How would they feel? And how do I make them feel better? Or how do I make them feel the results quicker? If you start thinking of questions like that your behavior will naturally sell the audience because you're just answering those questions that the customers have.
Blake Beus  19:34  Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't have to like it doesn't have to feel manipulative. We've talked about that. I have a an a very reasonable but very strong resistance to feeling manipulate middle and manipulative. Yes, I just, I just don't have patience for that in my life, and I really don't want to be that person. But because of that when I first started running ads specifically for my products, I I struggled because everything I said felt manipulative, because I felt like I was taking this very complicated things with a bunch of nuances and distilling it down to a few sentences. But the reality is, is that you can't have this big complicated conversation in an app. Yeah, it's, it's, it's not going to work. And so what you need to do is simplify all that down. And to make that feel better for me, because I simplified the offer and solved a very small part of the big problem that I that I could solve. And that was step one of the solution. And then step two, once they bought step one, now, I had a better communication channel where over time, via email, or going live or whatever, I had their ear, and I could explain the nuances and explain all of these things and lead them to, you know, once they completed step one, we can go to step two, which solves, you know, the next problem that's bigger and a little bit more complex.
Greg Marshall  20:53  Well, and I think to the back when I was training a lot of salespeople to go out and sell their products. What I always said, like a hack that can help you with the manipulate, like, you know, just like not wanting to be seen that one is intent. Okay, your intent, as long as your intent is there, you should feel okay, communicating in ways to help your customer feel a certain way to be able to take their next steps, as long as the intent is to truly help them. Yeah, right. To me, that's the key, as long as your intent is to truly help them out, then you want to do everything in your power to be able to trigger this and trigger that and to get them to understand that if this is a problem that you want to solve, this is how you get it done. As long as that intent is there, and it's in the right, you know, it's positive and you're trying to do the right thing, then I think you should be fine, where you would be able to not feel so negative. That's always what's helped me when I've trained people to help them understand like, we're not here trying to fool people into doing something bad, right? Or not helpful for them. Yeah, the intent is that, then step away, shouldn't do this. Right. Yeah. But if the intent is I really want to help this person solve this problem. Well, what would I need to do in order for them to take the steps because as human beings, we all get our own way? Oh, yeah. And sometimes we need someone to irritate and trigger some things for us to realize, yeah, I do want to fix that. Or I do want to get better at that. Or it is time now to fix this problem versus waiting. So that's always been something that I've worked with salespeople on how to not especially newer salespeople, how not to feel like you're twisting people's arms or manipulating or leading them in the wrong direction? Yeah.
Blake Beus  22:52  Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I want to take a quick step back and just talk about because we brushed on this and but I want to talk about, you're running some ads, or you doing some marketing, we talked a lot about ads on here. But any traffic source, yeah, organic, or paid organic or paid, works the same, whether that's social, or SEO, or email or whatever, right? It works the same. But I want to talk really quick about how to trouble you, you are doing some marketing, and it's not working. Is it the messaging? Is it something else, you know, and how to how to identify, because we brushed about that a little bit earlier. But I'd like to take just a minute to do that. So So what are your thoughts? Let's say someone's running an email campaign. And it's not. It doesn't seem to be doing what they've got a list of 1000 people that should be pretty interested. And it's not working.
Greg Marshall  23:47  It's the messaging is, when in doubt, as soon as the message right when in doubt, as soon as the messaging but
Blake Beus  23:54  I would take one step before that. Run a couple of test orders or leads. Yes, nature's work, right, you're getting zero First things first, it takes five minutes, fill out the form yourself, make sure it works for you. Try it on your phone, because if people are clicking on a phone, and you have a mobile responsive website issue, take five minutes to do that. Eliminate that as a problem. First, make sure your lead form works and your purchase form works. Yep. But then on email. It's almost always messaging. Yes. Because these are people that are already familiar with the business. But with email, you have a couple places to look at messaging. Yep. Well,
Greg Marshall  24:31  I mean, number 190 9% of your work is going to be in the subject headline, right? They never open it then they never saw the rest of the stuff.
Blake Beus  24:41  So how do we know it's a subject line? Headline we look at open rate
Greg Marshall  24:45  the rates Yeah, so typically you look at if you're getting like under a 20% open rate, depending on the size of your list too. But if you're getting under 20% You can probably try to worse improve that. And then some lists will get as high as 30 or 40%, depending on how qualified the people are the relationship they already have. But most importantly, the the subject headline has to be something that will cause you to want to open it. Yeah. Right. And that's the key. And if you don't get that, right, everything else will fall apart.
Blake Beus  25:18  So if you're on, let's just give you some guidelines, if you're under 20%, open rate, put effort into making those headlines better to try to get closer to 20%, or over 20%. Sometimes those percentages are a little bit weird, because if you got the email list by doing this offer over here, but you kind of shifted a little bit, whatever you're doing. But that might mean you need to put in your email list or whatever, but but strive for that. So that's step one, step two, the body of the message. Yeah. So
Greg Marshall  25:46  once you get into the actual once you stop them, and you get them to listen to what you have to say, the only part of the work is done. Once you get into the body. Now you have to think, how do I hook them over and over and over again, to keep reading? Right? So what you have to do is take a look and go, Well, is this messaging compelling to me? Right, or to my audience? And you have to look at like, is it causing? Is it stirring the emotions of curiosity? Interest, maybe anger, disappointment, embarrassment, fear of loss, those types of emotions? Is this email doing that in any kind of way? Or even excitement? Right? And then when you look at it, you have to think, a lot, a big question I get, how long should the emails be? And the answer, in my opinion, is however long it takes for the person to get excited to want to do something. Yeah, I don't think there's any magical, like, it needs to be two lines, or it needs to be 10 paragraphs. I think it's, well, if I get the right person to open this, what what else do they need to see and feel in order to take an action? Right. So this requires you to once again, go in depth on understanding what your customer wants, what the pain point is, and why they even would open that email in the first place. And then align that message with that. So that it's a perfect message to market match. Yeah. And that's where I would look into is whatever your subject line is, the body needs to correlate with that subject line. But it also needs to have the same kind of emotional trigger when they're reading it the whole time.
Blake Beus  27:23  Yeah. And I would say, if someone's asking me the question, should my email be long or short? My first question is, well, how often do you email your list? Yeah. Because if you struggle to get emails out, forget long emails. Yeah, just go a short, it's more important for you to get emails out. Yep. Once you're consistent with your emails, and you're getting them out, and you're seeing some progress, and you have kind of a baseline, and you've got a process in place, then start experimenting many with long emails. But if you're hemming and hawing over email length, and you're doing spending so much time thinking about that you're not getting emails out. Don't worry about emailing. Yeah, and I think
Greg Marshall  27:58  sometimes we're so sometimes as as business owners, too, we can get caught up focusing on the wrong thing. That's actually the wrong question to ask. Well, I've done it many times. It shouldn't be long or short. The real question you should ask is, what message do I need to write to compel my customer versus long or short? One is like attack that the other was more strategic. And the other one serves better. The other ones just kind of surface its feature versus benefit. And if you're thinking like, there's, once again, it goes back to the is there a magical setting out there? That will unlock the pot of gold? Right? Like if I do this versus that, and we've all done it, but always discipline yourself to think that's not the right question to ask the right question to ask is, What does my customer need to see, read feel, so that they want to go ahead and take the next step. And if we do that, and you focus on that, you will get better and better and better at your messaging overall, it's like this is a skill that translates into ADS, marketing, landing pages, email marketing, SMS, marketing, all of that. It translates to everything. That's what I said, messaging is the biggest lever to pull when it comes to your marketing. Because if you can get really good at that, you can almost be a bad ad buyer, and a non technical email user and still get great results. Because I have a client right now that that does is they're horrific at the technical part, like they don't know it click the wrong buttons all the time. They they're constantly sending, but it works. But she's fantastic at the messaging like are you really, really good. And so she sells a ton of stuff. And she has no technical skill like well, she sent an email wrong list.
Blake Beus  29:58  But it still works because the messaging is Is that good? Well, and that's this is a skill set that will stay with you, and benefit you and your business forever. Yep. learning the ins and outs of intricate targeting will only be relevant for maybe six months. So if you're going to dedicate time into a skill, make it be this skill. Yep. And then you can hand off the tech bits to someone like Greg, yeah, to actually set it up for you. And and you know that that's just a much better use case. Okay, so email, it's almost always guaranteed you have a messaging problem. If you're not getting results from your email, ads, your click through rate, how do I know if my if my ad message, my ad messaging is bad, or my landing page messaging is bad, like which one
Greg Marshall  30:52  so I measure the two metrics you'll want to measure, click the rate on your link, click the rate on your ads. No matter what platform doesn't matter what platform you're running, always the same. How many people are clicking the link to your to go to action, whatever it is you're selling? Okay, you want 1% or higher? Okay, I've seen ads work just fine. I like point nice and close enough to 1%. But essentially want one out of 100 people to click it and
Blake Beus  31:22  sees it to click it goes and you can get higher click through rates, you really can. But if it's below 1%, you probably most certainly you have a messaging problem in your app.
Greg Marshall  31:33  Yeah. And if you're like hovering around point five, or point three, your messaging is way
Blake Beus  31:40  off. I would say one caveat is Google Display Network ads, which many people kind of hop into that later in their journey? The click through rates on those are generally quite low, because they're just kind of blasted. Yeah, so but we're talking like Word Search Ads, YouTube ads, like anything in like a feed are very visible kind of point. Great point. Because display is going to be you know, they're
Greg Marshall  32:01  going to show they're going to be super low. So 10,000 impressions a one person, you know, so they can only click once. Right, right. So great point, because these are the we're talking about in fee type ads. So search, tick tock feeds, Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, YouTube feeds,
Blake Beus  32:17  all that search ads, you could very likely get significantly higher 15 20%. I
Greg Marshall  32:22  see way higher. Yeah, search. So yeah, yeah, so that's a good metric, a good place to start in feed is 1% or higher. But if you're like point three or point five, you're way off, you're way off the mark, it's not, you're not a little bit, it's way off. But that message is not the message that's gonna work. Then the other metric I measure is just conversion rate on the page. So if if I'm getting a very high click, let's say I get a 2%, click through rate on my ad, right, which is great. But then I go to my landing page, and I have 0% conversion, then you want to fix the landing page, the ad is getting people there. But the landing page isn't resonating once they get there. And that's how I diagnose or the other I've seen it where a click through rates are really low. And the people that do somehow get to the landing page, do convert, but it's just the volumes not there. The click through rate is really low with the conversion is really high, then it's the ad.
Blake Beus  33:26  And my suggestion to most people, you tell me if you agree, my suggestion, and most people, if you have, let's say you have a good click through rate and a bad conversion rate on the landing page, I would I suggest people literally just take the same emotions that is in their ad, because that's working and convey those on the landing page. Yeah, restate them in a different way on the landing page, or even the same, or even the exact same like you could use the exact same headline, you could maybe add some bullet points to drive the point home or something like that. But but that works. And if vice versa as well if the landing page is getting conversions, but the click through rates are really bad on the ads, just take the same copy on the landing page and maybe rework it a little so it fits within the ad display where it's supposed to look. And
Greg Marshall  34:11  then run those. Well. Here's it. Here's like another hack, which you can do. If you don't even want to build out some long, elaborate landing page until you figure it out. You can just build like a simple landing page. And then just only test your ad messages, figure out which ad messages work the best and then build a landing page all of that. And that that can save you a bunch of time from spending hours and hours and hours building a landing page that you don't even know if it resonates or not. You can use the ad to pretty much test what your landing page should be. And that's that's a good way just to save time, obviously, if you're pressed on time.
Blake Beus  34:47  Absolutely. And you can take that a step further. You can use that same messaging in your emails. Or if you have a good email list and you're working on that and you know what kind of messaging works in your emails, use that messaging in your ads, test that out See what see how that works? You don't have to rewrite everything you can. You could I've seen people do this before, I think it's fine. You can use the exact same wording, and an ad and an email and a landing page. Yeah. Like, there's literally nothing wrong with that. If you know that that works. And it converts, then do it, oh, do it over and over again, change out the headline on your email your subject line and send out the same one. Not everybody opens every single email. No, right. And it's okay to have too many emails going out that have a very similar message. That's totally fine.
Greg Marshall  35:35  Once you find your messaging, though, you just want to build around that. Yeah. So everything around that message, start really dialing in. And this is for, like people who don't have their messaging figured out. There's different techniques to use for people that already have great traction, and are looking to expand. That's a little bit different.
Blake Beus  35:56  A bit of a different conversation where
Greg Marshall  35:59  we, yeah, we got to cover Yeah, how to that'll be another POC as observer we'll talk about, if you're someone who's already having some level of success. But you're, you're stuck, like you can't seem to expand your passcode,
Blake Beus  36:12  right, like everybody does that you you hit a plateau. And then you've got to learn a new skill I've run into
Greg Marshall  36:17  many times, and then it's, it's always kind of like you're banging your head against the wall. But then you eventually figured out where you have to go, well, it's got to, I have to be wording things a little bit different to address a different market, or to address a different type of product. And that usually is what will help help you get over the hump. But that could be another episode where we can talk about chat about that, or how to do that.
Blake Beus  36:41  Yeah. So I think you've got a really good understanding at this point on how important messaging is yes. And we talked, we spent a lot of time talking about algorithms and all of this stuff. And we will continue to talk about those things. But messaging is literally the first thing you need to figure out. And so definitely put some time and effort into getting that figured out. Testing multiple messaging, getting a little creative. If you're in a if you're in a loved this one, if you're in a geographic location and your audiences in that same location. Record yourself in front of recognizable things. Yep.
Greg Marshall  37:18  Which. Awesome, awesome. Awesome. Add hook. Yeah,
Blake Beus  37:21  absolutely. Not, not just in front of your office, because that's what I thought you were gonna say. And I was like, Well, I don't know. But when you said in front of the very recommend recognizable, or, or here in Utah, we have Ben Lomond mountain, right, like, like it's a very recognizable peak, and you can stand up on, you know, in this one street that goes right down and very iconic for Ogden could make that work.
Greg Marshall  37:43  I mean, there's so many things you can do. Like the next round of ads we're gonna make for her is actually, we're going to walk on the highest trafficking street and say, like, Hey, do you walk on this Boulevard? Yeah, each and every day and wonder where you should work out? Yeah. No, that's great. Another one's gonna be, we're gonna go to each housing complex, and say the name of the housing conflict, say, Hey, do you just move into SO and SO apartments? Right across the street from our location? Yeah. If you need something, come on, like so. Right. Those are, but you've got to put the thought into the messaging like that. Most people just do the you're I'm in my gym, or I'm just in my office or and there's nothing to like, hook him in.
Blake Beus  38:31  Yeah. Well, and you don't need a high production value. So you know. Yeah. And, and you're gonna feel dumb doing it to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, it is. You're gonna feel like people don't do they're gonna feel a little stupid doing it, but just do it anyway, you know, work, it'll work. Alright, Greg, how can people get in touch with
Greg Marshall  38:49  you? You can go to Greg marshall.com and book a free strategy session call.
Blake Beus  38:54  And then Blake beus.com/sm threes, the best way to get in touch with me.
Greg Marshall  38:59  So great. Well, until next time, work on that messaging. And I will talk to you later. Okay, bye.