Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

Blake Beus  0:00  We want to talk about hooks like you this is something you brought up about it. And you were talking with me before we turn this on it was the the importance of add hooks, and you had some new ways you've been kind of thinking about add hooks. Yeah, thinking about how hooks work when you're working with clients, all of that.
Greg Marshall  0:17  Yep. So here's, here's a kind of a quick backstory. So when I first started running advertising, like Facebook, basically, and even email marketing back in the day, all you had was your ad copy and your ad hooks and, and what you put in the ads, right or in your messaging. And so I feel like I got really good at that. Okay, back, you know, back in the day, there was no such thing as pixels and all this other crap, right, and algorithms. So basically, back back, when you would create the messaging, you would spend a good amount of time really trying to write a good ad hook, and then good ad copy to follow that. And that's what made good ads. And I will say I had a lot of success running these ads, purely focusing on without using AI, or any, you know, sophisticated interest targeting none of that. Just good old fashioned ad hook ad copy, with a good ad creative and picture. And we were we were discussing that. I believe messaging is underrated, when it comes to how to get your ads to work. And the reason why I say that is because I see a lot of clients, I see a lot of people out there that when they push their ads out, they're so focused on the targeting, they put almost zero effort in the messaging. And so they may be actually in front of the right person. But because their messaging is not compelling. It's not it's not going to work, right. And that's the part that's the art and the skill of selling and marketing and how to make money basically, when you're running things is to actually have things that compel people to want to take an action. And so add hooks, is probably the most important and most overlooked thing. Because if they never actually stop, then everything after that, whether that's the captions below 100 email, your video will not be seen, right, therefore doesn't matter. Right. So then if you were to actually isolate, which is the most important thing, it's the ad hook, because without it, no one consumes the rest of the content. And you almost don't have to be so perfect on the content, as long as you can get them to stop and look at
Blake Beus  2:46  Right, right. Right. Right. So, I mean, like, so many of the people I've worked with in the past, you're right, they focus on the targeting and the mechanics of the ads. Like why do you think so many people are focused on on those things? And then the ad, hook or angle or ad, you know, tends to just be an afterthought? Like, why do you think that is? Because I feel like that's pretty universal?
Greg Marshall  3:12  Yep. I think well, here's my theory. My theory is they're bad at sales. And, and but think about the others. Yeah, this isn't a knock on people, because you can learn to get good at it. Right? What I'm saying is they're bad at sales currently, right? And they've never actually probably sold in person, or understand the fact of what you need to do to actually get a sale. And a lot of people have negative beliefs about selling, right, and that transpires and how they write their ad copy, or how they sell their stuff online, the same bad habit you might have in person is going to move on to the internet. And so for example, you see someone at a tradeshow. You ever see those booths where they're just sitting there? And they're not doing anything? Yeah. And no one's basically going Yeah, no, yeah. And no one's buying anything, right? It's not because their products bad and the person across product is good. It's that the other the tables, I have all the people, they have the ad hook they're selling, they're figuring out a way to get your attention to stop to go ahead and take a look at their products, and then go ahead and give you a persuasive message. That's where I think online is almost designed, like the perception is that you can hide behind the computer. Right. And so I think that's really what happens is you're, you're kind of taking that same habit that you would do in person and bringing it onto the internet.
Blake Beus  4:41  Yeah, yeah. I, you know, as as you were talking to me, it kind of gave me a couple of ideas and thoughts here. The first thing I want to say is many people that are starting running their businesses, whatever, they're there, they're an expert in an area and that area is Almost always, not ads and selling. Like even, even if they're selling a product or whatever their their expertise is probably in the logistics or the creation of that product or, or the distribution of that product and everything but but as the business owner or the founder, or whatever their expertise is probably not in selling. And so that carries over into, alright, I want to run some ads, let's do this, let's let's think about the logistics of running ads, all of these things. But the the hook is this creative. exercise that is a different skill set than those other things. And and you're 100%, right, you're not good at selling yet yet. This is another muscle that needs to be worked. And, and maybe I'm seeing all this through my own filter, because again, software engineer background, very much in the data side of things of the marketing and sales is where I approach stuff. And when it came to running ads on my own products. I I was bad at the copy. I even had one person that I worked with, too, we kind of did some some accountability group because she was starting something Her name was Monica and and she told me she's like, I'll be honest, your ad copy is boring. Yeah. It's just not good. Yeah. And honestly, that hurt. Sure. But I was like, your right. And it was not a skill that came easy to me. And I had to work at it, and do revisions. And I read books. Yeah, I started like copying other people's, like screenshotting other people's ads that I thought were good and putting them in a file. And And over time, they got better, and I started getting better results. But it was, it was not easy.
Greg Marshall  7:00  Well, here's something and just we do not want to downplay the importance of the data. Yeah, and understand, because you need both, ya can't just have one, very much an intersection of a lot of different skill sets when you start hopping into online advertising and marketing. But one thing that I think happens is when you're trying to write, for example, selling, right, if you are not familiar or have never done face to face sales, you will typically think more logically, yeah, right. And you'll put logical things on your ads like this product has this, it has that you can get this, you got 42 different things, whatever, whatever, right. And that's important that but that stage is secondary, right? It has to come after I capture your attention. And one of the things when you talk about the ads are boring. It's usually based off of fear. So just like selling in person, we usually try to dumb it down a little bit, or dial it down to almost not offend, or be too drastic with what we're saying. Or to not be like those annoying ads that we see Yeah, out on the air that was exactly exactly had all of those fears. Yeah, and those, that's just a normal fear, okay, this is normal, a normal fear of selling. And what you have to do is just overcome and test these different methods of being able to stop people, you know, in their tracks to look at your ad. And what you'll find is, it's not as scary as you think, right? When you write a little bit different, right? Or talk a little bit different, and how you're promoting your products, because I just had this conversation yesterday with a client, very common in professional spaces, where you have someone that has gone to school and has certifications and degrees. A lot of them are very upset about usually one or two people in their space, who are making a lot of money but who are deemed uncredible or uneducated, right in their space, and that they're making these bold bogus claims, right. And I always say the reason why they're selling so much is because they don't have that filter, stopping them from, you know, saying this is what we can do. And they're hitting that emotional point, right for the customer. Right? It's the customer doesn't buy off logic, right? Buy off emotion, right. And it's all about emotion. And it's very little about
Blake Beus  9:36  logic. Right? So I mean, along those lines, let me because this was a you're talking about fears, and these are bringing them back I'm not really but but is it possible to hit those emotional triggers and make bold claims while still remaining ethical? Yes. Right. Because because I feel like that's a lot of people's concern because we can all point to someone In our industry that is full of it. And they're making these claims especially No. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So many advertising guru. So how do you how do you balance your bold claims, while maintaining, you know, your integrity, that is probably a core value to anybody listening to this? Sure.
Greg Marshall  10:21  So this is how we would do it and in the fitness space is, we'd make bold claims, and then go ahead and give the like, the actual real truth and story of how to do it, for example, sell them what they want, and then give them what they need. Everyone does it backwards, if they're not having success with their ads. They're selling them what they need, and leaving out what they want. Okay, a good example would be, I want to lose weight, right? But what I don't need is a magic pill. Right? What I do need is consistent exercise, and healthy eating, done over a long period of time. Right? Right. That's what that's what I need. But as a consumer, I don't want to hear that. Because that's, I'm looking for a simple trick, you've probably already heard that 100 times before, right? So because of that, you have to, if you give them something to stop them, right? How you can lose your first 10 pounds in seven days or something like that, right? That gives them like a timeframe, that's short enough to get almost that like instant gratification. And then what you would say is now, if you do this system, you'll do this, this, this and that you get them enrolled, and then you transition them into a real program, right, almost without having to explain it. Right, you just do it, right. And that's what worked really well for us is where we were able to attract people that wanted to train and get fit and healthy. Give them a goal that they could reach in a short amount of time. And then just transition to the ethical stuff. Right, right. This this is a periodized program. Uh huh. You're gonna fall? I'm just not going to really tell you that. Yeah. Because then I know, you won't be able to track into that. Right.
Blake Beus  12:15  Yeah, and it gets me thinking too, is oftentimes the the full scope of what you're selling is a conversation that is very lengthy and very in depth, that probably happens, that communication happens over a period of weeks, months, years, let's talk specifically about fitness, right?
Greg Marshall  12:40  The talking about the full scope of what someone needs to do to maintain
Blake Beus  12:45  a healthy body weight, or maintain those fitness goals or lifestyle goal goals, that conversation is very complicated, because there's all these different areas. And if you try to have that entire complicated conversation upfront in your ad in your sales video, it's not going to work. Yeah, what you need to do, just to kind of restate, what you're saying is give them some sort of obtainable short term goal, that opens the door, to have them be able to be willing to listen to the rest of the conversation as you walk them through this program that teaches them all of these different ways. And there's so many different ways to achieve that in the health and fitness. There's lots of people that, you know, you'll hear paleo keto, all of these different things. And some of those work for some people, some of those don't work for some people. But that's a conversation that you can't stuff all of that into an ad copy. So you need something very, very simple. And that was the problem I was having. I was trying to stuff all of the nuances and everything into my ad, if when really what I needed them to do was to just try it out, yes, get some results. And then that would open the door for me to be able to communicate with him via email, or in now in my membership group that we do together, or, or all I can have those longer conversations over a longer period of time to explain the nuances and how to really take off with XY or Z
Greg Marshall  14:15  Exactly. And I think the biggest, the biggest takeaway to do ethically is to really just think well, what will get them to pay attention almost, if you struggle with this, like let's say you're highly highly educated, and tell us which is the are the ones that usually have the hardest time because they know so much about it. They know how it actually works, that they have this resistance, because they're like in my line, Is this really how it works, right? Take what you would want to say and say the opposite, right? And so for example, let's say you want to say well, you have to do complex super setting and you got to do three to five times a week, whatever say the exact opposite of that, right? You're going to use a simple technique, and that will work to get you extra Also in the next couple days, right? Use a portion of that and just say the opposite of what will act what you actually have to do. That typically is a good way to get the added or say something that you feel almost uneasy saying, when it comes to your philosophy, that's usually enough to do the correct ad. Right. Right. It should almost feel uneasy, because if you do it correctly, it will stop the person in their tracks. And they want to know, is that true? So you can take like, you know, in the fitness space, you can use like things like, you know, three, three ways personal trainers lie to you. Yep. Right, that will get people to stop and read and read it. Why gym members? Why gyms? Want you to sign a contract and cause you to become fat. Yeah, right. Or the little secrets that are unknown to X, Y, and Z. Customers. These are
Blake Beus  15:56  the real reason Planet Fitness has free pizza on Fridays
Greg Marshall  15:59  exact right? They want to keep you overweight. So you gotta keep coming. Yeah, they know you like pizza to stay. Yep. And the price point is low. And so I mean, you can have that conversation, and then you can and then that opens the door to something more lengthy, whatever. Yeah. So that's, that's basically what you want to be doing. It's just how do I stop them or tell them something that they've never heard before? That's like a really good way to get the attention as to say something that they're not hearing all the time. Right. Right, or that goes against essentially the religion? what's being said out there, no matter what industry you're in. So if you're like in the physical therapy space, they're always talking about injury prevention, and this and that, and that's like, it's not enough to excite someone. Right, right. So you'd want to say the polar opposite. Why physical therapists are lying to you about how to avoid injury and avoid overtraining? Right,
Blake Beus  16:55  right. And I think the other way to kind of approach this, because I mean, you've already said, say something that makes you a little bit uncomfortable. And when I think about this, and this is a shift that I had to do, as I had to start thinking about staging, meaning everybody's at a slightly different stage, and when you're creating a product or program or something, you're an expert in that area, but you've got to remember, it took you 510 years to get there. And the people, you people you're selling to this may be their first time they're taking a serious look at trying to solve this problem, whether it's fitness, or finances in their business, or online advertising or something like that. And so if you try to give them the entire seven course meal that you've learned over 10 years, it won't work. Yeah, they need, they need something that was going to help them fix kind of an immediate problem right now. And that's a very simple conversation with some simple claims. That's going to get them there. And then as they progress through, you know, stage one, you can move them into stage two, which is a lengthier conversation with some nuances where they can, where they now have that foundational understanding, because you, you know, you hook them with the foundational hook or whatever. And now you can walk them through the rest
Greg Marshall  18:11  of them, which is why that's the ad hook is so important. Because once you get on and the content you have, yeah, is normally enough. Because you have the expertise in your space. Yeah. It's you're just not able to get them in. Yeah. And that's where you should spend most of your right focus is how do I get the attention? To get them in? Yeah, because after that, it becomes easier because now I have their attention. Yeah. And then I can share the, you know, all of the expertise that I do have in my particular subject, and how I can help them out. But if you can't get them to sit down, and actually pay attention to what you're saying, there's nothing that could possibly get them to consume your content, right? Because they're not even sitting down listening. They're just like, it's kind of like saying, if people are walking by and you're just screaming out, yeah, like, Hey, this is why you know, you need a personal trainer, blah, blah. It's like, they're not listening because of walking. Yeah. Versus if someone's sitting down in front of you. Yeah, they're ready to listen and hear the message.
Blake Beus  19:18  Yeah. So so like, what if we pivot just a little bit here, and we talk about some ways that that people can get better either some resources they can do or some exercises they can do and, and you want to like even show you showed me a couple of ads? Yeah, like we could we could talk about those specific ones. Do you think there'll be Should we do that? Yeah, I think it's like for example, I screenshotted a couple ads earlier today. And for people that have access to the video inside the the membership group, you can actually hold it up there. If you have that screenshot. You could show it there on camera if you want.
Greg Marshall  19:48  Yeah, I mean, so I think I will have to definitely get this for you. But we've got the three reasons why women love this tea for their money. Add. Yeah. And they've got a before and after selling transformation there. And they say Side effects may include job promotion free drinks or father's blessing, right? Yeah. And to me, that's a very
Blake Beus  20:12  endless selling T shirts. Yeah. But they're using consum, some kind of humor. They're using a couple of key things that I would say your average guy would would love.
Greg Marshall  20:24  Well, what, what I think is even more important, is look out plain that is a bar. I mean, it's a black T shirt. It's, it fits well, but it's a black T shirt. There's not even writing. Yeah. And it's still got my attention that shows you that. Sometimes it's not even the product. Yeah, it's, it's just a promise you can give me right. And so you're talking about promotion, free drinks. And and, you know, one of the things that I think that's important that ad does, you know, it's targeting man, it's also doing a couple of the other ads that are in their ad account that I looked at, they're really kind of like tapping into the ego, of the man. And you're right, right. So free drinks. A bigger promotion. Right? Right, your father's blessing. Yeah. You know, and then some of the other ones is, you know, make it look like you can benchpress two times more than you can, like, think about that this is all ego boosting, that is kind of a good angle to take a very plain product, and turn it into an exciting product. And
Blake Beus  21:35  I think it's okay to be a little tongue in cheek because your average reasonable person knows that a plain black T shirt is not going to necessarily get them a job promotion. However, it does happen to kind of this part of our brands, it's like, but if I am dressing nice, I do feel better. If I have a shirt that fits well, I do feel better. And and that that does kind of translate. But obviously, they're not saying I guarantee this shirt will get you a job. Everybody understands that this is tongue in cheek humor. But but it works. And there is, you know, a bit of truth there. And I don't feel that that is deceptive. Not at all or unethical at all.
Greg Marshall  22:18  I just think it's funny. Yeah, it's funny, if you show it, it makes it interesting. And you go, like, there is that little piece in your head that's like, you know, I do have shirts that don't fit as good, right? When I wear them. And it would be nicer if maybe it fit better around the waist or the shoulder. So you start to like, you think about that. Yes, the file I you know, what I have had times where I wore a shirt that doesn't feel like it's the most flattering, or it's the best on my absolute. And I mean, just a little tangent. That totally happens with me, even just with plain T shirts, I've
Blake Beus  22:53  very square shoulders. And so if a t shirt is is cut so that it's more angled at the shoulders, then it doesn't, it doesn't fit, right. And it ripples in weird places. And I don't ever wear it even if it's a good deal at all. But and so getting a t shirt that fits well does make a difference. Legit does
Greg Marshall  23:10  so because you heard those other benefits, which, like you're saying tongue in cheek, we're having fun, it's humorous, it's this kind of creative, you start to consider buying that T shirt in your hand. There's there's nothing that like we all know, wearing a black T shirt is not going to make me benchpress two times or get a new job. We all know that. But it's the fact that now thinking about those end results, which is what a lot of men will like is to have a better career higher earnings. Get people to flatter them. Like that's core emotions that both men and women probably want to feel. And they're tapping into that and associating those emotions and feelings to the t shirt. Yeah. And
Blake Beus  23:58  who knows, it might even work simply because every time you put that T shirt on, you're gonna think Man, I bought this because of that hilarious ad or whatever. It might be more outgoing and confident. And like that does well, here's where it just
Greg Marshall  24:12  made me realize too. Here's how to drive more word of mouth. If you buy this t shirt, because the ad was kind of unique and funny and you're wearing it. I think you will tell your friends about it like Yeah, but this t shirt I bought from this company they've got this funny ad I saw this and it almost can be a conversation starter. No, absolutely right. Like I'm thinking like, you're hanging out with your friends. You're just chilling and you're getting into conversation and you know you have got a small talk. You start talking about this or that you know before you know you can like yeah, man I like this particular shirt and especially if the shirt actually does fit good or is made out of a slightly unique fabric for a T shirt right because I like some something slightly unique Think about it. Yep, that can bring it up in conversation. So because of that, now you've got the ad gets your attention, it makes it memorable. You get the product. And then you start talking to your friends about where you got this product. You may even show them just like I showed you. The ad Yeah, have a product. That is, I mean, that's invaluable. Oh, if you can create ads that spark that level of emotion, you can essentially grow as big as you want. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So So to talk about, like some real things that you can do if you're struggling writing good hooks, or whatever.
Blake Beus  25:40  The very first thing I would say is, write write several different add hooks. And when when I'm talking about an ad hook, I'm mostly talking about kind of your main concept or that first sentence. In the ad. It's a little bit broader than that the concept of an ad hook, but, but write that first down, but I would say don't do it by yourself sitting in a in a room by yourself in front of a computer, maybe call in a co worker or a friend that you think is funny or bounce ideas off one another. Do you remember back in the going to date me back in the 90s? deep thoughts by Jack Handey? Do you there was a Saturday Night Live thing? And they would always just have these kind of a deep thought and it was supposed to be inspirational? Oh,
Greg Marshall  26:26  yes, right? Yes, like random, right nonsense. And
Blake Beus  26:30  so for some reason, I read somewhere how they wrote those, and it's literally just two people in a room, they would usually bounce a tennis ball off of the wall, and they're just coming up with this, just a long list of crazy idea. And then they would pick the top, you know, handful of those in a session, work it around a little bit and turn it into this thing you have, that's a process that would work for creating asks right, like, sit down in a room with a couple people come up with 100 terrible ideas. Yep. But of those terrible ideas, you're going to have a handful of those that that you think you know what if we tweak this a little bit, it's going to be unique and clever and, and really resonate with our audience. And then you can run with that,
Greg Marshall  27:10  well, here's, here's kind of a. So one of the ad hooks, or I don't even use this ad, I use it just for regular content. And it works is using things that sound more specific as well. So for example, in the marketing space, we helped a client grow by over 2,000% in 30 days, and no, they didn't start at zero, this is just a very strong ad campaign that we had. That worked really well. And they grew over 2,000%. Now, I could use how we grew over 2,000%, which I tested that, and it worked. Okay. But then I switched it and tested another version, it says how we grew our clients account by 2,096%. And now and that one really took off. Yeah. And the reason for that, I believe is the how specific it was. It makes it more real, right? If I say how to grow your bids by 100%. That almost sounds like that's just so random. And almost too perfect. Yeah, to perfect. All right. I like that. But if you were like how to grow your business by 102%?
Blake Beus  28:20  Well, that's a little bit. I haven't heard someone tell me. Yeah, that's more specific. And for whatever reason, I believe that it feels a little bit more legitimate because it feels like there was some actual math that happened behind that, right? And you can do that with any industry doesn't have to be growth or whatever it could be, you know, fitness, how I lost 5.2 pounds,
Greg Marshall  28:39  what about 12 days, whatever, how I got seven more dates by wearing this t shirt.
Blake Beus  28:45  Right? Right, like how I or in the job interview space, right like that. I've seen that kind of that space is growing quite a bit right now. You know how I increased my salary by 33.5% by switching my internet, but by leveling my interview skills or something along those lines, right like that. And those are things that actually can happen. And
Greg Marshall  29:11  those remember that's touching on the point of what people want the end result for everything that we're doing is basically the same. Yeah, right. You want to be more attractive to the opposite sex. You want you earn more money. Yeah, you want to have more freedom, right? You want to have better relations with your family. I mean, these are like core desires of like, most people, if not most many people. Yeah. And you're most likely selling to many people. Yeah. So you want to talk about these results, because every product and every service that's out there usually is accomplishing one of those of that list I just gave it's very simple list. Yeah. And it's very funny how it's often left out in the selling. Yeah, products and services we forget to actually touch into the result that we all want,
Blake Beus  30:05  right? The emotional result. And I think there's some ways you can kind of remind yourself to do that I, I'm going to mention two books that I found helpful for me, cuz I'm like, again, engineering kind of mindset. The first book and this one was probably my favorite. It's called Great leads. I can't remember who wrote it, but you can just get it on Amazon. It's not very expensive. It's if you've heard of that, the the golden child of all marketing books, it's, it's that book that was $450, written by the guy back in the 50s. No, it wasn't Ogle Ogilvy. But it's, it's called, oh my gosh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna I think I can see the cover. I think I know you're, it was out of print for like 20 years, and then a company bought it up, and you can buy it again. Now. It's called whatever. Anyway, this one kind of takes those concepts. But instead of having it be a 450, page, textbook style, really big heavy book, they take it down and basically distill the concepts into hooks. Yes, they use the word leads. Yeah, for like the lead off of your ad. But really, it's it's hooks. So great leads is great hooks, and they just talk about these concepts in writing that first first line or that first hook of of your ads. So that one was really good. And the other one I would say is is not as good, but I liked it was copywriting secrets by Jim something. He's like, buddies with Brunson or whatever. Yeah, that one, that one was good. But in that book, he had this thing that, that I really liked, when you're trying to write an ad to capture emotions, if you're the type of person that it's very easy for you to write about a feature like, this has this many, you know, whatever get, he says after you write that feature with the data, put a so that at the end of it, and then put whatever the result is, and then at the end of the result, put, which means and then you attach an emotion there. And then once you have that sentence structure in place, Riri kind of rework that and maybe remove the soul that or the which means maybe lead with the motion, but rework that sentence and maybe even drop the data point the feature. Yep. And now you've got a decent hook. Yeah. But it was, it was kind of a process that works for me, because I'm a very kind of data driven person to attach a motion and result to what I'm selling, and then kind of rework it and I was able to come up with leads that worked. Yeah, and
Greg Marshall  32:33  I think that's the key is practice ran and spending the time I think that's the point is, if you were to allocate the time that you spend during the week, if you really want to take things to the next level, you should spend a large portion of your time on this, the Add hooks, because if you take how people usually break down their week, they're usually like, maybe there's 10 activities, right? Nine, nine of them are non revenue, generating activities, right? Logistics, shipping, product, design, all that stuff, right. And that's all important. And but but then they spend a very tiny amount of time on the sales and marketing, right? And the thought behind it, which in theory is backwards, you should be spending most of your time on the sales and marketing, and then come up with the delivery of that. And if you do that, I promise you the results that you get will be way better than what you're currently getting. Because now you're spending more time and thought your a lot of people are just doing as an afterthought, right? I've got this great shirt. All right, just throw some out there because the shirts so nice, it's just gonna person and that's backwards thinking, right? It's you have to go, how do I make this shirt sounds so amazing that people will buy anything? Because it's that amazing, right? Not the shirt is so good. I don't even need to sell. And that's sometimes the thought process that I believe people have is, well, my products are so good. I don't need to think that much about how to sell it right. And that's arrogant thinking. Because you're competing against a lot
Blake Beus  34:14  of people. Well, not only you're competing against a lot of people, when you start running ads, you're getting in front of people that have no idea who you are, who you are, or what your brand is, or anything like that. So you have to find some sort of way to stand out. Now, before we wrap up, I did want to talk about this because we did we chatted about this before and want to circle back about this. You're talking about brand voice and writing ads and how you've worked with some of your clients. And sometimes you get pushback by by them saying well, that's not kind of our brand voice for the ad or whatever. Like explain that a little bit. Let's talk about quickly a couple of solutions. And we're up this one up. Yeah,
Greg Marshall  34:50  so I think so a challenge that we run into when running ads and I've run into this so many times not funny is if we right Something that sells. So here's a story, we wrote, why I wrote something that was getting the most sales this particular client ever got. And the response I got back from them was, hey, we would like to stop this ad, even though it was making the money. We'd like to stop this ad because it doesn't sound like us, right? And we want to change it around and make it sound more like this. And then we ran that ad and it didn't it flopped. Right? Right. And it's a very kind of delicate thing to say, Well, mine worked better than yours. We should do that. Right. And, and no one ever I know, I don't want to tell someone what your work is not good, or it's not performing. But one of the things that you should be open to is, if you're currently struggling with selling your products, or you're not getting the conversions you want, you should have someone else write it for you. And be open to that idea. Because most likely what's happening is you're too close to the product or service. And you're right, you're writing and creating things too logically. And that messaging is not resonating with your audience. So when it feels like it's not your voice or your brand voice, that could be a good thing. Yeah. And that's not to be funny. But that could be a good thing. Because that means you're testing the total, totally opposite approach, which is what you need to do. If you're not getting the results that you want,
Blake Beus  36:26  right? Well, and you're not selling to you. Correct, your customers are different than you. So you might think this ad doesn't sound like us. But your customers may not know what you sound like that internal monologue you have going on. Maybe
Greg Marshall  36:39  they don't know who you are, they don't they don't know who you are, nor do they care unless you make them.
Blake Beus  36:44  Right. And the other thing I would talk about, and it would be to maybe explore a different type of brand voice. Yeah, for different channels, right, maybe you've got a brand voice that that works when you're selling in person, or via email, or whatever. But on ads, it's a different channel. And people interact with ads in a different way. So be open to the idea of exploring a different brand voice some different angles in your ads, because of the difference with which people interact yet with ads.
Greg Marshall  37:16  So I think you know, the key to what we want to wrap this up with is spend 90% of your time on the Add hook Park more than anything. Yeah. And that will that's the biggest leverage point that I think that you'll get is you'll see if you're looking for, like exponential growth in what you're doing. focus mostly on that. Because that's really what's gonna happen when it comes to a change in how many people are clicking. How many people are excited about your product. How many people take the offer, if you don't have the good ad hook, you won't get the results you're looking for.
Blake Beus  37:54  Right. Alright, let's wrap this up. Greg. How can people get in touch with you
Greg Marshall  37:57  Greg Marshall dot coat and you can book a free strategy call. And Blake use.com/sm Three is the best place to get in touch with me right now. Well, hopefully enjoy this episode and we'll talk to you next time. Bye
 

Blake Beus  0:00  Okay, common mistakes with messaging, this is what we decided to talk about. Right? Okay. So you're on the phone with clients all the time helping them run ads and everything. Let's just start talking about these mistakes, like people make mistakes with AD messaging all the time. And I feel like sometimes people are so worried to make a mistake that they maybe don't even run ads. So there's kind of like a flip side there. So how do we kind of help identify those mistakes and then demystify it so that people can start running their ads and not like overthink every
Greg Marshall  0:32  Yep. So I think, you know, one of the big mistakes, that's that's made when you're doing messaging is having the messaging be too like bland. That's number one, meaning bland, like there's nothing exciting. Like, I always like to use Dan Kennedy's example, he says, he gets a direct mail piece from maybe an insurance broker that just says, Hi, my name is Bill and I sell insurance call me. And then he makes fun of it says, Man, I can't wait. You know, like, there's nothing enticing, right? So that's number one. The messaging is too bland. Number two is not even having a call to action. Yeah. So like not being specific. Have you know, I talked with a client last night we're, that's what he was running into is he's doing as Brian Tracy, I don't know if you've read some of his stuff. But Brian Tracy talks about tap dancing around everything, but asking them to take action. Oh, really. So you would say you know, you do all this? We can our product is this. It's so nice. It'll help you do this. And then there's no ask. Then the customers kind of left with Okay, so what do I do next? Or and you've already lost them once they have to like,
Blake Beus  1:40  this. Brian trait I've never heard of does he actually teaches this as is like a method of No, no,
Greg Marshall  1:45  no. I'm sorry. So Ryan, trade Tracy is making fun. Oh, he
Blake Beus  1:51  points out. Don't do don't do that. Gotcha. Gotcha. So
Greg Marshall  1:55  sorry. Brian. Tracy was like, no, no. So he he teaches that a lot of people are afraid of the rejection part, subconsciously. So they end up doing all these things, except actually asking them to,
Blake Beus  2:07  I get that I get that, especially if it's like your thing. Yes, it's way easier to be to deal with that. You know, rejection, rejection, I was gonna say regression, yeah, thinking of programming. When it's not, your it's not your baby, right. And so you might be an expert in the field, and then you decide to split off and create a side hustle, or start that business or whatever. But now it's your baby. And it's hard to go out there and get rejected. So someone's unintentional behavior might be to just dance around with correct without actually being direct and say sign up now.
Greg Marshall  2:43  Yep. And that's, you know, that's, that's another conversation. And that's, you know, you can run into that, especially if you haven't done sales or stuff like that before, and you're not essentially used to the rejection. Or you just take it maybe a little more personally, you can work your way out of that. Because it's not like you stay there forever. And you either have or you don't, it's more of just you just have to train yourself to be okay with the rejection. But that's another big mistake is not actually having a call to action. Yeah. Or a clear call to action. Yeah, simply because most likely, it could just be you're worried about rejection. And but that's an easy fix. Put it out there. And eventually, you'll see doesn't hurt when someone says no.
Blake Beus  3:27  So let's really quick because if, like sometimes I think it's easy to talk about concepts, and the people get hung up on the actual implementation. So real quick, just on calls to action. Let's talk about Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and then maybe Google search ads, just to kind of how, how do you put a call to action each of those because the format's are different. Yes. Yeah. Right. And so what what are some good call to action? ways you can actually put that in
Greg Marshall  3:58  there? Yeah, I mean, so you basically just want to be as simple as possible, right? So with video, video is great, because you can have two calls to action, basically, one in the actual video, and then one on your ad copy when you're doing Facebook, and even on some of the YouTube ads when they're gone to display network. So the simplest ones are, you know, click the link below, go to the website, fill out the form, and then this is what's going to like give them kind of what's going to happen. Tell them by today, like very direct, right? What you don't want to do is leave it up to chance like, hey, we can help you out, whatever, whatever. And then,
Blake Beus  4:37  yeah, so if you're interested, yeah, consider contacting Yeah, don't use
Greg Marshall  4:42  words like maybe, or consider or any of those like those. Those are kind of iffy words be more direct. Like, would you like to sign up today? Yeah. Click the link below to sign up by today and get this essentially, good calls to action, or the equivalent to strong lead Ship words. Yeah, right taking leadership as the salesperson or the marketer, your job is to lead them to do the next step, because that's what the buyer the consumer needs and wants, is someone to lead them to the solution. Yeah, or whatever it is, they're looking for something, you know, it, maybe the product just is for pure vanity, or for pure, you know, pleasure. sell that, right, just selling yeah, that's, that's legit. Like those are, those are totally legit, legitimate angles, half our economy is built.
Blake Beus  5:30  So YouTube, Facebook, Facebook, you can put a button on your ads, whether it's a video or image, and you can have a button there that can say download, whatever. And then right next to the button, you can have some headline text that could say something like, you know, click the button to get it today. Whatever sometimes have to play around with the wording just to get it to fit character wise. So it's all readable on Facebook. But yeah, and then the the tough one, though, this is the one I feel like a lot of people really struggle with is Google search ads. And maybe not everybody's running Google search ads, because they're a little bit intimidating. Yeah. But call to action Google search ads, because you've got limited space. There's no images.
Greg Marshall  6:15  Yeah, what do you do? So I like I mean, calls to action, really, and it's feels like Google pushes this as well, is essentially, you know, same thing, like, whatever the offer is, right? So it depends on what you're matching. Right. So if you're matching a keyword, let's use fitness or fitness, how to lose weight, right? So your call to action would be, let's say, a common 190 Day transformation plan, you know, learn more, and then in your subtext, you can write this plan does X, Y, and Z, visit a website to go ahead and download or to buy or whatever, right. But the key really is the matching of what they're looking for, and the words you're using. So if they're looking for weight loss, you don't have to be super specific, like click this link. Now, yeah, you can just have the programming and apply because we're all trained now, to what we see an ad and it says something on search. We know like to click it, yes. So we don't have to be so precise on, click here. Now to do this, you can just use that in your sub headlines. And the key is just the words that they're looking for, needs to be one of the headlines and explain through. And I think that that does the trick when it comes to click through rates.
Blake Beus  7:33  I think with with search, it's easy to kind of get hung up, especially if you've done mostly Facebook or YouTube, other ads and search. But you got to understand when some when you're running search ads, someone is looking for skipping, they have a high intent to solve a problem right now. And so you don't need to say click here. Yep. Because they're already planning on clicking Yeah, they just need to know which link to click. Yep. And so you don't necessarily need to do that. In Facebook, you do need to say click here, because people are looking at funny animal pictures or arguing with their crazy uncle about different differences in politics, right? Like, you do need to say click here to get this or, you know, whatever, what
Greg Marshall  8:18  is in so Facebook and YouTube and all that. That's interruption marketing. Yes. Psychologically. Right. So like, you went on to scroll to waste time not to look for something versus Google search? Is you have been, you know, like, in your mind, you're like, I you know, where's the next travel location? I want to go? Yeah, how much are these flight tickets? Right? Or what's the best supplement? In your mind? You're already predetermined? That you're you're
Blake Beus  8:46  going to click on something. Yeah. That's why we're doing we're
Greg Marshall  8:49  not click Yeah,
Blake Beus  8:50  exactly. Exactly. So you don't need the the you don't need to interrupt them or grab their attention or whatever, you just need to be very clear on what they're getting. And what it's going to mean for them in your ad copy.
Greg Marshall  9:05  That's where message to Market Match is key. Yeah. Right. So if I'm looking at specific keywords, I need to just make sure those keywords are being presented to them, so that they know Oh, this is I'm at the right place, right? or wrong way to do it, when it comes to call to action really would be if someone types on how to lose weight. And you have and you're targeting that search term. And you put how to build muscle. Or one of your hands. Yes, not yet, which technically is one of the best ways to lose weight. But that's not what the person type.
Blake Beus  9:39  They're not looking for how to build muscle. That's not what's on their mind right now. So they're just never going to click on that link. So the
Greg Marshall  9:45  other thing I talked to you actually with a potential client, we talked about this was demand generation versus intent, right? So demand generation, the messaging is much different than it So Google search would be intent, because they've looked it up, they're intending to do that. Demand Generation is more on Facebook and YouTube, where you are where you're kind of convincing someone that they either have a problem and need that solved. Or there's some type of pleasure, or vanity or whatever that they should want. Right, right. And demand generation is basically, really educating them and irritating, whatever that problem is, or triggering that issue. to then get the customer want to do it. Now, demand generation marketing is a lot different than intent. If you could make the argument a lot harder, right? Yeah. Because you, you are trying to convince someone, it's kind of like cold approaching someone out in the street. You know, like, it brings me back to my fitness sales. I'd be in the parking lot of target selling gym memberships to random strangers who are obviously just going to target Yeah, right. That's demand generation, I have to create a Demand and you have to do a quick, right. So you have to be efficient with your wording. So when you're doing demand generation, which is interruption, essentially, you have to think of all the reasons why someone is going to tune you out. And you have to figure out how do I get them to tune in very quickly. Right, right. And then it's not just the first couple seconds, it's almost like you have to do over and over and over again, within the message, whether it's law, forum, copy, or video, it's like we have to get them to engage, again, to gauge again, it's not a guarantee, once again, to engage you have them the whole time.
Blake Beus  11:33  Right. Right. Well, and that's one of the reasons why. The best Save Video Ads, right, let's just pick them videos from the best video adds about every three to five seconds, they almost, it's almost like they have another hook or another cliffhanger to keep you watching. And for the most part, I almost never watch YouTube ads. But every now and again, I'll get one that grabs my attention and keeps it keeps me watching. There's like this, another hook another layup. I don't know if you want to, if you want to think of it, like another hit of the advertising drug, right? Like you're getting, like, um, what what are they gonna do next? The dopamine? Yeah. And almost always, at least for me, and I think this is probably pretty universal. But almost always, those are ads that have a various YouTube ads specifically, that have a very high quality storytelling framework. Yep. Right. They're telling a story about maybe how they solved this problem or something like that. Or maybe it's a funny story. There's these this sunglass company that makes titanium sunglasses, I will watch their ads every time they pop up. I can't even remember the name of the company right now. It's been a while but, but they're really good at storytelling. And it's geared towards men my age. And so it ticks all of my funny boxes about just being a guy at my age. And it's funny, and I will watch those and I haven't purchased it. But I've definitely clicked on a link and gone to their website and looked around. Yeah, which I never do for YouTube ads.
Greg Marshall  13:08  Well, and here's the thing. Do you have yours? Here's, here's my one that I see. And like, their name is V shred. Okay, shred is the company in its, its top targeting me because I'm always looking at fitness topics. Yeah. Right. And they're a fitness company, trying to get you to lose weight in a six pack, right? Yeah. And so what's interesting about them, they are very good. I heard they have 2300 different versions of their ads that they're currently testing. And they're all like, they're similar in nature, just they change out the front hook. Or, you know, they're just doing combinations, right? But basically, what they're doing is they, they're all story ads. So it starts right out the gate. They're like, you know, I never thought that I could have a stomach like that's like one of the hooks, right? I have a stomach like this. And then it's before and after pictures and the video. And then it's interviewing the guy on what he did and what his wife is saying. And like, as you can see, I've seen these ads enough to like, I pretty much know I can remember. Yeah. And this is V shred. I see their ads at least eight times a day. And they must be doing heavy retarget they must
Blake Beus  14:15  be and it must be working. Because that's that costs a lot of money. No doubt. It's worrying. Yeah, that costs a lot of money. You don't keep running ads like that. If you're losing money hand over fist, right? Like it's working. And this is where I feel like a lot of people get hung up. They're thinking, I'm not a storyteller. Yep. I don't know how to do this. I'm not good on camera. I'm not a good copywriter. I don't know how to tell a story in copy. I've seen ads on Facebook with good text and it's really great, but I don't I don't know. I don't know how to do that. So how do we help people like bridge that gap from this like place of insecurity? I don't know how to do this today. Let's get something out there and start going just fine.
Greg Marshall  14:56  So basically, here's what I here's the ultimate hack. to film yourself or a customer, or someone who can communicate this message, if you don't feel comfortable, and then find a video editor to edit it, and give them send them a link, something that you've seen and say, can you make something similar? Yeah, that's the ultimate hack. So if you don't know what to do just do that. And if you don't feel comfortable camera fine, just someone who does who looks like your target customer you're trying to get Yeah, right. So it doesn't always have to be the other work around that we use. For people who don't like to be on camera, or feel self conscious is we do the voiceover method. So we have them speak. And then we put in pictures, like the roll photos that are that are based off of their business. And we put it in like a little story for him. And those worked really well. So and So there's ways that you can do video ads without having you have to be the talking head. Yeah, you can do it from a voiceover you could even hire someone else to do voiceover, what I recommend is just start putting things out there. And a story like format of basically, the scripting would be your ad hook will get their attention, right? irritate the problem, provide the solution, have a call to action, just do that every single time. Use that
Blake Beus  16:21  in that order. Right? And that's a very simple formula that literally works. Every, in any industry for any any type, any type of thing. And if you're thinking, Oh, what, what? What's a good hook? Like? How do I come up with a hook because I gotta grab their attention in the first few seconds. One of my favorite and simplest ways to do a hook is you tell the end of the story at the very first in the first three to five seconds, like, and so then I ended up without realizing it that I had the six pack abs. But let me tell you how I got there. Boom, right, right. Like you just go right and you went with the end result that people want. And then you go back to the beginning and you tell your story, throw some emotion in there, whatever. But it's, it sounds really hard. I think the other thing I would say like along the lines of what you just mentioned is Get Started get putting them out there. But But understand that you're not going to knock the ball out of the park the first time this V shred, yeah, I have 2300 videos of different combinations of videos, probably same clips that they've kind of sorted around and whatever. They didn't get there by just coming up when we can and saying, you know, we should do Yep, record some videos. It's something that they've been doing for years and years and years. And they got there. So one of my favorite motivational quotes or concepts is, you want to know how to make something really good? Well, you have to make 1000 Shitty versions of that thing first. And that's This isn't this the same thing, you want to make really good video ads? Well, you have to make 1000 really terrible video ads. First, it's more important to just get started and start going. And then kind of just keep redoing, honing, tweaking, whatever. And if you think about whatever your business is, or whatever your specialty is, that's how you got good at that. Yep. In your business, right. And so, of course, that's how you you need to do it. This is just a new skill set that you just need to hop on board and start doing
Greg Marshall  18:17  well. And to build on that yesterday when I was talking to that prospective client. And this is what I share with a lot of clients. Basically, I tell them, Look, there's no magic formula that gets it done immediately on the first try. Right in, what it is, is you have a structure of how you should do things, but then you have to test the little bits within that structure to get kind of your fully optimized product. And so if you go into it that way, you should have less stress. Because it's you won't have that pressure of I have to make the perfect advertisement right away, or my messaging has to be perfect. And it's one and done. That's the other thing a lot of clients run into is they like they'll even ask this question like, so. Can I change what this says like? And I'm always surprised, I'm like, Well, of course we can. Absolutely. We can change what this says anytime. So therefore don't fear testing different messages or add hooks? Yeah, because it's not like you do it, and then you're not out of touch. And it's like, no, I can't change it. Now it's it's too late. So when you have that kind of mentality of thinking that if I don't get this done perfect the first time, then, you know, you know, it's not going to work that's going to prevent you from trying things. Yeah. And if you're not trying more, you know, more test more things to see what works and what combinations, you're not going to be able to get the best results that you're looking for.
Blake Beus  19:45  Right. Right. I think one of the keys to all of this testing, we talked about testing a lot is to maybe shift the way we think about running ads. So when I talk with people about running ads or marketing or whatever they they'll say something along the lines of Okay, it's time we need to run some ads. Yeah. So when can we get this done? Yeah. Well, the reality is, is you're, you're never going to be done. Yeah. So what you need to do is shift the mindset and say, Okay, we need to put 10% of our effort each week into ad creative and running ads, right. And whether that's outsourcing it to someone like Greg, or doing some internal stuff, or just trying to figure that out, what you're doing is you're saying this is part of our weekly process or regular process. And we're going to carve out some time to just keep working in moving forward and seeing what's working and seeing what's not. It's, it's just, it's, it's this marathon that never, never ends. Not saying that this is a terrible thing. It's just part of the process. It reminds me of, I grew up working on my grandpa's cattle ranch in I grew up in Wyoming, his ranch was in Idaho, but they were really close, just right across the border. And my grandpa worked on that, from the time from the 1930s. Right? He worked on that forever and ever. And one of the things I learned from him about working on the ranch, I asked him once, and how do you know when to stop, stop working for the day, when you're done. He said, Well, you're never done, you just put in a good day's work. And then the next day you have more to do. And that's it's just, you just, it's just this thing, you you always have something to do. And that's not terrible, it's not the end of the world, it's not bad. It's just, there's more to do. And that's the same thing with ads, you're just need to constantly keep putting some time and effort into it, putting some money into it, even if your budgets tight, you could do $5 a day for a week. And then and then evaluate the results. And then you spend the next two to three weeks finding out some ways to tweak it. And then you want to test where you're spending the $5 a day again, but you're running, you know, what you think might be better or whatever and see which which performs better. And just keep going
Greg Marshall  21:53  that well. And what you're really saying is, it's a mindset,
Blake Beus  21:56  it's a mindset,
Greg Marshall  21:57  it's your mind should be not how do I get some ads running? And then that's it. That would be the assumption of it's an event, but it's not an event. It's a process. Yeah, you know, it's it's part of your business, right? And if you look at I always and I'm sure I've said this in other podcasts, if Coca Cola still runs ads, I'm pretty sure one of the world knows who Coca Cola. But if they're still running ads, that means that as part of their business, it's you can learn a lot from just watching that. Because if your small business thinks you don't need to run ads, yeah. And they're running ads, you know, you've got to kind of, you know, backwards, because that's kind of how they got it right. As they figure out their sales process. They figured out promotional strategies. And they keep you know, now they're buying TV spots and stuff. And it's the equivalent, like scaling your ads, right? You don't start there. Right? We don't we don't start at we're gonna buy a Superbowl ad. You start with rule by a little ad on Facebook, or we'll buy a little spot, little TV spot in our local area. And then when we start getting more sales and growing, and we maybe go to regional, then we maybe we go to increasing budgets on Google, and you start you just keep growing. But but you don't start there. And that's where I think prevents most people from actually even try it. Yeah. Is they assume similar to fitness? Well, if I can't run a marathon today, what's the point? Right, that doesn't make any sense. It's like, No, you know, the person running it, once upon a time couldn't run around the block. Right. Right. But they built up to it. And that's, that's what you have to do. It's,
Blake Beus  23:39  it's exactly what you got to do. You've got to keep working on and I would make the argument that literally every business that makes revenue should run out. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, well, even if it's 50 bucks a month, it doesn't really matter, even if that's all you can really afford. And you're just a teeny business, run some ads, say each month, say, Okay, I have enough room in my budget, to drop 50 bucks in ADS this month, great. Run 50 bucks and ads, see what's working. Because that's how you're gonna get moving forward. I help a lot of people with just organic social media. That's what the SM3 group is, we talk about it quite a bit. I oftentimes tell people, hey, organic is great and fine. You need to get in front of new people that don't know you. So if you have followers, basically, only a percentage of your followers are going to see your content if you're just doing organic stuff. Yep. Maybe you'll show up in search or whatever, from time to time, but really, really not that much. Yep. The guaranteed way to show up in front of new people all the time is to run some ads and it doesn't have to be crazy expensive and it doesn't have to be time consuming but just get started and try it out.
Greg Marshall  24:43  Well and you just got to think like you always have to be promoting whatever it is you have whatever your product or service because still the way people are, you know new people are going to be introduced to it right? You can't just kind of keep it a secret and think people will eventually find out because it's just there's too many distractions, like, if you if you think of this is a good exercise to do, if you think about one individual, right? And you go this one individual if I do not talk to them, does that mean no one's talking to them? Or does that mean? They're just not thinking of me now, because there's all these other people out there being communicated all day long the average person sees, who knows how many ads for him? I don't know. So if you're not talking to them, it's kind of like your wife. If you don't talk to your wife and have a relationship with her, and you never call or text her, how long do you think that marriage is gonna last? It'd be toast, it's gonna be done. It's done. Yeah, someone else is talking to you. Right? So you have to be thinking about, you have to nurture every individual, whether they're a customer or not, you have to look at the whole market and say, I need to be talking to the market continuously, constantly. And always. Because once again, like one of my favorite things, Dan Kennedy says, you know, customers, they are the most disloyal group, not in a bad way. Just if you're not giving them value, they will leave you in a heartbeat. And find someone else who will.
Blake Beus  26:12  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And. And so yeah, I mean, really just just keep going. Now, we started this off kind of talking about, you know, the right kind of messaging, we talked, you gave us a good script, on how to come up with messaging that works for that script also also works for text ads. Yeah, you can type a script that follows that same model. And that would work. What are some other you know, are there any other mistakes people make when they're writing? When they're coming up with how to message or how to communicate? Their offer or whatever to clients? Yes,
Greg Marshall  26:46  speaking in the wrong language. So for example, speaking in what you think the customer's pain point or desire is, versus what it actually is. Right? So I have to, when I talk with clients, especially ones that are a little bit more brand focus is usually where I run into this, where they're like, Yeah, my brand, is this my brand? Is that the branding these? What, the way I translate that is I, it's about me, it's the wrong mindset. Right? You're not that's you're not actually saying the customer, right? So when they speak in that, so speaking about what you think they want, or what you want them to want, is another huge mistake versus what they actually say, the customer like the what the customer actually wants, right? It's very common to say, look how much we had this discussion weeks ago about my own business, where I said, I know that they need something like this, but I don't know how to deliver it to them. And I initially thought it was one way come to find out it's a totally different way. Now. Good thing. I've been in the game for a while, but I understand you have to be flexible. Yeah, like if you think it's one way, but it's another well, that old way that you thought it's gone now. Yeah. Now it's all about this because that's what the customer wants. Right? And if I don't give the customer what they want, I don't have a customer. Yeah, so you understand. So that's a big big mistake. The other mistake believing people buy exactly like you hmm, okay, this is like a gigantic This is a sin, basically to commit when it comes to doing your marketing. Because I hear this Yeah, I don't ever buy anything on Facebook ads. Yeah, well does that so I so that I guess all industries worthless. No
Blake Beus  28:36  one No one knows. Facebook became a multi bajillion dollar company for no reason or no reason they fooled the whole world. People are buying whole advertising. Their whole business model relies on paid advertisements, and no one's making money.
Greg Marshall  28:49  And that and I this is where I get this the most though, is email marketing. Yeah. Okay, I get this all the time. I, I'm not going to open an email. Like this is the business owner saying, I never buy anything off email, emails, annoying me. text message marketing annoys me. And they're saying all these things, right? And it's kind of like, we're not selling to you.
Blake Beus  29:13  Yeah. And nor are we selling to people like you. You've already solved this problem. Yeah, you're the problem solver. We've we're working on the people that haven't solved this problem yet and they act and behave completely different and here's the thing if it works it works Yep. That's there's no harm in trying out email marketing, no harm in trying out text marketing. I get really I really struggle with the people that will say emails dead texts dead let's not even give it a shot. Everything's let what if Hear me out what if we try it and if it works, we do we keep doing it. Right? Like what's wrong with there's literally nothing wrong with that, but some people just don't want to do it. I want to circle back to the brand thing. Because one of the companies I'm working with right now is go Going through a branding, exercise or whatever. And and I'm not going to say that that's pointless, I actually think it's worthwhile. But when your brand is so set in stone based on a brand exercise, that your marketing doesn't work. That's not good. Yeah. So if you go through like a branding exercise, and you come up with a brand and say, Okay, this is where my brand is, that brand needs to be flexible and shift based on what your customers respond to and react to. And the other thing, and this is kind of a higher level topic, but a lot of people when they start thinking about branding, they'll buy some brand books, when they talk, they'll they'll they'll see how did Apple handle its branding? And how did Tesla handle its branding. The reality is, is your business is not if you're listening to podcasts, your business is not anything like those businesses, and you can't follow the steps that they follow to make your stuff work. Those are statistical outlier businesses. 99.99999% of all businesses out there do not operate like those businesses, they simply don't. And so looking to those businesses to get ideas is fun and interesting. But most of the concepts there aren't super applicable to your business or your brand. And so what you need to do is maybe have a flexible loosey goosey brand, that is defined by customer interaction. And then you solidify that over time, based on what what the customers want, how they respond, and how they spend their money. They're basically voting with their dollars on on how your brand should be. So keep kind of doing more of that
Greg Marshall  31:35  well, and the brand that they you know, put together, quite frankly, they built it based on the same concepts we're talking about. They provided something that is of such huge value, that it's a no brainer to the customer, and they tell more customers to buy. And the referrals go up, which is why those companies are so viral, so profitable. And they can charge a premium. It's because it's not because they thought of a cool thing first, as far as how to look and appear, and then show that to the customer. I started buying because it looks cool. It's actually the other way around. They created stuff that people loved, and couldn't get enough of, and provided so much value first. And then built made it just look sexier and sexier over time over time.
Blake Beus  32:27  And you think apples been around since the 70s? Yep.
Greg Marshall  32:30  What's the first Apple logo from the 70s to now does not look the same, right?
Blake Beus  32:35  No, I mean, it's similar, because the companies are still named apple. But there's been a lot of changes, but logo is only one piece of the branding. Back in the 70s, Apple was branded their company persona was this scrappy company where you could have this, you could build this stuff in your garage and could connect to everything. And now Apple is not this scrappy company. It's polished Hill, it's everything. But they had to go through each of those phases. And they had to shift, right, because that scrappy computer company in the 70s and 80s worked. But then in the 90s, it started to fade as Microsoft started becoming this business professional kind of brand. And so they reinvented themselves to be for creators. And that reinvention took them 1215 years. So they were also flexible. And you got to realize that so if you read a brand book that talks just about how Steve Jobs did the rebranding, when he came back, that's not entirely relevant to you and your company. Tell me about
Greg Marshall  33:34  Steve Jobs when they had zero customer. And guess what he was willing to do? Pick up the phone and call people and say you got to try this new computer that I got this new product, hey, investor, take a look at this the same principles that we all need to do. And we're never above any of that.
Blake Beus  33:53  And you have to go through those principles to get to this to get to that level, like like all of them, all of them do. And they spent millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in branding, advertising to get there as well and to really seek that brand. But you know, you if you're listening to this and you own a title company, that's just not, that's not going to have that's you're not going to be the Steve Jobs of title companies, right? That doesn't mean your business can't be wildly successful and be everything you need that business to be in and help 1000s and 1000s 1000s of people you totally can. But your brand is not going to not going to be like that. But you can run some ads, you can you can have a very personalized voice. You can come up with messaging, you can follow the hook scripts that Greg talked about. And you can start seeing some serious results without having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to solidify your brand.
Greg Marshall  34:43  Well just you know, to kind of cap this off here. Think customer first. And that's how you'll have your most powerful messaging and avoid the mistakes of thinking you first versus customer first because that's usually where the messaging kind of Next up is your thinking more about you versus the value the customer is desiring, and speaking in their language. And so, with that being said, I hope today was valuable. Yeah. Blake, how can people reach
Blake Beus  35:14  you? Just go to Blake beus.com/sm. Three, that's the easiest way to kind of get in touch with me, Greg and I run a membership where we talk more on all of this stuff, and answer your questions and everything. Plus give you a bunch of things that make your life easier every month with your marketing efforts.
Greg Marshall  35:34  And yeah, you can reach me at Greg marshall.co cio.co. And you can book a free strategy session where we can go over how we can grow your business in the best way possible for the long term.
Blake Beus  35:45  All right, we'll catch you guys later. Bye
 

Blake Beus  0:00  Recap of last week we did some testing. Well, you did some testing about what we talked about on our last episode. Yep. About being where customers at being okay, spending a little bit more money from a CPM perspective. Yeah. Give us a rundown on on what we talked about last week. And then let's talk about your tests that you ran and what you found.
Greg Marshall  0:23  Yeah, so. So basically, to recap, last week, we were talking about how this individual is talking about data, and really researching where your customers at, you know, and focusing more and more on where they're actually at, versus what the advertising platforms recommend that you do, which is to put the ads everywhere, right, and that, technically, it is cheaper when you do it that way. But in a way, it could actually be more expensive. Yeah. Because if you're wasting money on placements that aren't converting, or your customers aren't there, then it doesn't matter how cheap it actually is. And so with the tests that we ran, last week, I ran one on my account, and I ran a couple on some clients accounts, after analyzing what actually works for for the specific offers, right. And I found that by running them on the placements that their customers are actually on, including mine, you get a lot, although the CPM is slightly higher, you're actually getting I think more for your dollar, because that dollar is not being spread out to so many different platforms, right? That the customer that you really want to see it is not actually seeing it as many times as they need to be right. And so that's what I found is although you technically and there's all these prompts, especially in Facebook, that will tell you your cost per result is going to increase if you don't use all the placements. just disregard that, because this is where you have to think, Where is my customer? And right, how do I show up in front of them regardless of the cost, because you have to work out your math anyways on cost per acquisition to revenue you're making. But if you're not actually in front of the customer, then you're essentially wasting money. So therefore, it's more expensive.
Blake Beus  2:14  Right, right. So let's define CPM. And I know we define this a lot. But if someone's just hopping in right here, CPM is cost per 1000. Impressions. So what what is an impression specifically in that context?
Greg Marshall  2:28  Meaning so an impression when when you run the ads is when someone sees the ad? Okay, so that's, like, if they're scrolling, and they just see it, they don't have to do anything. Okay, that's the impression.
Blake Beus  2:39  So here's the question I've always had in regards to impressions that I've actually never looked into. And I'm curious if you know the answer. So let's, let's talk about Google Display Network, right? Those are the ads that show up on someone's blog, or whatever. So if I'm running some ads, in the Display Network, very, very cheap cost per impression, like the CPMs are very, very low. Yeah. I, I'm a user, I hit the blog, and I see the same ad four times on that blog. Does that count as four impressions? Yep. Okay. So that's why the cost per impressions are so cheap, because one person is causing four impressions. Yeah. Which basically cuts the cost cost of that impression. The CPMs in the reporting by 75%. Right, like,
Greg Marshall  3:28  yep. And so that's basically how they counted. Yeah, if you're, so if I'm reading, you know, espn.com, and I see one of your ads on there. But I see it four times, because maybe it's placed at the top, and then he scrolled and maybe it's within the article, that's going to count as two impressions and more if I keep looking at it, right. And so, so impressions are great. And I do, I do see some value in them. But I believe where the impression is happening is more important, in my opinion, then, you know, how many times you're seeing right?
Blake Beus  4:00  So you're saying it's worth paying more? From a CPM perspective? Yes. To be in front of your correct audience,
Greg Marshall  4:08  correct? Yeah. Because it makes sense. It's just like, Well, why would I spend, you know, less money to talk to people that are not my customer? Yeah. That makes absolutely no sense because I can't possibly gain a customer. Right?
Blake Beus  4:24  Going, I could probably get a really cheap billboard. Yeah. If I wanted to put a billboard up in China. Yeah. For products solely in English in America here, but it wouldn't do anything. Really sad. It'd be really cheap advertising, but it won't
Greg Marshall  4:39  get any sales. So actually, it's very expensive. Yeah, so then it would be like a waste of money.
Blake Beus  4:44  It's like, it's like buying a shirt just because it's cheap. Yep. But then it doesn't fit right. So you never wear it. Like I never not even once exact. It's more it's better off to it's more expensive than buying a more expensive shirt that fits right that you wear all the time.
Greg Marshall  5:00  Exactly, yeah. So that's how I like to view advertising. And when you're especially when you're running paid, and I've pretty much always had this view, but you're constantly getting influenced by Facebook or Google or whoever, always wanting and recommending that you do a certain tactic. When really, it feels like it's not serving my best interest to serve in their best sense. Yeah, it almost makes
Blake Beus  5:24  you feel a little crazy, though. Yeah. Because you're like, well, it's working for me over here. But, but they keep telling you over and over and over again to do to do. It's crazy.
Greg Marshall  5:34  I liked that you brought that up, because there's actually a point since I, since I've done that I have received 10 phone calls from Facebook last week. Really? Yeah. Like, they want me to get on the phone with an advertising rep. And that my results could be better. I've made a few adjustments. And of course, I already know what they're going to tell me. Yeah, they're gonna say move it all. It's automatic placements, and changes and change. And all it's going to do is make them more money and make my stuff less effective. So remember, we talked about the theory about why you think they do that? Yeah. And the theory is basically, which also makes sense. If I can get great results on a single placement, and it does really well. And it's, you know, turning a profit, then I don't really have a huge incentive to spend more. Right, right. Because if I'm very profitable spending x amount, like if I was getting a 10x return, that's bad for them. Because I'm not going to turn it up. Nope, I'm gonna keep it as that budget. And that's it, and there's no more spend. So if you think about it, it makes sense why they want to keep pushing all these other, you know, placements that convert as well, is because if they're not, what's the recommendation? Spend more, you're not spending enough? Yeah, you got some results, you got to always spend more and
Blake Beus  6:57  more. Yeah, and I? Yeah, I always feel like even with these machine learning AI, you know, things like performance, Max and Facebook had their CBO. And they've done some other things as well. Those things do perform well, because of how machine learning or AI works. When you have bigger datasets, and to get a bigger data set, you need to spend more advertising dollars, and then they can totally work. But if you're working with a small budget, yep. And small in this context might be big for some but small in this context, I would say is anything under $500 a day?
Greg Marshall  7:34  Yep. I would agree. I would say the like the budgets. It seems like the people who recommend the automatic type placements are people that are spending 1000s And 1000s per day. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Because you need a giant data set to make that
Blake Beus  7:53  work. And that and that does make sense. And machine learning or AI can totally help in those circumstances. Because if you're spending 1000s a day, you're you're very quickly going to saturate small audiences. So you need to go find more people out there they exist, they're just harder to identify. And so it does make sense. But if you're working with a smaller budget, this is just a strategy that just doesn't work. And frankly, a lot of people will their business probably never ever, ever needs to go above $500. If you're gonna have a very profitable, very successful business with multiple marketing channels, without without going over that budget, not everyone has to be a Coca Cola, or Pepsi or McDonald's that has, you know, a 10 million 100 million dollar a year advertising budget, right?
Greg Marshall  8:41  Well, if you think about it be spending 500 A day it's about what 15,000 A month. So if you get it three or 4x return on that you're at 45 to 60,000 in revenue. And then if you're able to capitalize on repeat purchases off the new customer acquisition, you can grow yourself into 8090 100,000 or some million dollar a year business Yeah, which most people would be pretty happy, very happy with. It's a comfortable living as long as your margins are pretty good. So in this case, and this scenario, and I'm glad you added that context is really we're talking to the business owner that is doing $500 In a day in Aspen or less Yeah. Because most business owners that's what they're doing. Right I can't remember the exact statistic but I do know it's a very low percentage that of how many businesses actually reached a million dollar revenue per year mark yes, not as many as you think. I mean, the internet will make you think like everyone has ever you're the only millionaire that not out there but that's not true at all. If you look up the statistics and it's very that's a that's a big milestone if you can hit a million dollars a year. That's that's pretty good. And so So yeah, so you can definitely reach a million dollars a year spending $500 there less Yeah, and over time that will compound as long as You have a strong business model?
Blake Beus  10:01  Absolutely. Absolutely. So what what do you think is a good way to kind of test this out for Aranda, some listeners listening right now they're like, Okay, I want to test this out for me? Would it be? Would it make sense to just say, okay, my budget is going to be $50 a day, $100 a day, and I'll run it with all placements for a week just to get a baseline, and then I'll back off and run just targeted placements out, you know, what would you think this?
Greg Marshall  10:29  I mean, if someone were to ask me, yeah, like, just directly, like, hey, you know, I'm thinking about doing this, I would say, in my experience, based on all of the ads that I've run, that's been a lot. I would say, like, if it's on Facebook, the newsfeed and the stories option, those are the earth placements. Those are the two placements that I would say, just focus on those, forget about the other ones to get those data. And then if you go to Google, I would say search or YouTube ads, okay, okay, those are the two places that I would go, I would stay away from display. And so either you have a gigantic budget, which we just went over, you're most likely not going to want to go to anyways. And those are going to give you your highest return. So I feel like news news feeds the same even if you go Tik Tok, or any other platform, always choose the newsfeed over any display, we ran into the Zealand LinkedIn member, yeah, when you run website traffic campaigns, if you have display network enabled, your cost per clicks will be like 25 cents. But then what you'll notice is no one stays on the site very long, no one converge if no one does anything. And the second you turn that off, and you only have the newsfeed the cost per clicks, go back to what they're supposed to. And so I would always recommend newsfeed no matter what you're doing, you always take out display or Audience Network or anything that sounds like that,
Blake Beus  11:56  or in video stream, or any of those people aren't in the click to go off. They want to just keep watching, but
Greg Marshall  12:04  it's just those replacements to give, I feel like a lot of vanity metrics. You know, like you've had 100,000 impressions, but 95,000 came from in stream and Audience Network. And it's like, that's not going to drive your bottom line. So the other thing that I typically recommend, okay, nothing is like set in stone. There's outliers out there. But I would say, if you're doing e commerce, right, or lower ticket products, you could stick with Facebook, and you can even start to test out tick tock, since CPMs are really low. And that'll allow you to get more volume of traffic and the numbers will work out. If you have high ticket though. Google and YouTube are better,
Blake Beus  12:46  in my opinion for E commerce, or just are just high ticket just high
Greg Marshall  12:49  ticket. Okay. Yeah. For high ticket, I believe. Those are better.
Blake Beus  12:53  Yeah. So when you say high ticket, just to define that we're talking like, maybe a consulting thing, at least
Greg Marshall  12:59  five $600. Okay. But you could get away with even higher priced products. Absolutely. So I would say if you're, if you're charging a lot more, you tend to get better results. And you know, I use personal training in this too, because personal training, technically is higher ticket because you're buying four or $5,000 training packages, right? The mindset is different. So think lower price point equals higher impulse, higher price point equals more logical thinking, right? And because of that, think of Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok you're scrolling, you're really just wasting time. So you can just impulsively buy things, right? But when you're like, for example, YouTube, you're like kind of searching things out your mindset mentality is a lot different, right? Especially if you're targeting based off of keyword searches. Yeah, or topics, that really means that person that you're getting in front of is actually in the state of mind of the exact product you're selling.
Blake Beus  14:00  Plus, along those lines with YouTube, people are generally on YouTube to spend some time. Yep. And so they're willing to watch an ad that's interesting and relevant to them longer. Yep. And so with a higher ticket product, oftentimes, you need a little bit more time to explain the value proposition. And so YouTube is a really good fit for that. Yeah. Because you tend to get more time. I mean, you were telling me once this was a while ago, but you had a client that was, I don't know, a chiropractor, physical therapist, something, something along those lines. And you had a YouTube ad, and your average watch time was something like seven minutes. Oh, yeah. Or something like that. Remember?
Greg Marshall  14:42  I did? Yeah. It was to actually the gentleman. Oh,
Blake Beus  14:47  yeah. So the average I mean, think about how much selling you can, you can do. We're explaining the value proposition you can do in seven minutes of an ad. How long you remember back in the day when people actually have ads on TV, they still exist. But I wouldn't sit there and watch a seven minute ad. But if it's highly relevant, and interesting to that person, which you can do in YouTube, because you then all the search history and everything, you can get a seven minute and are highly,
Greg Marshall  15:18  highly qualified. Yeah. Just think of someone that just walking around and thinking about buying your exact product. Yeah. And then you serve them an ad of that exact product. Like it's a perfect match matches the market match. And so that's why I think if you have higher ticket, it's better to like your opportunity to essentially make money is higher on YouTube, then, you know, Facebook and Instagram just because of the mindset, our high ticket buyers on Facebook and Instagram. Of course they are I'm not saying that they're not there. What I'm saying is, you may see a better performance on YouTube, because of where their mentality is. And the other thing that I find is, if you're targeting people on YouTube, and they fill out your lead form, and they get on a phone call, the quality of the person is higher, also, because of the mindset, then I find that a lot of those sales turn around pretty quick. Yeah, like less than seven days interest. And quite often they can. I've actually had some ads on YouTube for my own business where the person bought, like, an hour later. Oh, really, like after a phone call? Like they saw the ad they clicked they booked the call got on the phone, they purchased all like that, really? No, no thinking about it. And but it was because individuals like I am looking for this, which I of course I knew because that's what I'm targeting.
Blake Beus  16:44  And you made the video, you made the video content basically resolve objections, probably before they even got on the phone with you exactly. And so for the ideal person, it's a no brainer.
Greg Marshall  16:53  Exactly. And so just think about that, when you think about placements be where your customers at, and where you're gonna have the most probability of success. And the other thing I've been telling. Lately, I've been talking to quite a few fitness trainers wanting to sell their services out of their gyms, and I've been trying to move a lot of them to YouTube. And the reason why is because YouTube number one, personal training services are technically high ticket, right? Like, you're not gonna get anything really for like less than 300 bucks. Okay. All the most of the programs are being sold or 2345 $6,000. So with that being said, YouTube's a perfect match for that. It's also a perfect match for that, because I was talking to a trainer yesterday, who will be launching her ads soon, and we'll keep you updated on it. I said, How many courses have you seen on YouTube ads to build for personal trainers? She said, I've never seen more. I said, How many have you seen on Facebook and Instagram? How To Grow Your Fitness following and all that Facebook? That's all I've seen? Yeah. So I said, so it's most likely that the market is saturated. And it's all the same offers over and over and over and over again to the consumer, right, you're seeing over and over and over again, the same offer just a different location, right? So that kind of makes it where your CPMs are gonna be higher, because you're competing in a highly competitive audience. And then the offers all sound the same. Right? Right. So you're going to spend more and be a part of they're going to associate with all being the same versus if you go to YouTube. They don't really know. They're they're not seeing these offers, right, particularly locally. Yeah. So because of that, and there's this level of like, and I don't know if you've ever run into this, but there's his level of YouTube, like when people see you on YouTube, the perception is, wow,
Blake Beus  18:48  there's like an authority there. You know, what I mean? Builds authority. Yeah. And so
Greg Marshall  18:52  you also have that, that that can go into play. So anyways, what are some of your thoughts on, you know, placements and targeting? And are you along the same lines of this thinking?
Blake Beus  19:06  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I've, for a long time felt that there were ulterior motives, with a lot of the cues that they have in the platforms about how you should run your ads. And, and some of the defaults and things they put in place I felt weren't necessarily in the best interest of the advertisers. But were in the best interests of say, Google or Facebook, namely, specifically the geographic targeting Yeah, like you when you when by default, when you target people in America on Google's the default option, which is like three or four clicks away, you can't see is, is people that live in America have been to America recently or are interested in America. If you're targeting America, you have to change that to people that live in America, or else you're going to retargeting people all over the place. And so they always have these cues. So I guess my main takeaway from this is from a placements and all this perspective is, as you're going through and running the ads, trust yourself, run those tests, verify everything that they're claiming. And you can keep listening to to us, because we're doing these tests all the time, you can kind of skip some of those steps and just run right to the targeted placements. But you definitely need to do that, or else you'll be spending money and you'll that you don't need to spend to not have any actual benefit. Yep. And so if you want to be profitable, if you're running on a smaller budget, or whatever, definitely stick with those targeted placements. And think about which platform people are on. I know, we talk a lot about Facebook and Google, they're definitely some of the bigger players out there with the industries that we work with. But there's mean tick tock is is growing from an advertising perspective, really cheap CPMs there. I've seen some pretty interesting results from from an E commerce perspective. On tick tock, yep. Like little demo demo videos or whatever. Pin Pinterest still exists. A lot of people forget about that. But Pinterest, including me, yeah. Pinterest has a full advertising platform, they have millions and millions and millions of daily users. And people use Pinterest in a different way than they use the other. The other ones, people actually use Pinterest, very similar to the way people use Google, if you if you think about Pinterest as a search engine first, which wasn't what it was initially, but it's kind of how people use it. Now, if you think of it as a search engine first, and you're just having, you know, search results, but in pin form, then there's some really interesting opportunities there. LinkedIn is another one, if your people are hanging out on LinkedIn, they have a full advertising platform. It's a little bit clunky, yeah. But I've seen some amazing results there. And they probably have one of the best in my opinion built in. Bot, like message bot? Yep, advertising platforms, I've seen that it's in. And I've seen some really great results there. For higher ticket offers the best offers, I've seen, there have been something like, Hey, let's get on a call and chat three others. So a good way to book a call for consultants, or if a phone call is part of your funnel, the and your people are on LinkedIn, the LinkedIn messenger, bots are a pretty interesting advertising way to go and, you know, get targeted on those things. And you're definitely gonna see better results.
Greg Marshall  22:43  Yeah, and I think you know, the moral of the story, basically, with all the testing and things like that is, number one, know where your customers at. And then number two, get the message in front of you. Right? I mean, you've got like 80% of the work done. If you're literally showing up where your actual customer is at, and you're putting something in front of us, then all you have to do is figure out, how do I get them to respond. But what you don't want to do, which a lot is advertising platforms, I feel like maybe not intentionally, but probably most likely, intentionally, is encourage you to put your placements everywhere. Yeah, and to almost be wasteful with what you're doing. Because it's in the best interest of them versus you actually putting it in the right person's face, and getting the results that you want. So it's it's amazing how simple of a concept that is. And even as I consider myself a veteran and buying ads, you still can get it. So if I'm getting influenced, I feel like someone who maybe doesn't know any better, for sure is getting in on that. Because they don't know any better.
Blake Beus  23:50  Yeah, well, I think it's causing an unintentional side effect of people getting frustrated and then not even advertising. Yep. So so they're putting these cues in here saying, Hey, do do all this stuff, push, push the auto placement button button, push CBO push performance, Max, we'll just automate everything for you. And then the results aren't going to be that good, but their profit margins are better. But then you have a lot of businesses that would potentially be really great businesses where the founder, the owner, whoever throws their hands in the air says not nevermind, because literally advertising can take a business from nothing to huge, yep. When when done right. And so there's I feel like there's this entire kind of hidden layer of businesses that have really great products really great offers really great people running them. But this advertising piece is frustrating enough that they never see the light of day in a in a big way, when the could well and I
Greg Marshall  24:51  think a lot of these advertising companies they you know, they're salesmen just like us, just like anyone else. They know that the consumer ever wants to hear automatic? Yep. And set it and forget it. Yep. And that type of language, so they kind of know how to dangle that in front of you these these products are basically that, you know, just let us do the work for you, which, you know, most likely is not going to be as they don't have as near as much investment and you're succeeding. And here's the other thing. I have seen campaigns, this, I'm thinking of this one client, how I got him. And when he gave me access to that account, I couldn't believe what I was saying, really. So he so Google, agreed to, like, build his ads or something like that, and had convinced them that he needed to spend like $500 or six hours a day, okay. And this individual had the money to do so. But I went in there and there was like, I mean, I think there was like four conversions even ran this for like weeks.
Blake Beus  25:58  The average order value or was it was
Greg Marshall  26:01  like a 40 $50 product, it was performing Wow, horribly. And it was all set up by Google. And I'm like, so Google set this up, encourage you to spend a whole bunch of money, and you're not getting any results. And when I say a bunch of money, I mean, what is you know, 500 times 10? Or has five grand? Yeah. And he got four sales. I like it. So that's like 280 bucks and sales. We spent $5,000. Yeah, it's it's just, that's insane. I mean, I couldn't believe and I was like, Google actually set this up. And he had suspicion like, these ads, they're not working very well, even though Google literally made them. So I understand the psyche, because it in theory, it would make sense, right? Who would know the advertising platform better than an actual Google rep or a Facebook rep or whatever. But you gotta remember the people that they're hiring. These are just salespeople that yeah, and most of them never run out of their life. Yeah. And so when they give you advice, it's, you know, it's from a script, you know, piece of paper that their sales manager told him to say, and it's like, I've had so many phone calls that reps like this, where I'm like, that just doesn't seem to make sense, right experience. Yeah, actually running and paying money. I've never seen that work.
Blake Beus  27:16  Yeah, you know, it's, it's just got me thinking. The psychological term for someone convincing you that you're crazy is called gaslighting. This episode definitely needs to be called gaslighting. gaslighted gaslit like Google gaslit like
Greg Marshall  27:35  Google Facebook, where they convince you that you're literally going crazy and you're like, I don't feel like I feel like this is what it's telling you.
Blake Beus  27:45  So, anyway, well, let's let's wrap. Let's wrap it up here. Yeah. How can people get in touch with you Greg?
Greg Marshall  27:51  You go to my website, Greg marshall.co book a free strategy session.
Blake Beus  27:55  And you and Blake Beus stock comm slash SM three is the best way to get in touch with me. All right. Well, I
Greg Marshall  28:00  hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'll see you guys next week. Okay, bye.
 

Blake Beus  0:00  All right, so you were talking to me about all sorts of things. You tell me what you wanted to go over today? Because like you've got a better plan on today. Yeah. And what I do?
Greg Marshall  0:10  Well, I listened to a podcast yesterday, I want to give credit to the guys names. I think it's onic or UNeek. I can't remember exactly how to say it. But he had a podcast with a gentleman that was on there. And he was talking about data, and how he uses this software or this thing that he created, you know, 11 years ago, on how to predict buyer behavior. Okay. And he says, what he he worked on the Donald Trump campaign. Oh, what other political campaign
Blake Beus  0:38  in the 2016 20 2016? Yep. Interesting. And so
Greg Marshall  0:43  he kind of shared what he does, to help people win the elections, he had, like, over 1000 wins, really, in politics. So sounds like he knows what he's doing?
Blake Beus  0:57  Well, I mean, I will say, politics is where you get some of the most sophisticated advertising especial, especially presidential politics in America. And so even though you may not like a particular candidate, or you may prefer whatever all of that aside from an advertising perspective, there's a lot of interesting strategies that can be learned by looking at how they're doing their online ads, because they have massive budgets, they have huge incentives to do a really good job, they have access to some of the most intelligent advertisers and creative advertisers out there. And so it's a good place to learn, oh, great strategies,
Greg Marshall  1:36  what he shared was, basically, what they would do is figure out, they come up based on the research data that he had 10 to 12 different messages that most likely would work based off the data. And then they would test those 10 or 12, to then figure out which one or to resonate the most, okay, and then from those one or two, have 100 Something variations of those one or two messages. So
Blake Beus  2:05  when you say one or two messages, not talking specific wording, but you're talking like angles, right, but I believe, a message angle, and then you just find a bunch of different ways to say that exact same thing. Correct that, okay, that's what it sounded like. If I were to sum up American politics, advertising and the messages they're getting out there, I would put it kind of in that realm, and that there was a handful of messages. And they just say that over and over and over again, but in different ways. Yeah, they say it in, in debates, they say it on commercials, they say it in interviews, they say it in press conferences. But if you notice, it's almost always the same small set of messages set in a different
Greg Marshall  2:45  way. Well, and the interesting part about what he said was applying it to business, he says what you would do is, you have to figure out first what platforms your customer is actually on. And then know their customer, you know, know your customers very deep. And so he used an example of a chair company that was running, I guess most of their ad spend on Facebook, to sell chairs. But then he asked them why. And they said, We don't know, we just started on Facebook. And so he said, alright, and he uploaded their data on who buys chairs, and found out that Facebook was number four, as far as traffic sources, where that buyer was okay. And number one was Pinterest. So he said, if you're putting on your dollars at the number four platform, versus putting it the number one, you're not going to be as efficient. So he talked about how most businesses do this, they don't actually know exactly where their customers at, and dedicate their budgets to the right message and where they're actually at in the platform. And my question to you was, I've noticed, like in the E commerce world, Facebook, Facebook ads works extremely well. Right. And I always found that the placements newsfeed like the newsfeed is where all the conversions come from. Yeah, but Facebook always pushes you to do automatic placements. Now, obviously, they want you to spend money everywhere. But I always do notice that the cost like the CPM traffic for that for the newsfeed placement is cheaper when it's under automatic, than if you just say I only want the news feed. What are your theories on that? And would you say it's a good or a bad idea to only put it on the news feed.
Blake Beus  4:41  So I think it all kind of really boils down to how efficient you're trying to be with your budget and everything along those lines and how big your budget is. I don't think they're wrong by saying that putting it as automatic placements is a good move. But I think that information comes from From massive accounts with massive amounts of budget, because if you if you do that, you need to reach a much, much larger audience. If you have a smaller budget, though, you need to be very efficient with that budget. So one of the things I think about everybody's seen, like the typical bell curve, right, like the graph of that bell curve, where you have the slope that comes up really high in the middle, and then it goes down kind of at the edges, yep. And you have these, if you look at it in in quarters, like so this quarter down here are outliers, this quarter right here is leading up to the main group, this quarter, whatever. When you're running ads, your audience looks a lot like that you have a product or a service. And there are a group of people, it's a smaller group of people that this is the exact thing they've been looking for. It's perfect for them in every way. If you have a smaller budget, you can just mark it to Val, those people. And you've got a big enough audience, that you can make sales and be profitable. Yep. Now, as you start getting over into the larger part of the population, you're going into a group of people where it's maybe not an exact fit, but it's a good fit. It's something that's helpful, something that's useful, but it's not perfectly exactly what they need, because they have some slightly different circumstances. And that's going to be the largest percentage of the audience. And so if you have a big budget, you can burn through that smaller, perfect audience, and perfect group of people much faster. And then you have to start marketing to this larger group of people. And when you do that, having lower CPMs. So you can reach a much, much, much larger audience can still be extremely profitable. Yep. Because you couldn't you just couldn't spend that amount of money on that small group of people got it. And so that's how I kind of look at it and think about it. The other thing I look at too, is like, what, what are the incentives? Have we talked about this before? What are the incentives of Facebook? Right, like, advertisers are Facebook's customers? And
Greg Marshall  7:06  let me also interject? Because this also goes into YouTube ads, and performance Max. Yeah. How they? I don't know if you do this, but you to me, it forces us to now use it on Google Display. Oh, can you can you can know this? I think this applies to Facebook. I think they're all going to this? Yeah. Yeah. Like you have to advertise and write to me these lower profitable channels.
Blake Beus  7:34  Yes, yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here. This, this is I start, I look at things in, I try to look at things in a very holistic way and try to look at what what, why everything's happening. And I also am a nerd when it comes to behavioral economics, which is essentially matching psychology of why people buy to buying an economics and things in it's it's nerdy, but that's why. So you have these companies that are publicly traded Facebook, Google, they're big companies, their incentives are to show profit, not only show profit, but show an increase in profit. At at the end of every quarter. Yep. And so even though they dominate these markets, their incentives are to prove to their show shareholders that not only are they profitable, they're increasing in profitability. So they have this constant pressure to come up with new ways to increase their margins and improve their bottom line. And, and the ratio of their expenses to their revenue. And so, so constantly, you see this with Netflix, they're constantly raising their prices. I'm like, You guys dominate everything. You've been profitable for 10 years? Why can't you just chill and be profitable, maybe even discount every day? But no, they keep raising their prices, because their incentives are to show to the shareholders, that they're continuing to increase in profits. So when you understand that principle, you start understanding why some of these things can happen and why these companies have this, this pressure to continue to do that. Now. If you have Facebook has last I looked at 1.251 Point 5 billion people that use it every single day. That's just under a quarter of the entire population of the planet. Every day. Yeah, logs into Facebook. Yep. That is market saturation, right? Like that is so how to be how do you become more profitable if you already have all of the eyeball inventory that you can possibly get? And you already have hundreds of 1000s of advertisers spending money with you know, how do you become more profitable, you're already profitable, but how do you become more profitable? You have to start coming up with new channels. So you have the Display Network, you have these new things like for formance Max with YouTube where, where you have to, if you're gonna run ads on YouTube, you have to also run ads on some of these other channels that that that never worked that don't work with you, they, they require you to spend money on those channels, right. And the same thing is with Facebook, Facebook keeps coming up, they have their audience network, which is like Google's display ads they have in stream video ads. So they can say, hey, we have this new inventory up. But and and they might even start shifting over to, you know, forcing people to do that. And so when you take all of that into consideration, these this is why they're doing some of those things, and to advertisers were thinking, well, that's stupid, that's not helping us make money. They don't, they don't care. They're trying to increase their profitability. Now, I'm not saying this is a terrible thing. And they're evil for doing all this stuff. I'm just saying understanding the incentives is what helps you understand why some of this is happening. And when you understand why some of this is happening, you can kind of start to predict and see moves and be a leader and and a front runner and some of these new strategies as an advertiser, because I can't I can't call up Zuckerberg and say, Hey, why are you doing this? This is stupid. Yeah, this is affecting my agency. He doesn't care. But if so you don't you can't really change that direction. But what you can do is be one of the early adopters and early understandings of a lot of these things. And that will make you stand out to the crowd instead of being reactionary to everything. Yep.
Greg Marshall  11:26  And I think, you know, one of the things that I've been using for years is, even though this goes against what they tell you to do, I've been using only the newsfeeds placements, like my E commerce clients, all the ones that only do that have higher prop profitability than the ones where we use automatic placements. I've tested it over and over and over like, I mean, I don't know how many tests every single time only having the DSP placements, although the CPMs are higher conversions are better. Yeah. And your cost per purchase or cost per leads are better. Yeah. And so that's something where I just found interesting that he mentioned, because it almost feels like the advertising platforms are trying to go away from optimizations. And this gentleman was talking about optimizing more, right? And I've always thought, Well, how do you do that? If the advertising platforms are essentially trying to get away from that? Even though, to me, it makes the most sense. If you look at data, no matter what it is, if you want to get the best results, focus on the part that's getting the best results. Yeah. And get rid of the rest. Yeah. So one of the challenges that I feel moving forward, especially when you're executing certain placements, is to try to get that control of where it should show. Yeah, because those are always the best, highest converting channels. Yeah. So I don't know what some of my thoughts on that are. The CPMs go, it almost feels like maybe they try to penalize you when you do that. But you're still getting the cost per result that you want. So it doesn't matter. But it just seems like the CPM goes higher. No matter what platform, you're when you try to isolate the placement.
Blake Beus  13:19  Yeah. And I think this just goes to show that it's really important to look at your actual numbers. Yep. And maybe not trust the numbers, the ad platform is reporting to you not because they're lying to you. But because it's very difficult for an ads platform to be completely accurate. But then you look at the your actual numbers, we spent just your high level numbers, we spent this much in ads, we made this much revenue, we know this revenue came from our email list and not from ads. And we know this part of our revenue maybe came from organic, but this came from ads, and then run those numbers and be like, alright, we're doing good, we should keep doing more. Plus, spending more on ads built up our email list, our email list is almost pure profit when we sell off the email list, right? And so just looking at those high level numbers, and then constantly testing, you know, that you've probably heard the saying, you know, you know, what, the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result? Well, that's not really true for marketers. Yeah. Because you're not testing even if I run the exact same test in two months, you know, Audience Network and and all the placement, automatic placements versus feed placements. Even if we run the exact same test in two months, so many things would have changed out behind the scenes with Facebook's algorithm and Google's algorithm or whatever and how they handle ads, that you're not running the same test. And so you need to run those exact same tests to see, are my conclusions still valid? Because there's been all these other things that change that? I don't know. They don't publish all their changes, we don't know. So we need to kind of constantly run that and that's one of the things I really like about you, Greg. You're like, well, I'll tested again. Yeah. And you tested again, you're still the same. Yep. And and but as soon as that changes, you'll know, oh, whereas all of the other advertisers and marketers and media buyers or whatever, they will get burned. Yeah. It'd be like, Oh, this used to work what's going on? Yep. And
Greg Marshall  15:16  so you have to constantly constantly test and question what's going on at the current state. That's, uh, that's what I'm constantly doing is looking at, well, it looks like this is what's going on right now. And making those adjustments and other things that I noticed is when you're running the ads, suck with with attribution. So we're doing this test with shutting off a certain channel with our ads to see how much it's actually impacting them. And the attribution and all of our data shows that it wasn't that impactful. But as soon as we've shut it off, we have seen a massive impact. Yeah, a big drop in app purchases. And so that's another thing is to try to figure out like, where are the app platforms missing? The results? Like not giving themselves credit? Yeah, right. Because this channel is, as soon as we turned it off, we've already seen like, literally like a 70%. Drop. Oh, wow. But that's not what it shows when it's turned on. Yeah. And so that's like, an interesting thing is it's almost like you have to test turning on turning off. Yeah. To figure out what's impacting the bottom line? Yeah.
Blake Beus  16:33  Well, I think we're constantly kind of will and we'll never get to kind of where this was, but we're constantly kind of moving towards getting creative with how you detect the success of an ad, like you used to have to do with direct mail marketing, and with billboard advertising, or whatever. It's, you got to put it up and kind of see and then look at your high level numbers, you don't have the direct feedback we got. There was that sweet spot for about 10 years where none of the ad platforms cared about privacy. So marketers could have really accurate data. Yeah, well, now there's a lot of privacy concerns with iOS 1415, and upcoming 16. Those are going to have a lot of changes. Google has announced their advertiser sandbox, which, which on Android is going to,
Greg Marshall  17:23  which is always good news for marketers, yeah, more changes.
Blake Beus  17:28  And that's going to impact some things as well. And so you got to look at those those high level numbers. And you got to, you got to think differently about things like one of the things you were talking about earlier, I want to circle back to was, was Pinterest. I mean, how many advertisers that listen to this, you know, podcasts out here
Greg Marshall  17:46  have even spent $1 on Pinterest. I know not I mean, I have but not many know, Matt, and full disclosure, probably maybe maximum $1,000. Man, yeah, pictures.
Blake Beus  17:58  And it's Pinterest feels. It's been a while since I've run some ads in there. But it feels kind of old school. It's kind of clunky. It's probably improved since I've used it. But that might be kind of a turnoff to people. But it's if your audience is there. Pinterest has a lot of ad inventory. A lot of eyeballs look at Pinterest every day. And the people that are browsing Pinterest have different buying behaviors than the people that are browsing Facebook. Oftentimes people that are browsing Pinterest are looking to do something. Yep. Whereas if you're on Facebook, you're looking to kill some time. Yep. Or argue with someone about
Greg Marshall  18:35  politics. Yep. Most likely.
Blake Beus  18:39  It but if you're on Pinterest, you are in your typical Pinterest user is in a creative, I'm going to make something I'm gonna create something. I'm looking for ideas, I'm looking for a product concept or whatever. And that's a way different buying mindset. And a good buying mindset if you're an advertised. Exactly.
Greg Marshall  19:00  So I think you know, so So going back to even channels. So here's like the next thought process. What would you do? And the case where, let's say most of your customers are on Instagram. Okay, right. But when you advertise only on Instagram, the cost for that placement is much higher. What, to me logically makes sense to disregard that? Because already there Yeah. So you just have to like make that work. Yeah. versus saying, we'll target audience everywhere like Instagram audience everywhere. That's a question I have because to me, sometimes when I'm working with clients, they will believe that their audience is on one channel, but it's actually on another And then they almost want to force you to go where they want, where they wish it were, versus where it's at. Right? So what are your thoughts on isolating channel? For example, if all your customers are on Instagram, would you just advertise on Instagram? Or would you take the Instagram audience and advertise everywhere? What are your thoughts on that?
Blake Beus  20:27  I mean, it all just boils down to testing, right and budget, if I have a smaller budget, I would just I would just advertise just on Instagram, and then find ways to make that offer more profitable to cover the cost of the, you know, the increased cost of that traffic, the increased CPMs of that traffic. And some ways you could do that would be bundling or a special offer or upsell or, or maybe you have a freebie and then you do most of your actual selling via email or text messaging or something like that something that's a little cheaper, the more impactful if I had a bigger budget, then I would definitely be doing some testing to try to find that Instagram audience or I would maybe use the Instagram budget and I would lose money audience to build retargeting traffic and other places. Yeah. And then I'd be uploading customer lists and things to other platforms, and then try to follow them around a different places. Understanding that the cold traffic would probably not necessarily be profitable yet. But you'd make 5x 6x 10x row as return on your ad spend on your retargeting and your email efforts after that initial cold kind of introduction.
Greg Marshall  21:36  So here's my thought. So I'm thinking of a customer right now. Most of their purchases happen on Facebook, right? Would you my theory or thought would be to put more budget? They're spending 100 hours of their
Blake Beus  21:56  time? Is it a product like an E commerce type thing? Okay,
Greg Marshall  22:01  okay. They love what they're in this situation. They're one of those where they wish or want the audience to be on Instagram? Do they
Blake Beus  22:11  want it because they feel like they have a better representation of their brand on their Instagram, social media, or I think
Greg Marshall  22:16  it's mostly because they feel more comfortable, okay, with using it with using Instagram, okay. And so they believe that they're honest as air, but most of their purchases, like 85 90% happen on Facebook. And so in my mind, if you if you just like, eliminate advertising platforms, and you would say, if one channel got you x and another underperform by, like 80%, yeah, I will get rid of the underperforming, put all the money into the top performer. Yeah. Now one of the challenges that you see with ad platforms is, at what point? How much? How far can you go? Before you can no longer do that?
Blake Beus  23:03  Yeah. Because I would say $100 a day, that's still a small budget. I mean, to some people, they might think, Oh, my gosh, that's all that's a big budget. But in the grand scheme of things, that's a that's a teeny, that's a teeny budget. Yep. And so as far as scaling that up, you might, you might blow through that. Tiny, perfect audience. Pretty quick. If you were to go to say, $300 a day or $500 a day. Yep. So yeah, I don't know, either, then you have to get a little bit more creative. But if you're scaling up, and you're still profitable, then you have additional revenue to, to put put money in other places, right like that. And that's how that works. You got to get a little bit more sophisticated as you scale up.
Greg Marshall  23:46  So I think, you know, that case, when they want to squeeze out as much profit, you think we'll just keep an eye on one platform focused on that. And that's gonna give you your highest return on adspend. Yeah, for that type of a budget. Right? Obviously, when you start spending $500,000, a day or more, yeah, you have to expand the where are these can go? Because like you said, there's only so many perfect customer. Yep. In one channel. Yeah. And so that's something that I'm thinking about how to best serve the lower spending customer, right? Yeah, how to get them the highest return maybe would be just to focus on one channel, and only do that one channel. But it was just interesting what this guy was saying, because what I thought what I thought was interesting about the the information he was stating is when you're talking about political campaigns, and you're talking about one message, he literally said he only focused on one message once he figured that out. Yeah. And that is it. And I thought that's interesting because of because of the size of the budget. Yeah. I thought, well, how do they do that? Well, I think and he was saying, Facebook. So he mentioned they were doing this on Facebook, and you know, they're spending? Oh, yeah, millions and millions? Well,
Blake Beus  25:12  I mean, I looked at it, I looked at it, I haven't looked at the 2016 numbers, but I looked at the 2020 numbers. And off the top of my head, Donald Trump on Facebook alone spent about $120 million in ADS. And that was just in that, like that year, like that wasn't, I don't think I even think that was total over a couple of years, I think it was just that year. And Joe Biden spent, I think, just a little bit more like five, 5 million more or something like that, so that they're spending some serious dollars. I think the one difference you got to understand, though, is they don't care about profitability. That's sure they're not trying to make sales. Yep. Right. And so they have a stack of cash, and it's gonna get spent. Yep. And so when this guy's talking about, you know, we're focusing on that one message. It's, it's about saturation of the entire population. And it's not about making sales. So their success metrics are different. Yep, then, you know, a company that's trying to sell a product. Yeah, I think there's a lot of good principles we can use, we've got to understand, they can be a little more wasteful, they can because because it's an all donor money, it's not their money. And it's an all or nothing thing. And all of that needs to be spent by voting day. Right. And so, but the singular message does apply in other areas, other businesses, it's just easier for, for us as humans to make a purchase, purchase decision. If our message isn't all over the place. It's very singular. And that's hard to do. And that's why you got to know your customer and everything. But in politics, it's easy, it's even easier. And and if we start if we start diving back into politics, the easiest message that will have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort, as far as coming up with a message in politics is the other side sucks. In practice, I'm great. But that person sucks. I don't need to tell you how great I am. Because that's common knowledge. But let me tell you all the way that other guys, right. And so you'll I hate that that's what works. But that's what works. And it's very easy. It's much harder in a business to come up with, you know, reasons why someone should buy, if you have a clear competitor that has a little bit of bad PR out there, then the that that company sucks, and so it can work. And I've seen that on on Facebook, I keep seeing this ad and it says something. Cancel, Click Funnels this is the really rare you've probably seen. I'm sure that's working because I've seen that same ad for six months. And I'm sure it's performing them. And click funnels has, you know, a very polarizing brand, brand reputation, right. And and, and so this, this person is capitalizing on that. Right?
Greg Marshall  28:10  So it's interesting, because as we were talking about messaging, all I could think about was, how do you spend $100 million on Facebook? And that burn through literally every single person that would be in that? You know, political class? Yeah. But it's just,
Blake Beus  28:31  I think that's the point. I think they want to burn through everybody. They want everybody to see that message. Yeah, they don't care if they get ad fatigue at all, because they want every single person that's on Facebook to see see that. See that message. And here's the funny thing, though. Even in 2020, I don't think I saw very many Trump or Biden ads. Yeah. Myself, it was weird, but they were blowing a lot of money, which makes me think maybe they're targeting a different age demographic or something like that. Or while the
Greg Marshall  29:06  places here's where I saw they were using Google discovery ads heavily. That's where I saw a lot of the, the advertisements. Yeah. And when I say a lot, I'm talking a lot Hmm. So but but only in a short span. So I didn't see anything. And then like that final month. Yeah. It was like, I could not go anywhere on YouTube. Without see. Yeah. Like it was above every meal. I was watching on the side. And I was like, Man, I wonder how much is spent on this campaign? Because a lot Oh, I can't I literally can't go anywhere else seeing it? Yeah, it's
Blake Beus  29:45  it's interesting. I mean, here we're here. We're having local elections here in Utah. And I've seen quite a few local YouTube ads. Okay for for a couple of candidates. There's, there's one party To the candidate in Utah, that there is a clear effort to get that person not reelected.
Greg Marshall  30:10  I actually think I think I know what ad you're told. Yeah. And and is it an industry man? Payroll? Or is it was a pre roll on YouTube as
Blake Beus  30:19  the ones I've been seeing. I see this on Facebook, but I've seen it on YouTube quite a bit. And so that that's been pretty interesting. But I think, you know, as, as advertisers get a little bit more sophisticated, you're gonna see just more and more digital ads for local local stuff, because it's not as hard. It's I mean, it's more approachable now for for someone than it used to be. Yep. So yeah,
Greg Marshall  30:46  yeah. And I think YouTube is, it's like TV. Yeah. Right. I mean, they literally have YouTube TV. So when you're trying to mimic maybe TV campaigns, YouTube is a great example. This other gentleman also brought up. I'm glad that we said that, because he said the new thing that they're actually focusing on is, and I can't remember how he described it, but it's TV advertising. But not like the traditional TV advertising, like streaming TV advertising. I think so because he was saying right now, the, the tracking and all that with IP addresses is the wild wild west. And he referred to it as just like Facebook was years ago. And he's like, so that's where we're actually focusing most of our efforts. Right now. Interesting is a place that's not as controlled, basically. Curious,
Blake Beus  31:38  I'll have a look at that a little bit.
Greg Marshall  31:39  Yeah, it was an interesting, when he brought it up. I was like, wow, you can even see the interviewer was like, really? What's that? Yeah. So that'll probably be the next thing. And then they'll put the clamp down on that eventually, when they figured out that use? Yeah, with too much information. But yeah, I just thought the interview was interesting, just because of talking about optimizations and what you can do. And I've always felt like, I've I mean, I wouldn't consider myself Ultra data. But maybe I am, because even back when I saw personal training in person, I actually did segmentation without realizing that's what I was doing. Yeah, I would figure out while my buyers are basically like this, so I'm just not gonna talk to anyone unless they look like this. And what it did was it made my efforts very efficient. Yeah. And I would exceed my goals every month. Yeah. And I with less effort, because I just only focused on that group of you that group of people. And if they didn't match that, I just not that I would like, ignore them. I just didn't put much effort into that. That group.
Blake Beus  32:49  Yeah, one quick story from my sales days, I used to sell office equipment. Online, it was like an e commerce Store. But it was that it was early enough that a lot of people still weren't comfortable. Okay, punching in a credit card number on a website. So they would call and then we would take their orders over the phone. Now I'm like, I would never get my now.
Greg Marshall  33:12  Reverse. I trust the internet more than college. So
Blake Beus  33:17  it's funny. But anyway, so I worked at this company for a while. And I was always kind of in the bottom third. As far as sales goes, I just, it's not something that comes naturally. Yeah, just. And then we have this guy come in that I end up being really good friends with. And he instantly in his, like, second month became number one, number two, and he was constantly number one, even even above people that were had been there for a long time. And so I was friends with him. And I was like, Man, why, you know, why are you doing better? And, and he kind of couldn't really pinpoint what he was doing different. Yeah. So just in talking with him, because essentially, it was kind of natural to him, whatever. He was doing different. But what I boiled it down to was, we would get enough calls in the day that you could spend your entire time on the phone. Yep, whatever. And I was like, well, that's how you get the sales. He was really, really good at determining very early on in a phone call that this person was not going to make the sale. Yeah, pre qualifying. Pretty good, right? So just based on on the phone call, if he knew they weren't going to make the call or weren't going to buy something and they were all over the place. He will work pretty quickly to get them off the phone. And sometimes it'd be sometimes his strategy would be, you know what, let me check you check on that. And I'll get back to you and you just wouldn't
Greg Marshall  34:43  waste my time.
Blake Beus  34:46  And I'm not saying that wasn't necessarily the best, but I had I felt like I had an obligation to help everybody as best as possible. And so he was spending his time filtering people out and then focusing on those that made the good sale. Had the big sale. And then those people that were interested, if they needed a little bit of effort or a follow up phone call, those were the people he would call, and I would try to follow up with everybody. Yep, then he was only following up with the good prospects. And then after I put a little system in place for me, that worked for me to identify and filter out those people, that would be good prospects versus not, I started getting up to number two, number three, constantly. But I was terrible until I did that.
Greg Marshall  35:24  Well, that's, that's the key. And that's almost if you bring it back to marketing advertising. It's almost like what you're doing when you're segmenting customer list or placement or whatever, you're basically just saying, I'm only gonna spend my time where I know, I want to get the biggest return. Yep. And just ignore everything else. That's honestly, I'll never forget this, because I was always told in the sales world have as many appointments as possible, you need to be calling all day you need to do you know, all this activity. And when I did it, that way, I would generate a lot more sales. But I would also be spending a lot more time a lot more time. And then I remember I literally cut like my work day by like, 80 90%, when I was like, you know, the only people who really buy are people that kind of fit this mold. And so if they don't fit this mold, I'd rather have no appointments. If I can't find that person than 10 appointments of unqualified because you're just wasting your time. I'm just like burning energy versus can feel busy look busy. I feel that way about meetings a lot of times. Yeah. So meetings, we don't really need to do that. And I just find that. How can we apply that same thought process to our advertising and our marketing? Right? So can we find a channel where basically most of the stuff happens? And what? What would happen? If you just said, I could get more units of sales or more volume, if I was on all channels, but I would also be spending more money and energy without getting an exponential return. Right? Versus what if he just went to one channel knew I could get more by expanding channel, but more is not always better? How do I get more efficient? Yep. And just focus on that. That's, that's constantly what I'm thinking about? Yeah, how do we be?
Blake Beus  37:27  I think we're gonna make fish. And that's what makes you stand out, right? Because if you go talk to a typical traditional agency, they're gonna say, We're gonna let you on all these channels, you'll be in front of millions of people. Yeah. And, and they're kind of incentivized to do that. Because they kind of want the advertising process to be complicated. So you feel like you need the agency. And I think when people come to you, they're like, we're just going to advertise on one place. Yeah. When you're like, Well, yeah, if that's working for you, why why would we expand until we blow through it? And you know, that all of that, but if it continually works, and we can scale up with the budget you guys have? Why do we need to do something more complicated? We don't you guys don't want to do that? We'd like Yeah, I mean,
Greg Marshall  38:09  I think and that's always, that's always the challenge is, in general, the overall message that I feel like you're told most of the time, is to do more, without an explanation of why and what the trade offs are. Right, right, like, so if you do more, you can get more. But like the ratio of effort versus return is not like, it's like scaling ads, right? You get your best returns, lower spans. But when you start spending an unbelievable money that you start to get, what do they say there's diminishing returns diminishing? It's
Blake Beus  38:49  a point of diminishing returns? Yeah, I can't
Greg Marshall  38:51  think of that word. But basically, that's what happens, right? How do you view other ad platforms and more activity, you have to look at as that can also be a form of diminishing returns because you only have so much time, energy resources to get the returns you want? Yeah. You see, I'm saying like, so if you want high returns focus on the area that could get you high returns, and stay focused on that.
Blake Beus  39:21  And if you must have all sorts of other channels, maybe just do some low dollar retargeting? Yep. Right? That's, that's kind of a set and forget type of a thing. Yep. Right. Even if it's five $10 a day, whatever. So you're still showing up? You'll probably be profitable on that traffic. Yep. But you don't have to put a ton of effort into it. Yeah, that's fine. And I feel
Greg Marshall  39:40  like that's probably the best use because every time I analyze accounts and see what works the best it what it really is, is focus on like the most profitable things that are doing and how do we just do more of that? And discipline yourself to not do anything
Blake Beus  39:59  when You got to understand, we got to wrap this up because it's getting old but you got to understand to Facebook's a big place. Yep. So if your most profitable traffic is on Facebook Yep, newsfeed. You mean you've got hundreds of 1000s of people and most, most clients unless they're selling something selling something low dollar, most clients, 1000 customers is a big deal. And 1000 people is not very big of an audience. Yeah. On Facebook, right. And so you've got quite a bit you don't need to expand to all these other channels if you don't want to right Facebook, Google, whatever, whatever channel it is, but so anyway, let's wrap this up. Right. How do people get in touch with
Greg Marshall  40:39  you? Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session
Blake Beus  40:43  and Blake beus.com/sm. Three is probably the best place to catch me right now. So
Greg Marshall  40:46  until next time,
Blake Beus  40:48  Kay, we'll catch you guys later. Bye, right
 

Blake Beus  0:01  Okay, performance Max, what is it? You said it's the new thing. Everybody loves it. I know nothing about it.
Greg Marshall  0:08  Well, and I'll say, I don't know if everyone loves it. But I do know that perpetual traffic, the podcast. Yeah. And the couple of gentlemen there that run it. They sound like they absolutely love really performance racks. And here's the brief explanation of what it is essentially, instead of doing, you know how, when you build your campaigns on Google, you would say like, if you have a target audience, you'd fill out like your own search campaign, its own YouTube campaign, its own display. Like to reach them all time performance, Max puts all that to one, huh? Okay, so all the placements are kind of batched into one. And then what it does, and, you know, once again, this is new. So supposedly, what this does, is it picks it essentially does almost like its sales cycle, for all the different placements for you. So it kind of like, for example, let's say we were trying to sell Blake, instead of like me creating all these campaigns and forcing each campaign on you, everywhere you go. Performance Max is going to say, well, Blake's in market for a new camera, right? Because he's in market for a new camera. He's showing up on this website. So we'll show him some display, then we'll show him some content from a website, then we'll show him a YouTube video, though. So it's kind of like it chooses individuals, and then uses the placements as it thinks it's best necessary to get you to convert.
Blake Beus  1:36  Okay, gearing, placements and part of the journey based on the person viewing the ads. Correct. So you set up a bunch of assets. And then behind the scenes, Google knows a bunch about a person. Yep. And so they start showing you placements based on that. I'm guessing some sort of escalation as they see more and more, maybe there's higher intent. content a little bit later after, after they're more aware, something like
Greg Marshall  2:07  that? Well, yeah, here's the here's the thing that they're mentioned, I have run a couple of these campaigns is test. Okay. One thing that I do notice, you can either force or not force. And so far, the recommendation is to not force where the customer goes to. So what happens is, if you have all your tracking pixels on your website, Google's actually sends the person to the page that they think is most relevant to help the buyer journey. Okay, right. So instead of just a landing page, it is send it to a blog post first, and then something second, some third, okay. And my initial thought was probably the same as yours. Well, how would they know that? Right? But this one, so the, the guys over at perpetual traffic that are using that are saying they're getting like, insane results, okay. And they're, they are noticing that the landing pages are different, they're sending them to different parts of their website that they would never have to send them to you. And so this is the part where you're probably similar to me. Where I say, Wow, you really could just like, do I trust giving up all of that, I guess, control on the buyers journey? Yeah. Just to Google.
Blake Beus  3:18  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I have a lot of thoughts. And this is something I mean, this is my thoughts are centered around. We've, we've talked about this different businesses are different places their journey. Yep. My instant thought after you explained to me what it was, is, my guess is perpetual traffic, guys. And gals are working with bigger budgets. Yeah. And with with more established with more established businesses with more pages on their site. And therefore, you have more touch points that the algorithm can use to learn what a person is doing and what types of people are doing. And it probably works really, really well. When you have big budgets, large traffic volumes, large site with organic traffic even, and all of that. And I think that's great. I hope that they point out on the on the perpetual traffic that their experience might be different. Because if you're running ads, and this is your first time running ads, and I've got $100 a day, which is a big budget for me, you know, that's three grand a month on ads. Crazy, right? I I'm going to set this up. And I have a website that has four pages, you know, homepage, an offer page, a thank you page and About Me page and maybe a place to contact so maybe five pages. I'm going to follow. I'm going to follow perpetual traffic's advice on this performance, Max. It's probably not going to work for you. Yeah. And that doesn't mean the perpetual traffic is wrong. Yep. I'm what I'm saying is different. It's businesses need to need to function differently. Right. And those were my initial thoughts. What are you thinking? Well,
Greg Marshall  5:07  number one, they did mention that. It seems like they're one of the few that love performance max time. They've mentioned that there are several other, you know, digital Google Ads specific kind of gurus that don't believe in it. And they do not think it works. Okay. So they have mentioned this. Now, one thing that I did notice, they didn't point it out specifically, but I did notice, like, kind of off the cuff, they had mentioned, what they were spending, and it was it was a significant number, like 1000s a day or Yeah, so they're like in the 1000s, multiple 1000s per day. Yeah, versus a big,
Blake Beus  5:49  that's a big difference, right? If you're spending $1,000 a day, that's 30 grand a month and adds it. A lot of businesses aren't to that point. Yep. And that's fine. But yeah,
Greg Marshall  6:01  what you're saying about budgets? 100? Yeah, correct, though, because it is, when they mentioned that, there isn't a mention of like, starting at $10 a day in your space spending? I think they even said, like, a minimum $100 a day. Yeah, right. And so, my, and the, here's the other thing that they had mentioned is this can take up to 90 days, to really work. I
Blake Beus  6:29  don't doubt but I'm also thinking $1,000 a day for 90 days, to get to start working. So you got to have 100, I mean, you're gonna I mean, you'll be making sales at that point. But what I'm getting at is, you've got to, you've got to commit some serious funds. Yeah, it's not like you're gonna lose $90,000 That whole time, you'll make sales, but you have to be prepared to stick with it. Yep, and have your delivery down and everything. Because the other problem is, if you're not used to spending those types of budgets, you as a business might struggle with the delivery, you have that much in sales, right. And so then you have to end up turning your ads off, or reducing the scope of the ads, because you're scrambling to deliver. And then you're not getting the benefits, because you didn't you didn't let it learn for the 90 days or whatever. But that being said, I do see this as something that could be extremely powerful, especially, especially for companies that are big, because marketing campaigns and campaigns can get super complex if you're trying to manage every little piece. And so I can see this being extremely powerful. I just think there needs to be some caveats. The other thing I would say, too, is I don't know if you said the minimum was $100 a day, I don't know if that's Google's minimum or the perpetual traffic guys, were saying that that was the the minimum I for something like this that needs a lot of data to learn and work. I would want to be well within the minimum. Oh, yeah. Before I would even attempt it. Yep. Because if you're going to be just at the bare minimum to try to get this to work for 90 days, probably not, it's probably not going to, you're probably not going to see all of the benefits from it.
Greg Marshall  8:15  Well, I think, too, they they are mentioning that. This takes time, this is probably something so new, that that's why they're doing it more than like the day to day person. Because these individuals just have bigger budgets to actually justice all out. And so they just I think they didn't specifically say that, what their budgets were and things like that. But you can tell based on just listening to the podcast, you can tell that, you know, they're not spending a little bit they're spending quite a bit and they're really, you know, a lot of it is is talking about, you know, 20,000 30,000 40,000 and all the data points. And one of the things that I'm curious to get your opinion on, when I ran a couple of these performance just to see, like what this even does, right, I noticed that I have a very large bulk of the budget went towards Display Network. And my thought is, I don't know if I love that. But I also don't know if that's part of what Google knows. Right? Yeah, my thought is, Google display network can sometimes be challenging because you know, they can put them on websites that maybe don't make any sense. Or I'm not really sure the quality of that traffic.
Blake Beus  9:38  Yeah. I I mean, I'm laughing because I have such a love hate relationship with Display Network. Yeah. And every time I've worked with anything in Display Network, and let Google kind of decide the budget, it's blown. Yeah, budget on the wrong thing. Yep. And put Don't get on the wrong sites and the traffic i get from those if I dive into it and look at the leads we got from those is low, low, low quality. Yep. And but I think the key is you said especially cold traffic. Yep. I love display ads for warm traffic, people that already know who you are people. So I can keep showing up. That makes a lot of sense to me. The Ultra but cold truck and that's see I started laughing because this is where I get a little conspiratorial, or I'll dive into the My conspiracies here. But none of this is is found I have no evidence, yes, but this is, this is just me thinking that I sometimes wonder if Facebook and Google, they come out with this way to Hey, let us manage all of your things. So that they can kind of prop up the channels that are less profitable for them, but they have a large inventory of places to put ads. And so they'll dump budget into these things. Because that channel in isolation isn't really profitable for them. But when we have this thing where we, hey, you know, here's Google, we have 10 billion websites of Google Display ads on there. None of them are really profitable. So let's manage your budget. So dump money into those areas. And you'll get tons of impressions and it looks good on paper, but maybe, maybe isn't quite the best.
Greg Marshall  11:29  I think what you're saying to correct me if I'm wrong, but really to, to kind of build on that it feels like maybe the competition is getting so high on the most profitable channels, that it makes it harder for newer businesses and things like that. So they try to pretty much like, move some of that traffic over to other placements to give you the perception that the cost of traffic has dropped. Right? That's that's what it feels like to me.
Blake Beus  12:01  Do they blend the CPMs? Between all of that? Is it like a in the reporting? Is it a blended? CPN?
Greg Marshall  12:07  That's a good question. I when I looked into reporting, I think it is a blended, but you could probably split it out if you can put placements because I did. Here's some of the things. Some of the placements, I saw when I ran this performance max test for this one account. They didn't look great, right. So like, I don't know if there's a way to exclude certain types of sites or whatnot. But I remember having quite a significant amount of impressions on I remember a website where it was one of those like, very minimal, like when you go to visit a website, it's almost like, like it's built for not getting quality traffic. Yes, for lack of better way of saying it looks like it's just built to just get clicks. But that's it, that there's not real, qualified people reading this website. And so that's, that was one of the things that made me turn it off. And maybe I turned it off too soon. But according to them, their recommendation is, over time, if you're optimizing for conversion, it'll the system will learn all the sites that don't convert sure and stop showing it, some of those and so
Blake Beus  13:16  I'm okay with that. If they would just give me a refund on all that traffic. Right. Like, it'd be like, but you get like you guys get to keep all that money.
Greg Marshall  13:24  Yeah. And that's, that's the tricky part are spending money and watching it. And almost like, I'm not smarter than though Google algorithm. But I can tell you, like, you know, a website, that's not good. It's not going to convert immediately.
Blake Beus  13:39  Right? And I'm totally, I think it's great that you learn which sites are not going to convert, but I gotta blow a bunch of money to make that happen first, and then again, that's fine. If you already have a bunch of traffic, and you're you've got your sales cycle down and, and all that stuff. This is probably an amazing way to really scale up. Yep, big. But if you're not at that point, I can see this being a bit frustrating. Well,
Greg Marshall  14:07  one of that, so the targeting options, so here's like the big thing that they're the most excited about. Okay, so in the past, they talked about platform. Okay. And Platt like placement targeting right, so you use YouTube or search or display. And essentially what you're doing is you're using the placements as you're targeting this. Now they're talking more about audience time, right? And so they're saying like, if I target let's say, in market for cameras, time, directly, I'm following the people that are in market on cameras all over the internet. That's what seems to be what they're the most excited about. Interesting. Is it now these things have transitioned to audience targeting versus in the past, I guess only key word or parameters like that placement. Right.
Blake Beus  14:57  Right. So let me let me restate Because, because it used to be that I could say, Okay, I, I'm I'm targeting cameras, right? And then I would show up on camera blogs, camera, YouTube channels and that kind of stuff. But what you're saying is, it's switched because Google knows so much about people and their search history and everything. You could target cameras. And Google might know that Blake is interested in cameras, because I've been looking at them and Googling them and watching YouTube videos about them. But then when I hop onto a site that has a completely different interest of mine, say, cat, yep, I could see ads for Canon for cameras, because they know that I'm me. And even though I'm on a cat website, yep. I'm in market to buy a camera right now. And they're gonna keep showing correct stuff.
Greg Marshall  15:50  That's exactly that's a good,
Blake Beus  15:52  that's a good adjustment. I like that. That will be really interesting. I would love to see if that if that expands outside of just is that inside only performance Max? Or is that something that that you can show? Outside of that in a more targeted fashion? You
Greg Marshall  16:04  could use it outside of it. Okay. But I guess performance Max, is, you know, it's like the old kid.
Blake Beus  16:12  I mean, it makes sense, because it's on all the channels, I can see that.
Greg Marshall  16:16  I here see that? Here's my hesitation. Okay, so when I run, for example, when I run YouTube ads, or even some search or and display ads in the past, one thing is if like I noticed, if I don't exclude certain things, all the money goes to some of the traffic, right? So I've learned this the hard way with YouTube ads. Like, if you don't exclude certain placements, you'll get a lot of your ads showing kids channels. Yep. Right. Which is, it's tough to justify, like, you know, if it's on a kid's channel, they really got to
Blake Beus  16:53  say, and this is not to interrupt you, but I did interrupt you. So what are you going, this happens to me in my house, right? So all of my TVs are connected to my YouTube account. So because you know, my kids are younger, whatever. And so when they watch something on YouTube that's associated with me, Google doesn't know that my kids that my kids are watching, they might think that I just love you know,
Greg Marshall  17:19  hey, Bear. Watching my little
Blake Beus  17:23  kids. Yeah, so. And so it's, that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Greg Marshall  17:31  And that's, that's the challenge. See, because I do believe that performance Max might run into that same issue, right? Because it's connected to your device. If my kid is on Disney World, calm watching cartoons, he may be served the ad. And so that's my thing is the placements are, are difficult, because if you don't exclude them, the other one is mobile apps. Like if I don't exclude mobile apps from campaigns, I ended up let's say, you spent 100 bucks, like $80 of that will be on mobile apps. And then when you look at what mobile apps, then you look and go there's no way that people are they're just playing Words of friends or something like that, that I've got foreign clicks from that. And those are
Blake Beus  18:14  accidental clicks. You know, like, who's driving me the worst, those drives? We I bumped into that a lot. And unfortunately, it's not necessarily easy to turn off mobile apps. It's very convoluted. But yeah, I was I was working with a client that had a business to business project. And if we forgot to shut off mobile apps, yep. It would dump so much of their budget into Clash of Clans. Oh, yeah. And they will get a ton of clicks. And no one would fill out the lead form, of course, yeah. Because they were playing a game and they accidentally clicked the ad because it takes up half the screen. And it's just that was that was the place I was thinking where a lot of budget could be done. Well, can you exclude that with performance Max? Or do you have to have it turned off?
Greg Marshall  18:58  That's the thing that at least when I ran it, I couldn't find where to exclude it. Oh, interesting. So it's, maybe it's possible, and I was looking in the wrong area. But I can exclude. And that's the first thing I thought of, I saw performance when I said this would be perfect. As long as I can exclude mobile apps, and kids channel and TV and TV distribution. And I would be this Yeah, I'd be all on it. But I couldn't. And so then as soon as I went to my report, to see all the placements of large majority of my impression is looked exactly like when you run Display Network, and you don't shut off mobile app. It's it's all going to mobile apps and things where you're just like, I don't know, but this doesn't seem like the people that are playing these games, or going to buy it
Blake Beus  19:47  and they might be the people. They might be the people you're after, but they're not in the buying mood. Yeah, if they're playing. It drives me nuts. If someone's playing a game. Yeah, they're not going to fill out a checkout for me. at my site, they're on dumping their credit card number. They're in the middle of a freaking game. Yep. And many of those games use triggering mechanisms based on timers. Yep. Because you can't leave the game for very long or else you lose out on whatever. And so that's yeah, that's, that's frustrating. So
Greg Marshall  20:17  yeah, so with performance Max, you know, I just wanted to kind of wrap this up, I want to talk about performance Max, give it a shot, if you have a big budget and understand that, according to kind of the leaders in this space, right now, they're saying it can take up to 90 days to really see the results. So really think you know, if you can stomach 90 days to do that, great. But outside of that, I would just highly recommend maybe looking at doing individual channels at the moment till you can work your budget up to, to those kinds of levels. Interesting. I'm curious to see where this goes. Yeah. So the the idea, and in theory, this sounds like a fantastic product. Now, I just think the kinks need to be worked out as far as placements. Because you know, how I feel about places when I see those mobile apps or kids channels, I'm just thinking, this is not a placement that should be in there,
Blake Beus  21:16  let alone spend a majority of my budget.
Greg Marshall  21:18  And unfortunately, that's what that's what's happened. And maybe there are some better and different ways to do it. So I'll stay tuned and we'll report those back to you when we learned but outside of that, Blake kind of get a hold of
Blake Beus  21:32  Blake beus.com/s M three is the best way to get in touch with me right now.
Greg Marshall  21:37  And if you want to get ahold of me, it's Greg marshall.co. You can fill out the form we can book a free strategy session. And until next time, we'll see you later. Bye. Are you wanting to 20 minutes right? Yeah, that's
Blake Beus  21:49  great. I was
 

Blake Beus  0:00  Let's get let's get to lifetime value. That's what we talked about today. Right? Lifetime value. Yeah. So why is that important?
Greg Marshall  0:06  Yeah. So I think lifetime number one lifetime value is, you know, they call it LTV, right. In marketing, you have to abbreviate everything, right. So, LTV lifetime value. And the reason why lifetime value of a customer is super important is because it allows you to understand how aggressive you can get with your marketing and advertising, especially if you're doing paid in any way, whether that's paid ads, influencer, paid marketing, high levels of SEO paying for an SEO team, you can figure out how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer. And so lifetime value is probably the most important metric in a business, in my opinion. Because if you don't kind of constantly work at trying to increase it, you're just not going to be able to get the business growth results that you want. And you're not gonna be able to have the profits, and you most likely will miss opportunities, if you have good lifetime value of a customer, right? And that's one thing that I find is, if you don't like for example, let's say your lifetime value customer is way higher than you actually think it is. And you might not be aggressive enough to acquire those customers, simply because you haven't figured out what your lifetime value is.
Blake Beus  1:25  Yeah, yeah. So I mean, one of the things every time I talked about lifetime value, most people understand what the metric is. But oftentimes, they don't know what the metric means. And I think you summarized it really well. Most of the time. When I talk with people about it, they they know well, yeah, that's how much money I make over the life of the you know, the customer. That's that's what the metric is. But what it means is what you were saying how aggressive you can get with your marketing and tech marketing tactics and things because once you know that, then you can scoop up more of the market share exactly. But if you don't know what that actually is, then you can get aggressive. It's, it's almost like most people don't think a whole lot about it other than, hey, that's profit, yes. And not think about it from a standpoint of acquiring new customers or finding out finding new people to help or whatever, right?
Greg Marshall  2:14  That's actually a good point. Because I think you're right, in the sense that people are not thinking about it, they like they off and they're just like, Yeah, my lifetime value may be XYZ, right? But they're not, they're not realizing that they could use that like data point, to actually take more action or to drive growth in their business. And I think typically, where the customer gets kind of caught up is like, and I've run into this to lifetime value is again, theory, that's great if they're worth $10,000. But I can't spend $9,000 Get them, right, because it's 10,000 over their lifetime, not immediately, right? And so you have to almost balance the two between lifetime value, and then cash flow turnaround. So like, how much cash do you get from the right away? Right? And then how fast can you essentially survive and reach that lifetime value?
Blake Beus  3:06  Right. And I feel like when we start talking about that, that it's very easy for people to envision that from a single customer standpoint. But they forget that you're signing up customer, whatever the product is, or service is, you're signing up more than one customer at a time. Yep. Unless you're one of those companies that only works with one customer time, which is very rare. So you're signing up multiple customers at a time. And so as you sign up people, you can start seeing the cashflow come in from people you signed up maybe a month ago or whatever. But then you start seeing the cash flow coming in from the people you signed up a year ago on their secondary purchase or their upsell or their, their renewal of the membership or subscription or whatever. And, and so you end up having, I don't know I think of it like stacks, right? You're you're stacking on top of each other. And you have this this this life cycle where you just kind of keep going up the hill, even though it's a little bit up and down at first. If you do your if you if you have an eye on the lifetime value can keep growing, growing, growing. And then you can get to the point where well yeah, I can spend $9,000 to get a 10,000 back customer. Because I know actually because I've been working on my lifetime value. This no longer $10,000 It's $50,000 for my lifetime value. But that's realized over five years instead of, you know, lifetime over to what I was calculating before. And so now it makes perfect sense to spend $9,000 to get that $10,000 Customer whatever. Yep. Right?
Greg Marshall  4:43  Well, and I think too, you should aim on. So here's like some actual strategies you can use to try to figure it out. And then what you should do so if you just started out, it's a little bit tougher, but look at maybe a competitor's business, and see what their lifetime All right, what are they most likely getting? Is it? Do they stick around for six months? 12 months, two years, right? What's their average order value and do your research that way, if you're just starting, if you've been in business for at least a year or more, take a look at all of your customers. And then it takes time, but just figure out how long people are staying around. Or how many purchases are they making right? Over a 12 month or 24 month period, right, and then come up with a number that is average, right? Because you're gonna have some people that are like, really like, their lifetime value is massive, like I have some clients that their lives. But if I based everything off that, that may be skewing the numbers in the wrong direction. And same with people that are maybe shorter, so take the average of what all of your customers are doing, then once you get that lifetime value, average, then what you want to do is some ways to increase it, think about how can I get them to purchase more, right, so you can actually have them buy more at the point of purchase, you can increase your prices, you can try to get a like a subscription model where they're paying each month, you can come up with unique product offerings for that audience, to get them to buy more, there's a bunch of different ways that you can use to increase the lifetime value your customer which you should be obsessively thinking about. How do I get them to stay on longer, pay more, buy faster, and get more offerings for me?
Blake Beus  6:30  Right, right. And, and one of one of my favorite tactics is great, what's the next logical step for for my customers to get. And it's like, starting a business is complicated. Coming up with a product line is complicated, or package of services or something like that. And if you're just barely starting out, or even if you've been in business for a few years, you you're not where you could be. And you can only really focus on a small set of things at once. But once you kind of get that down, you can start saying okay, now I've I've service to these clients. Yep. What's the next logical step that I couldn't do two years ago, but maybe I have the cash flow, or the bandwidth or the staff to be able to execute on right and you see this all the time with the guru model is quite easy right to, to see this, you'll see them launch some sort of a product or a service. And then the next logical step might be group coaching, or consulting. Right, the next large logical step after that might be a retreat that's like a $10,000 to go to, you can escalate pretty quick. But you don't have to have all those pieces together. At first. Yep. And you don't have to make sure the next logical step works for all of your customers. Because there's, there's going to be some that will will need that next logical step. And some that won't. Yeah. But you see this all the time. Another way I've seen people and businesses improve their lifetime value is just maybe simplifying the process. So one of my favorite examples is Amazon, they kind of pioneered the two day shipping. Yep, and the Amazon Prime, where you could pay one fee and get free two day shipping one fee once a year and get free two day shipping. Well, that kind of locks you in it makes it so much easier for you to keep buying more from them. Because you pay this one fee. And it's like, well, I'll just get it on prime. And I'll just I'll just get on with prime, you almost feel obligated to use those because you pay Yes, you pay for you pay for it up front. But it's it's insanely convenient. And I think that single innovation right there has allowed Amazon to to grow way bigger than than many other companies.
Greg Marshall  8:40  Well, and another strategy you could use for lifetime values, you can ask yourself the question, why is my lifetime value of a customer not higher? Right. And once you come up with some of the reasons why you can start to fix that, and plug that hole like that's one thing I like to use when coming up with just ad campaigns and landing page ideas is what is preventing the like think negatively Oh, yeah. Why would someone say no to this offer? Why would someone not stick around? Why would someone not keep buying more and more from me, that typically will help give you the answers. Yeah, what you can fix, essentially, to get better results. And this is like, like, I tell my clients and this is my own personal belief as well. Optimization never ends, right? Like you're just constantly. There is no end. Yeah, it's it's not like okay, I've arrived, I have my perfect lifetime. Trust me, Jeff Bezos and his crew. They're still thinking about how to increase the lifetime value of customers. And they're very rare, right? And so this is part of the the journey and the game is to continuously figure out how can I provide more value so that the customer sticks around more often? buys more often buys more things, and refers their friends and family to us? Yeah,
Blake Beus  9:59  yeah. It's, it's a unique thing. And I mean, you might be thinking about, you know, it's easy to kind of pick them. I like picking on boring businesses, right? Because there's so there's such an underserved model. And I say boring lightly is title companies is one we pick on quite a bit here because title companies provide a valuable service, but you don't see a whole lot of marketing campaigns aimed at getting title company clients for marketing or whatever. It's this kind of boring model. But it's, it's an interesting one. But there's so many things that they can do to improve increase that they could say, Okay, well, we provide the service. What if we found customers or taught workshops to people on how to buy their second property as a rental or something like that, right, so now you're turning a customer that typically buys maybe once or twice in their life buys a home, now you might find a company customer that's going to buy maybe five or six times in their lifetime, because you've showed them how, how simple the rental purchasing process can be. And you are the clear company for providing the title services, sales purchases, and things along those lines. So there's so many ways to make this happen. And it's so easy to just forget about it or not think about it, because you're focused on delivering for your clients or, or the next product or whatever. And, and taking a step back and actually looking at this stuff is is super, super important. Well, I
Greg Marshall  11:26  think the next question, typically, I think people will have as well, what if I just sell like, you know, I work a lot of T shirt brands, right? Or low cost items? Well, how do I increase my lifetime value of a customer? If it's just like I have a T shirt? Yeah. Or I have a watch or a necklace? Or whatever? And basically, the the simple answer is this, always come up with the next product for those customers, meaning that part never ends, you want to continuously be coming up with new product, new product ideas, because that's actually how you increase your lifetime, lifetime value of a customer versus only trying to increase the price on the front end. Yep, that's like one mistake that I feel like a lot of the, I guess, lower cost items, type businesses, the mistake they make is, they're not making enough new products for their customer to keep purchasing. They're just kind of trying to tweet the price of their one product
Blake Beus  12:28  or, or the marketing materials, or the ad materials or something.
Greg Marshall  12:32  And that to me, that's the wrong approach. Because you can only squeeze out so much from like, let's say you go, well, you're selling it for 30 and say 35. Well, why that? Versus if you made 10 new products from that same customer? You can get 300. Right? I mean, absolutely. So which one would you rather have? And I think one you can control better than the other because the market will only pay so much for certain products. Therefore your strategy, I believe should be? Well, that's what they'll pay for certain products. Let me get the more of those products, while reducing my customer acquisition costs.
Blake Beus  13:08  Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, you could think of more T shirts, you could think of related products, right? So if you sell T shirts, maybe maybe there's something related acts Yeah, hurts or shorts or sweatbands. Or something else. That's an easy just, well, yeah, add that on. Whatever that is, the other thing you could do is you could have bounced back sales, right. So every time someone buys a product, in 24 hours, you shoot them an email or a text or something saying, Hey, if you buy something else in the next 12 hours, we'll toss it in the box, no extra shipping, just just buy it, because we're already shipping this other thing to you. And so that's an easy way to just bump up your your initial kind of order value. And then lifetime value could have deals for returning customers are saying, Hey, we heard you loved this, this shirt or this, this whatever, we have this new line that's related or buy this as a gift to someone, right? There's got to be someone in your life that would love this also, right? You could do
Greg Marshall  14:07  subscriptions. So I have one client that sells hair products, they've created a subscription model called a hair products. With jewelry, let's say we use jewelry, you can, if they're buying a watch, come up with a different version of that same lens or offer them more watches more often than more necklaces or rings. Or the point is you have to continuously get you need to create new things for your customer to buy. And that's how you really increase the lifetime value of your customer. Especially if you're in kind of like that product business. service based businesses can be you can make the argument they could be a little bit easier for lifetime value because service typically, people need services built over and over and over again, not just one offs. Yeah, it's almost rare to have service based businesses that are like I don't They need this one time and never again. Yeah. Right. And so because of that, and service based businesses, really, the simplest way to do it, is to get them on a membership or subscription model. Yeah. Right, and then just retain them as long as possible. And that's really how you can increase your lifetime value. And that
Blake Beus  15:18  model works really well. Yeah, I'm glad you use the word retain, because I was gonna bring up retainers for like, you know, legal fees, or whatever you see this all the time with, with big companies, they have a legal firm on retainer. And what that means is they pay them money every month to handle a handful of things. And if something bumped comes up, they kind of have this buffer zone of basically prepaid legal hours, that they can say, hey, come take come square up this thing for us or whatever. And and I think that model could very easily be used in so many other industries, but it's just not the norm. And so people don't think about it a whole lot. But for a service based business business, the retainer model could totally work really, really, really well.
Greg Marshall  16:03  Well, I think, if he spent a lot of your time thinking about how can I get repeat, repeat purchases, then doing the membership subscription type model makes the most sense, because it happens automatically, right? And you don't have to keep chasing them down. Yeah, to get them to buy over and over again, and then your job becomes just make sure that the service is good, and that they really love what's going on, so that they stick around as long
Blake Beus  16:30  as possible. Yeah, and your your job shifts from constantly trying to find brand new people, to that part's a little bit automated. Yeah, too. And then the next thing is, is basically communicating the value to them, which you and I've talked a lot about, right? Because the retainer model is very similar to how you run your business, essentially, right. And, and we've talked about how you communicate the value to your clients and customers, because sometimes they're an expert in, say, selling T shirts, yep, you're an expert in advertising those things while need the while they need to work together, they don't always understand the value you're providing, because that's not their realm. And so you have to spend time explaining that value. But that's a shift in your business. But But that alone provides a lot of value and makes the retainer worth it
Greg Marshall  17:21  exactly. And all of my businesses in the past have always worked off of essentially a retainer or more, what you would call E of t model, right? Where people are paying every single month to go ahead and have us provide them services. And to me, that's it's a great way to build a great cash flow, right, predictable cash flow, which helps you to increase your lifetime value of your customers and get more customers because of that constant cash flow coming in. That gives you essentially what it does, it gives you time to let the customer value play out. Yeah, without having it to be like I have to keep selling over and over and over and over again. Hope and then you know, kind of risking it with well, how do I although this customer can be worth a lot in the future, I don't have the cash right now to be as aggressive as I want to be. And so that kind of helps to fill in the gaps there. So I think with lifetime value, the biggest, the biggest thing we should focus on is repeat purchases. I like to tell clients, the money is not made on the first sale, it never is. The money is made on the second sale and every sale after that. And if you have that mindset, you behave differently, then if you need to make a profit on the first sale, because you will spin your wheels, essentially forever. How to make that work, because there's too many variables that you don't control. You can't control how much competition is in the market for ad space. You can't control you know, Seo 100%, right, you can't control influence of marketing 100% There's a lot of things you really cannot throw, at least not 100% control, but you can control how many things you can put in front of his customers in order to get the maximum value.
Blake Beus  19:08  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm gonna guess if you're listening to this, you might be thinking okay, cool. Well, maybe let's get people on a contract or whatever. And I there's definite pros and cons of say like a long term contract. I mean, legal companies with the legal retainers, that's definitely on a contract. I know businesses that they sign up people for money month after month service, but there's there's no long term contract. It's a it's a basically you pay for the one month and if you want to cancel the next month, you can Yep. What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of that? I'm sure you've seen both sides of it as well.
Greg Marshall  19:45  Well, I come from my first job, basically was selling contracts. Okay, right. And then I've, over time gone away from that. So there's pros and cons, right? So the pros and contracts Bay See is, it's almost like you're guaranteed not guaranteed, but closer guarantee the money up front whether you do a good job or not, right, right, like the person, they, you know, they could have a billion complaints. But you still get paid. Right? Right. So that's the pro, you will get paid, you'll get your money, nine times out of 10. All right? The cons are, sometimes it can make you lazy. Because you know, you're gonna get their money anyways. And then the cons can also be you have worst customer, like the customer experience is not as good. Oftentimes, yeah. Because they're because there's no incentive to keep them, then it's kind of like, you're just letting it happen. And there's no like real reason for you to make sure the customer is actually happy. Yeah, because sometimes that cost you more money to do that. So it's actually less profitable to make the customer happy. And that position, which logs are wise can hurt you. Because once that contract is done, they're telling all their friends and family not to sign that contract and not go there. So you could be losing customers, or you don't even realize just because of the contract now, on the no contract the pros are, the conversion rates are easier, because people like the opportunity to I can get out anytime. Yeah, some of the cons that can come from that are just people can cancel easier. And you actually have to make sure every single month to keep them Oh, darn right, Oh, shucks, he actually have to do your job. So those are kind of the cons from a business standpoint, the con is the money's not guaranteed, right? Unless you do a good job. And so there, there are pros and cons, I tend to like the no contract, just because I do want to at least hold myself accountable for like, trying to do a good job, right customer versus if I get you in a contract. And it's just like, Well, I'm gonna get your money no matter what. And there's no incentive for me. And if you try to cancel, you can't because you're gonna kind of Yeah, and it just, it just feels icky, or
Blake Beus  22:06  that way. Yeah, I've noticed. I mean, let me put it this way, there's clearly a time and a place for a contract, you get that. Typically, I think that works a whole lot better for larger businesses with a very complicated thing. And both sides need to deliver and hold true to something. But for smaller businesses, almost always, I feel like the the the month to month is just a simpler transaction all the way around simpler sales. Like you said, you don't have to put as much effort into trying to sell it. You don't have to go over all this legal, whatever, it is just a Let's sign up and try it. It makes the explanation of value easier. And a lot of people don't think about that. But it's so hard sometimes to explain the value of something complicated, like running Facebook and Google Ads ad strategy. When it's so much easier to just show that Yep. Right. And so the no contract allows you to just say, let's just do a quick trial run. Yep, see how this works. I'll show you how I'm working. And then you can take that first month to show them how that works. Yep. And and it's so much easier for that value to be explained. And then and then they can continue to sign up.
Greg Marshall  23:25  Well, and there is one, there's one card that I actually forgot to mention that, depending on your business strategy and goal can make or break things. So if you basically if your objective is to build a business to sell it, then the big pro to a contract is the people who would buy it. Love that. Yeah, because they're investors, and they typically don't really, they typically don't really care about the customer experience. They just want the money, right? And how much money can I get this in the future? And how many of your customers are locked in? Versus if you're not trying to sell a business doesn't matter. But if you're trying to sell it fit, everything is month to month, they're probably not going to be as interested in your business because it could all leave you know, overnight.
Blake Beus  24:17  Well, that's a really good point. I've never, none of my businesses have ever started. And what I'm doing right now has never been with the intent to exit or sell in that way. And so that's something I don't think about a whole lot. So I'm glad you brought that up because that that is a completely valid point. Yeah,
Greg Marshall  24:35  I mean, if you're trying to get a big payout, like let's say, because there are you know, this is like a sport almost where there are people that just want to build this company with the whole intent of selling it to someone, then I highly recommend that you get contracts in your business to make it more attractive. Yeah, just from you know, from just a logical standpoint, and investors gonna want to know What type of money? Am I going to basically guaranteed every month? And how long do I have these customers? And the reason why I know that just from gyms in the past that I've seen been sold. Yeah, that is typically the difference because I've worked at two different types of gyms, ones that are contract based ones that are month to month days. And the contract based ones tend to sell faster at a higher price point. Oh, because they love guaranteed the contract guaranteed that that makes a ton of sense. So yeah, so that's, that's a con if, if you are planning on selling your business at some point and want that option, then you you definitely don't want to have a contract.
Blake Beus  25:36  Yeah, yeah. super interesting. Interesting. Okay. So I had one last thing I wanted to bring up. And then you know, you, you have more, but this is this is the last thing I wanted to say. One of my favorite ways for subscription models, or like prepaid model or whatever to increase the lifetime order value is something that's easy, but hard at the same time. And I love this strategy, it's, you get on the phone with everyone that has cancelled because they didn't like your product. Yep. And you ask them, Hey, I know we already lost you as a customer. I'm not trying to get you back. But what would have kept you? Yep. And then make those changes? Those are the people that are gonna give you the feedback that's going to pivot your business in the best way possible. And they're insanely uncomfortable conversations. Yeah, well, they'll
Greg Marshall  26:30  give you honest feedback, honest feedback, right? honest feedback.
Blake Beus  26:36  And doing that, and implementing those things. I mean, some of them are just going to be jerks, right? Like, whatever. But taking that feedback, and really looking at it, and maybe evaluating it with a business partner, or, you know, a colleague or something like that. And implementing some of those changes will have a huge impact, because they know what you might not be seeing, yeah, would be an improvement. And then you make those improvements and boom, you're you're doing way better. You're you're retaining customers longer. All of that stuff just starts blowing up. Everybody's happy. Everybody's happy, except for that one person.
Greg Marshall  27:12  But I think in the long term, yeah, having those conversations are always you know, they're always difficult, right? Because no one really wants to say, like, you did a bad job, you, you're this done or whatever. But if it happens, there's two ways to look at it. One, you can completely ignore it, which I don't recommend. Or two, you can take the the insight and make it stronger to make sure it never happens again. And I always like to use sports analogies, right? If you lose, you know, if you lose a game, yeah, because the other team was just draining threes on you all day, oh, then your job is to go, I'm going to lose in every way possible, except by the three. Right? And so you can use that competitive spirit that energy to go, don't get too emotionally attached to the whatever they say, and don't take it too personal. Just take use it to be able to go, if I'm going to lose, it will not be in that fashion. And that's how I like to take feedback from if a customer has had a bad experience or hasn't gotten the results that they want or whatever. That's how I take is how can I make sure that that doesn't happen again? Yeah. And any other way? I will lose, but that way? Yeah. And so with that being said, Do you have anything else to talk about as far as lifetime value? Customer?
Blake Beus  28:31  No, nope, that's it. As far as contacting me or whatever, just go to Blake beus.com/sm. Three, if you want to go directly to the SM three group, then that's where we do group coaching, coaching, consulting, surrounding social media marketing and digital marketing and all of that good stuff. If you want some one on one time with me, that's a good place to do it. And Greg, how about you,
Greg Marshall  28:53  Greg Marshall Dotco. If you could go ahead and book a free strategy session. And you know, outside of that, I think, until next time, we'll see you later. All right, bye.
 

We do this every time we talk about stuff, we just start nerding out before we even turn the camera on and start recording the podcast. And so today you were just talking about you've been testing eight or nine different accounts. Yes. With an old school strategy. Yes. It and it's not new. No, it's, it's, it needs to happen. Yeah, right. Off offline events, specifically for Facebook, Google does this a little bit different, but what we're gonna be talking about Facebook today, uploading offline events to tell, you know, tell everyone out there what that means.
Greg Marshall  0:33  Yeah, essentially what you're doing especially like if you have a Shopify store, but you can do it for WooCommerce, or whatever is any whenever you you have your your buyers on your website, you would download your buyer list or export your orders. And then you would upload that information back into the offline events manager, which can be found in the Events Manager, you just have to create a new offline events account, super easy, and then attach it to your ad account. But what you do is you upload that information, and you just map the data, which is a fancy way of saying, just make sure each column is named correctly. So that when you upload the CSV file, or the Excel sheet, or whatever, it can then understand what it is it should be looking for. Okay. And with this, this has helped tremendously on getting better information and data back into the ad accounts. Because on the ads manager, if you don't upload, it seems like it misses a lot of the purchases, right. And I have a specific account that essentially only does runs ads to sell their product. So this is how I'm using it to measure to make sure that it's accurate. Basically, it's like its own case study, right. And so far, so good. It seems like it does catch all the purchases, where as before he was the challenge that I would run into, we would run the ads. And we know this is the only source of traffic. And you would look into the ad account. But it would say like, you only got a few purchases off this ad, even though we may have had 10 or 15 of this exact product. And we're like, and we know it's not organic traffic, right? Because this is a brand new shirt, we haven't even promoted it anywhere yet. Right? So the only way they could have purchased it was through the
Blake Beus  2:20  app, right? So it's a brand new, this particular thing and brand new product, whatever, there's no SEO no zero for that, for that product, no email campaigns going after that product, no organic social media, whatever, for that product, it's a new product, you run ads for it. And in the back system, you're seeing, you know, 1020 purchases, but um, ads, you're seeing three for purchases, and you know, those purchases had to come from the ad because that's the only source of traffic for that page. Exactly. And so you start uploading off yeah, conversion, we start
Greg Marshall  2:51  uploading off offline conversions. And what happens is, all that data gets fed back into the account. And it starts to show and match up with the amount of sales we actually have. And it breaks down per ad, which ad was doing it. Now the challenge that we had before uploading this was you will look at the cost for purchases if you had 10 sales. But Facebook Ads Manager on the front end is only showing like three, right? Well, your cost of purchase seems like it's outrageous, right? Even though your ad spend to revenue match what you need, right. And the challenge with that is you become tempted to turn off the the campaigns just because the front end numbers are like oh, man, those I mean cost per purchase $48. That doesn't make any sense.
Blake Beus  3:36  So you're ending up turning off an ad that's actually working? Correct. Facebook's reporting? Yep. That is, is inaccurate. Exactly. Right. And it's tough to scale. Because
Greg Marshall  3:46  if no, even though your gut is telling you that this is happening, it's still like, you just don't feel as confident, right? Making the decision of scaling something when it's showing when the numbers themselves on the ads manager reporting are completely off. Well,
Blake Beus  4:03  it's hard. You gotta you gotta, you gotta trust your gut over trusting Bismack.
Greg Marshall  4:07  Yeah, exactly. That's good.
Blake Beus  4:11  But there's also an actual problem with that. Because if the ad account isn't tracking those sales, yeah, then algorithmically. They're going to, it's not going to keep performing, even though in the real world it is performing because the, those numbers do reflect what the ad account algorithm thinks it's happening. Yep. And so they know you're selling this product for $30. And if if they're only showing, you know, three purchases when you actually had 20. Yep, they're assuming that your cost per purchase is way more than your actual product. So then you lose, you think you're losing and so they're thinking, well, this is just a terrible product. Let's give it to the other things that are performing. So even though you know this ad is working, it's not going to scale well. Yep. Because you've got to fix the algorithm data problem. Yep. So you're uploading these offline conversions. And I know in the past, I've done this in the past in the past, we would either get duplicate duplicate conversions, it would over report revenue, or it would miss miss. It would tie it to the wrong campaign, or the wrong ad account and everything like that. But you were saying, that's, well, that's still an issue. Yes. But it seems to get resolved over time. Like check. Yeah, tell me more about what you're saying there.
Greg Marshall  5:30  So right now, and this has just been, you know, from just staring at this over and over and over again, to see if this is a way that I can utilize. So it seems like initially, there may be double reporting. Right. But I don't know of Facebook, because when you upload the events, especially when you first set up, it says, In the I don't know the captions, wherever the disclaimer, it says that the duplicate, right, you know, anything that was maybe tracked on the front end and the back end, and it takes it out, right. And so initially, when I tried it, it seemed like it was counting as two. But then I look back at it, and it seems like the values went down. Like they normalized, like somehow they went in and cleaned it up so that it's not over.
Blake Beus  6:20  Okay, so what I'm understanding what you say is, clarify, if I'm wrong, what I'm understanding is, when you initially make that upload, it takes, I don't know, 30 minutes to an hour to turn through the offline data and attribute things. And then you can hop into ads manager, and it will show you how it did. Yep. So at first, it's still showing over reporting revenue and over reporting purchases. But what you're saying then is maybe after a few days, or after a week, you go look at that same time period, it seems to be much closer to reality. Yeah. So it's like it's over reporting for a bit, and then it normalizes over here, I'm in the DT. It's almost like the deduplication happens over a 72 hour period or a five day period, whereas the revenue reporting is almost instantaneous. After it does,
Greg Marshall  7:12  yes, yes. So that's exactly what I'm saying. So that's what I've been really watching. To see if that is the case, if it actually is deduplicating. Over time, so that it is accurate. Because then if that's the case, then you would just if as long as you use the best practices that it says to use is as close to the purchase as possible, upload the data. So really, they say that, yeah, so I remember reading it somewhere, I think is when you first set it up, it says make sure to put the information as close to the purchase as possible, meaning, don't wait three weeks to upload your last three weeks of purchases and upload it because then your match rate will not be as good. We've been using daily. So every single morning, uploading the purchases from the day before, that seems to be working. And it seems to make it a little more accurate. And it's just given us better overall, like under at least understanding of what is working and what isn't because many times I've talked with clients, and they've, in fact, there's another client that I'm thinking of that said this, whatever ad you have running right now is working really well. And then when I looked in the ads manager, the purchase, the cost per purchase were like really high. But in their Shopify account, they were doing really well, like the ratio that I wanted from ad spend to revenue was 50% less than what I typically want, right? So like meaning, I typically want the ad cost to be especially for a product 30% or less of revenue. Okay, make sense? I don't want to ever spend more than 30%.
Blake Beus  8:51  Yeah, with a physical product or a physical digital, you got, you got a little more
Greg Marshall  8:55  flexible, but physical products, you have to, you know, take into account costs of product and shipping. And I never want to spend more than 30%. They were spending like it was a 15%. So it was 50% less than the maximum that I would even want to spend. Okay, which means it was like imperfect range. But the ads manager from what was being reported was way off, compared to what was in their Shopify. So that's why I was like, and there's got to be a way to figure out like, because it's you feel like you're almost blind making decisions that way, interest of your life. Yeah. So and the other thing we've talked about is if, if the ad account is only getting so little data, then it can't optimize as fast. So by uploading these offline conversions, and they imagine it essentially speeds up the optimization. That's where I found right that's my theory on why every single account that we're using this on, it has improved. Yeah, like their sales numbers have improved without massive increases and but
Blake Beus  9:57  yeah, so I mean, I've gotten so many questions about this because, again, this is not a new strategy. Yeah. But I feel like people, media buyers, whatever, kind of forget about some of these these it's a tedious strategy. It's it's not. It's not cool. It's not sexy. It's not like this. But my first question is, what what data are you uploading? Right? I know you're you're using this with a lot of Shopify stores, you can use this without any any, any checkout process whatsoever. You can even use this for lead conversions that are don't have $1 amount attached to it. But But what data are you uploading in this CSV file? And what do you think is the most like, what is the critical kind of data for sure,
Greg Marshall  10:43  so I think the most important date, alright, this is what we're upload, and then I'll tell you what I think is most important. So we're uploading first name, last name, order ID, time it was purchased, the value associated with that purchase. And then the city, state country and everything else that I can map, email address, email address, phone number, if you if you're gathering up if you have that, like literally everything as much as you can. And then I upload that, and then it goes as and matches based off. But the most important thing that I think that makes it more accurate, unless you're doing it every single day, the time purchase. That's what I think is the most valuable data set in their time is the time that makes a purchase. That makes sense, because there's lots of ways for
Blake Beus  11:32  the data ball to get dropped, and then the attribution data ball to get dropped. But a point in time only happens once. And unless you're doing 10s of 1000s of orders every hour. The odds are that the time of purchase is extremely unique to that one event that Facebook knows happened, but maybe doesn't know
Greg Marshall  11:53  who that was exactly, exact. Okay, so that's what I think is helping the matching of all this kind of in my mind, my thought process is these offline advances, whatever the pixel doesn't get on the front end, by uploading their first last name, email, and most importantly, the time of purchase, and what they purchased like the dollar amount, that's where I think they're able to go and backtrack and go this individual was on this time. This is the email associated with them. They did click on an ad they did see this. That's That's my theory on what they're doing. Yeah. Is that Is that what you think? You're more? You're more of the data guy that understands all this?
Blake Beus  12:34  Yeah, I would, I would definitely agree with you on that, like, I'm just thinking through how that would work from a data matching perspective has taking a big step back, let's just look at the flow. I'm scrolling through and I see one of the ads for for, you know, one of your clients, and I click on it inside of Facebook's app on my phone. Facebook knows exactly who I am. And the exact time that I click on that ad, yep, from there, the data starts to get kind of fuzzy, because we're going over to someone's website, if have iOS 14 14.5, or any of those others, data tracking starts to get kind of fuzzy and kind of mushy, but they know for a fact who I am. And when I clicked that ad, what ad I clicked on what campaign that came from, and what ad group that was from has its own platform. It's on platform and they know all of that data. But then once I move past that point, that data starts to get a little fuzzy, there may be only getting certain bits and pieces, there may be there may be getting anonymized some anonymized data or hashed data from the pixels sent back to their servers. But they know that I clicked on that. And they kind of know what time those other events are happening. So if I click on this, and 10 seconds later, there's an Add to Cart event with a couple of other identifiers, ie a browser that's similar to the browser on my phone, the operating system, homophone that's similar to that they, they start being able to piece those things back together, but maybe the ball gets dropped on the purchase event or something like that. So when you're uploading a purchase event time, with a name, and an email address, and $1 amount and all of those things. It's almost like they can connect the dots. If you think about those connected dot drawings you have do you have your kids do right now? Yeah, you know, they have dot one, two, and three, and then dot 24 and 25. The offline Conversions can say, Okay, here's dots, you know, 478 1250. And from there, you can definitely draw straight line to to that conversion and more accurately pinpoint that purchase event, to the AD, AD SET, campaign and person. Yep. And then from there, once they have a complete data picture, algorithm optimizing should be much cleaner on their side for predicting who to put the ad in from.
Greg Marshall  14:55  So next, based on how you're explaining it, this is my interpretation. And that that what you're essentially doing is you're taking Facebook's data on platform, which will never go away because it's their platform. Yep. Yep. And then you're taking your first party data, which is yours to own? Uh huh. And you're removing the middleman of iOS 14, or any other Google Chrome or anything else and get in the way, right? ad blockers, whatever, and you're just matching. So you're basically taking the middleman out, right? And putting more of the control in your own hands. Yeah. This is why I think this is a great strategy, because now you don't have to worry so much about can you get better data? If you take the middleman out, because what's the one variable that has ruined a lot of this? It's the middleman of iOS and ad blockers and other browser tools that have gotten in the way of event
Blake Beus  15:55  network problems, right. I don't think a lot of people realize this. I do. Because I'm a massive nerd. But at any point in time, when you're browsing your phone, and everything, there's a significant number of data packets sent from your phone between your phone and the server that get dropped the go to a dead end or whatever. And there's this error checking and everything built in so that you as the user, you don't notice, yeah, but it happens all the time. It's messy behind them, like network internet, it's all messy behind the scenes. And that little tracking event could just get just go off into nowhere yet or land. Right.
Greg Marshall  16:25  Which, which makes sense. So it's like, so this is almost a safer way to match your data to get it to be as accurate as you can. Yeah. With what you have, you know, around.
Blake Beus  16:38  Yeah, well, I'm glad you talked about first party data, because I know that reminded me and we've talked about first party data. And I've been I've made the perfect prediction, you made the prediction, I will continue to make this error addiction, that first party data will 100% be the most important asset your business owns, as in the future. And the only way to really have that good first party data is to own more of your own platform, like own more of your own server stack. All of these things. We've talked about server side, Google Tag Manager, that's, that's putting first party data into your hands. And I guess, to circle back that, it's not surprising that Facebook behind the scenes is probably massively improving their ability to match first party data from advertisers to their own first party data in platform and quietly behind the scenes probably dumping millions upon millions upon millions of dollars to improve that matching to make this work way. But I
Greg Marshall  17:46  think, you know, I think there's going to be just a shift. And they'll probably be by a new solution that comes out that makes this process more seamless with first party data and offline events and attaching it to ads. I personally don't know how to make that.
Blake Beus  18:08  Well, they already are working on it. That's essentially what the conversion API is. Yep. Right. And so in, that was the other thing I wanted to kind of circle back to really quick, there's kind of three ways you can get data into the ads manager, that's the pixel. That's the old school way that's been there. And that's the way that's been hammered lately, with privacy, whatever. You have this offline events, and that's been around for a long, long, long time, but seems to be getting massive improvement in optimizations. And the third way is the conversion API. And I know people have heard about that. But if you're listening to this, and you don't know what, what the conversion API is, Greg, what what, what is the conversion API?
Greg Marshall  18:51  Because I was gonna ask, Well,
Blake Beus  18:52  I actually what you think and then I'll, I'll answer a mine.
Greg Marshall  18:55  My understanding is that the API is connected within Facebook, that then gets more information that matches to what's happening on your website. That's like, My interpretation is more accurate than, like, browser pixel information. Yeah. Is that correct? Like, that's how I understand. Yes,
Blake Beus  19:17  so from from a tech nerd standpoint, you there's lots of layers to this. But I'm going to talk about two kind of main layers to how our technology and internet infrastructure is built. The the layer, the first layer I'm gonna talk about is the client side layer. So that is your browser. There's actually code that executes in your browser, right? And then there's another layer, which is called server side. And that is code that operates that executes on the server before anything gets sent to your browser. Okay. Okay. So the pixel is all executed in your browser. So that means me as the user, myself as the user I have a lot of control over what the client side does, because that's my browser, I own it, I can install a, an ad blocker, I can have a firewall, I can have an anti virus that I can have all of these things, I can have a virus on my computer that monitors my traffic and blokes, that kind of stuff. There's lots of things that could go wrong, intentionally or unintentionally, on my side, but I have a lot of control over them. The server side is is the owner or whoever runs that server has kind of control over how that operates. So the conversion API is essentially talking from the server side, directly to Facebook's server side. And we're cutting out the client side altogether better. So there's less data available. On the server side, I don't necessarily get access easily to say, mouse clicks and things like that on the server side, because those are client side events. Yep. But there are things on the server side, I do have access to a purchase event that has to go through my server, right? You know, or add to cart Events Add to Cart events, because that goes through my server, and that gets updated in my servers database, adding a lead, that's a server side event. And those are hard events that we know, not only when they happen, but we know the data that was submitted and sent to us. And so you're pushing that data. So it is more accurate. But there's kind of less data to go with gotta go, right? Because the pixel can capture a lot more client side events. So you're gonna get a lot more accurate. So this is what I have aggregated events. Yes, yeah. Because it kind of starts to merge all of that answer
Greg Marshall  21:43  together. That's why they limit how many events you can do. Yeah, because they only want so many. Because from what you just said, server side, it takes some of the, you know, the other pieces of data, you kind of lose that on the client side, right? Yes. So So server side, that's why you have aggregate events of give us eight events. And aggregate events are just events that you set up within Facebook. And once again, I use them and understand what they're doing. But I don't know how to explain that. Yeah, on the technical side, just know what they're doing. Right, right. But it's a way to essentially allow Facebook to be able to optimize for the events still. Versus if you do just browser, the warning that I see that they get is you won't be able to target people that have the iOS 14 setting. Right. Right. And so that pretty much will reduce your reach. Right? Absolutely. Right. And so with those three, we have offline events, we have conversion API. And then we have the pixel events, where when we give all three of those channels of data to the ads platform, are basically feeding the ads manager, fertilizer, like you're planting a field, you're just you're just giving it all of this good, good fertilizer for it to work with. And
Blake Beus  23:04  we've talked about sending positive signals back to the algorithm, we've talked about what types of signals we want to send. And even though you're sending the exact same signals in the conversion API, as you are your offline events,
Greg Marshall  23:17  and your pixel, especially those that are all very similar datasets, they can use those to make a statistically significant, you know, guess, much more accurately, because you're giving it a lot more data. Yep. So I think those So with all this kind of, we're talking heavy about data. The reason why we tend to talk about data so much, is because the date of data runs everything. Right? No matter I mean, right now, we're talking about advertising, but you can you can talk about weight loss, you're talking about data and school, data's data runs everything, and you can't make smart decisions. Unless you know, unless the data is correct, right? And then even more importantly, what to do with it. Right? So it does, you know, good to, like, have all this data, but then not know what decisions right you need to make. And so that's why we're talking about data's, you want to get that all figured out so that you can start to figure out what drives your business performance, which is everyone wants increased sales and profitability, right? This data will give you that, but you have to work hard to get it all in a way that you can make actual business decisions to you're maximizing the return on your dollar. Right. And that's, that's what all marketers are business owners really want the end of the day is, how do I make sure that if I spend the dollar that at least a second one comes back? Right, exactly. Well,
Blake Beus  24:46  in and out. I know I talked about data and we're both nerds in our own way and I'll fully admit that, but this doesn't have to be insanely complicated. Like if you're a business owner solo business owner Small Business sonar whatever. I would say this does not have to be super complicated because most of the work can be done for you if you pick the right platform to kind of run your business off of. And I know this is a big decision and a big, big question mark that a lot of people have. But it's one of the reasons say in the E commerce space, why Shopify is the gold standard. While they're not perfect, yep, they do put a lot of effort into making sure they have tight integration with ad platforms. And they spent years and years and years doing that. And I wouldn't be surprised if Shopify has an entire team dedicated to basically being a liaison with Facebook and making sure the ads and making sure that we're doing things the way Google wants it done. And we're doing things the way Facebook wants it done so that a person can sign up for Shopify store, they can literally click a button and turn on conversion API. Yep, which implementing that yourself behind the scenes is a lot of work with Shopify, you can click a button, there are other platforms that make this easy. I use a cart software called Pay kickstart for a lot of my subscriptions and things. They have that integrated, I can just click a button and handle the authorization and boom, it's done. But you need to make sure you pick a platform that allows you to do two things. Now that allows you to have the conversion API and allows you to export your order data with timestamp, and all of that stuff, so that you can then upload that if you have those two pieces in place, this is very easy to do. And it's very approachable. If you don't have those two pieces in place, it can get really complicated.
Greg Marshall  26:29  Well, and you know what, I'm happy you brought that up. Because one of the things, you know, just running a lot of different accounts, different clients use different software's. The software's that used to work really well before you needed aggregate events, and server side and API and all that. They don't work as well anymore at the moment, because there's no way to kind of update, right, the new way of doing it. Like for example, I'm not going to say the company's names. But an example would be what you used to be able to do is like just take your pixel ID, and plug it in to these platforms where people can use forms. Yeah. And the pixel itself would just figure out all the events. Yeah, that's all you needed to do, right? But now you have to verify your domain. Well, now you can't use that domain unless you verify and there's multiple ways you have to do that. And then if you have multiple websites, you have to figure that out. And then the other thing is the actual conversion events that you want it to track. Well, you have to be able to put code and now specific pages versus before that just that Id alone would fix that for you. Right? So there's multiple steps that are now and if they're purchasing through these platforms, a lot of them don't have the time that they purchase. Like they're not recording that or at least they're not giving it to me, right, yeah, they're not allowing you to export that. And so because of that, then you're off on events won't be as accurate, then it would if you're using platforms that are more up to date, like a shop, right? Well, and this is this is you talked about verifying your domain. And that's a really important piece that not a lot of people think about when they're picking a platform. So, five, six years ago, the
Blake Beus  28:16  standard was for a very easy kind of funnel situation was to sign up for a service, I would have my domain name, Blake beus.com, or whatever, I would be able to associate that with, you know, the funnel builder, but then when it came to making the payment or something, the domain name would be something like something that you know, something like, I don't know, payments, start payment, platform.com or whatever. And then that's how you would make the payment. Well, I can't verify that domain, because I don't own that exact payment platform owns that exactly. And so now Now, that's a problem, because I am required to verify that domain in order to capture purchase events through the pixel Exactly. So you have to, you have to own those domains name now. And so a lot of these companies are having to shift. They did that for a reason on purpose. And it wasn't a bad reason. It was a security reason there. That way, they could own the security certificates to make sure the payment was sent securely and encrypted. But now there's this layer of complexity. Yeah, it doesn't have to be crazy though. There's, there's some, there's some ways to make it happen. But if you pick the right kind of platform, they will handle creating the security certificates for your domain. That's easy. Now, it used to be hard. It's easy. Now, it's easy to do that in a secure way. But you have to get a platform that allows you to do that. So do a little bit of research on how they handle payments and things. Because some of the ones that used to be big a few years ago, are behind the times and don't allow you to do this now. And they need to play a little bit of catch up. And some advice that I actually would give is if you're on one of these platforms. In fact, I'm talking with a client after this podcast, see if we can do this but
Greg Marshall  30:00  If you're on one of those platforms, and you're wondering, is it worth the change, I would say yes, even if it's a headache, initially, I would switch over because whatever, you know, getting that data back into your ad accounts is more important than I think a lot of people understand. Because if your ad platform can't optimize, and you're using ADS to grow, then you're you're basically already starting at a disadvantage, right? And you're keeping yourself at a disadvantage. You will, I don't want to say never, but you will rarely outperform your competitor, who maybe has the right platform. And the same same everything, they will outperform you just because that data will get fed into their accounts faster and more efficiently than yours, and therefore they will win. So you can have a competitive advantage could be having a better cleaner platform being the data versus your competitors.
Blake Beus  30:56  Yeah, yeah. And we keep kind of circling back on onto this. As business owners, you're going to have to take more ownership over your platform, it's, it's where the future is, as agency owners, you're going to have to probably have some sort of tech, nerd contact or whatever, that can help sort out some of these complex platform issues. And make sure that the reporting and everything is, right, this guy is why you're gonna, you're gonna need more and more of that. And some people might be able to say, well, I can do both, and that's totally fine. But realistically, you know, media buying, and that tech side of things are quite different or appeal, set weight, and quite different expertise. And so I would recommend getting a good relationship and sending work if you're small agency sending work back and forth between one another from the media buying and, and just build that relationship. If you're a little bit larger agency, get a platform specialist in house that can help sort these issues out. Because if you're going to bring on a client and they have a platform that's not quite right, you either need to do a platform conversion, at least for the payment side of things, or you're going to need to build some sort of custom solution that can overcome the platform limitations. Exactly. Because it's, it's, it's the future, where having the wrong platform is going to completely kill your business is not that far down the road.
Greg Marshall  32:16  Yes. And it matters like back, you know, when I say back in the day, we're talking like just like a year and a half. But even you it matters so much, that I can just tell you from experience running ads with similar products, just on different platforms, the performance is night and day. And trust me, if you if you want to see a better performance, you want to take your data collection, and I'm putting all this together very seriously. Because if you do, trust me, you'll make better business decisions, you'll have better results. And you'll you'll gain an advantage over the competition who's not willing to invest in these types of strategies. So, Blake, I mean, I know we covered a lot today. Yeah. When I wouldn't
Blake Beus  33:03  say a data. Yeah, let me just wrap all this up into some sim because I like to simplify the apps because it's easy to go down this rabbit hole. The simple, simple, simple thing you should be doing right now is upload offline data daily. Yep, that's it. If you're doing everything else, even if you have the conversion API all set up, upload that offline data daily, do it every day, just if you do that every day, and it can you can get it down so that it's it's a few minute job, it doesn't have to be this crazy, difficult thing. Do that every day, I guarantee you, you're gonna start seeing more interesting results. And you'll be able to make better decisions on your ads. Oh, no, by doing that one simple thing everyday for you, your business or your clients.
Greg Marshall  33:47  So I think, you know, wrap this up, I think, take your data serious and build a system that can track and monitor and use like Blake got me on this. Make, you know, business intelligence, business intelligence to make the right decisions and to grow. So with that being said, Blake, how do people get a hold of
Blake Beus  34:10  Blake beus.com. And there's the SM3 group there that Greg and I are both involved with if you have any questions surrounding marketing, organic, social media, marketing, any of that stuff, we have a bunch of tools to help you do all of that stuff. It's a great place to be when
Greg Marshall  34:23  to reach me, you can go to Greg marshall.co, you can book strategy session if you have any questions and until next time, we'll see you later. Bye.
 

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Blake Beus  0:00  All right, yeah. Okay. All right. Greg, you were telling me about this time you were working with a client. And you, you let them convince you to make changes, you knew we're not good changes. Yeah. And it didn't, then well. So yes, I wanted to ask you kind of about when you should put your foot down, when you're working with clients, when you should put your foot down and say, No, you're not making these changes, we are not making these changes, and like, how to how to handle that.
Greg Marshall  0:32  Yeah. So I think what I've learned over, you know, I don't know how many clients I've worked with at this point. But it's very similar to even personal training. Clients are, you know, they become influenced by things they're seeing and hearing and, or maybe a conviction that they suddenly have. And when, in the past, what would happen is, I'm thinking of it as one particular client. Yeah, where I'm like, man, you know, they really had huge momentum. And they, because I allowed them to convince me that they should do a different thing. They completely have, like, gone the wrong direction. And so I think the correct time is, immediately, when, when, like, when I look back at because, you know, you make mistakes, even even when it's like indirect, right? Like, it wasn't actually my advice to do what they were doing, but I did it to satisfy the client. There's, there's a slight danger in that. Yeah. Because sometimes you can actually not get the client the results that they actually are desiring by allowing them to dictate what's happening, right. And kind of the situation was, we were talking, we had the way I structured everything, actually not I think this happens twice. The way we structure everything was a way that they felt they personally just fell out of their comfort zone and out of control. Okay. And because of that they made decisions based on that versus the result.
Blake Beus  2:02  Okay, what was was, was this the business owner, like the founder, the founder, owner owner role times both times, okay, okay. Because I think that's relevant sometimes, because they're used to having control over everything. And as a business scales, this happens in more areas than just advertising and media buying. But they need to start letting go of control and delegating and dictating. And this is probably, you know, an instance of that as well. Right? Well, and they were both solopreneurs. Okay, right. And so they didn't even have a team. They don't have any other contractors other than you.
Greg Marshall  2:39  Maybe, but I don't think so. Okay, if they did, it was to two or three. Okay. And so one of the, one of the things that I learned, though, is because I can, in my mind, I can remember exactly what I would do differently, which is, I would have said, You should follow this system, regardless of how you feel. Just look at the numbers. Right? Right. And we were talking about how a lot of times we're making decisions off of emotion. And that's usually the times where you make the worst, right? Because your fears is taken into account, or stress, and then you just start making these these decisions that they don't really make any sense. Yeah, right. And the situation was the way that I had the campaign structured, I had a whole bunch of ad sets, a whole bunch of different targeting a whole bunch, just a lot of stuff visually, when they looked at it, they couldn't fully understand it. Right. And so because of that, they felt like, oh, I don't like I don't like how this looks okay. versus how much am I spent? How much time?
Blake Beus  3:49  Right? And was this? Was this recent, or years ago? Or what is
Unknown Speaker  3:53  two years
Blake Beus  3:54  ago? Two years ago? Okay.
Greg Marshall  3:55  So it's been two years, because I know,
Blake Beus  3:57  we've talked recently about a simpler campaign structure, but a few years ago, yes, that's what was working, that's having a lot of different campaigns and a lot of different targeting of peaks acid,
Greg Marshall  4:07  this is before iOS, right? changes where you can, you know, really, you could
Blake Beus  4:12  really get targeted and really get that data. Whereas now that's, that's not really available. So broader campaigns, especially in Facebook broadcasts tend to work better. Well, and
Greg Marshall  4:21  here's, here's the other thing. So this also applies to now. So people who are stuck and living in the old days of how things used to be, which is the big mistake you can make if you're running a business is to follow how things used to be and not adapt to what is now, right, you get, you know, with the whole iOS changes, now people can't see the tracking as well. And so that's sometimes drives them to want to test there's got to be some secret targeting out there, of being able to track this and that's just not the case. And so, this iOS change has actually helped me get better at leading the client and telling them no This is what we need to do, regardless of how we feel okay? Right. And I use those numbers that we're talking about, because there are actual, like benchmarks that I'm measuring everything. But in the past, I have never really like, educated the customer, okay, on these numbers. And it wasn't until last week when we had a conversation, where Blake actually, he structured a sentence that I think kind of like changed my whole mindset, because what's obvious to him was a blind spot for me. And he talked about business intelligence. And since I've used what he basically taught me last week, it is already helped my clients tremendously and feeling like we're on the right track, okay. And it's like a strategy, because this whole time I've been operating off this strategy, but never communicating. Okay, what that is, because normally, when I would bring it up, they would just kind of have a blank. Like, yeah, what does that mean? Exactly? Okay. And I would go through, so maybe I assumed, which is the wrong idea. I assume that maybe they're not interested in knowing any of this information. But it's actually incorrect. They are interested I, it's my job to break it down. For them to understand it in like the simplest terms.
Blake Beus  6:19  Okay, so what what are some of your tips and tricks to breaking down? Complex? You know, digital advertising and marketing numbers Sure, into what they actually want to know. Yep. Because a lot of times, they don't know what they want to know. Right? Because they're an expert in their area, whether it's ecommerce or, or something, they built it up to a point, and they're an expert in that area. But sometimes they don't know what to ask. So what's your tips on breaking down these complicated things? To give them the answers they want? So they can move on and feel good about where they're at?
Greg Marshall  6:53  Yeah, so number one, I basically measure against, like other people's accounts, and other numbers from my like history, right? So for example, knowing like, I don't want to exceed 30%, on marketing costs to revenue generation, right. And basically using that as like that as the top baseline of what we're going to use, and anything below that is good. All right. And then the next thing I explained is click through rates, and then offers. So with the click through rates, I just basically tell him what a click through rate means, okay, and what we're trying to achieve. So in the simplest term, I just say, the click through rate basically is telling you if we're either talking to the right person, or we're saying the wrong thing, okay, right. So if we're at 1% or higher, that means we're talking to the right person, we're saying the right thing. If we're below that, we need to change that. Okay. That's the that's the problem. Then, the next number I explained is if let's say we have a 2%, click through rate, I educate them on the mistake everyone makes is they have a high click through rate on the ad. And then people get to their page and no one buys. They think it's the ad. But it's not No, see, but most people don't know that. So before I wouldn't even explain that, I would just say, well, we have to, like fix the offer. And I would receive resistance from the business owner like no, there's got to be the ad is not doing right. And it's like, well, that's not really the case. So I use this as the analogy I use with all okay, I say, this is how it works. Let's pretend we're in a physical space. And we're at the mall. And you have a store at the mall, which is your Shopify store. And it's a very big mall, and you're trying to get your target customer into the store will find go outside and I have like the best sign ever. And I get them excited. And a whole bunch of people are coming to my billboard that a high sign that I'm spinning, and they go, Hey, where's this store where I can buy these unbelievable hoodies? It's right in here. And I send them in there. And then the hoodies are $10,000. And none of them can afford it. Or they go in there and we only have size large and everyone who went in as a size small, or they go in and we don't even have what we told them we had. What's the problem? Is it the advertisement? Or is it what's inside the store? Right? And they all understand that they grow. That makes sense. So I say when we have a high click through rate on our ad that means we did our job getting them there. Yeah, getting them excited. Now, we did not do our job once they got there. Right. And so that seemed that analogy right there seems to like simplify all the stuff that you can look in Facebook and Google and Tik Tok and all the ads he confused with. Yeah, to me, that's what simplifies it.
Blake Beus  9:54  Well, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. I think the only time that's not the case is if you're trying to intentionally deceive people with your ads And frankly, I just won't work with anybody. Well, that there are people out there that do that. So. So if they're getting there and they're landing on the page and they're not buying, then there's something wrong with the offer, or something broken on the page. That's the other thing to think about. And I think a lot of clients resist hearing that unless you explain it and break it down in a good way, because they're interpreting that as there's something wrong with me. Yes. Especially in a solo printer kind of business situation, because this is something they created. Yeah. And when you say, well, there's something wrong with the offer, they hear. I'm the screwed up one, because everybody kind of deals with impostor syndrome, especially at this stage in the business. And so breaking it down like that, I think removes helps them understand that you're not blaming them, you're just saying, Hey, here's the situation. So we need to pivot on the offer a little bit. Yep. And that's fine. Because you created these offers, you can also pivot on the offer, and you're super flexible. You don't have to like go to a board of directors and try to get approval for an offer change. If you're getting people into your, you know, mall store with your flippy sign and everything and people aren't buying, you can just ask them. Well, what did you expect this and this and this? Come back next week, and we'll have Hustings. We'll make that happen? Yep. And, and a lot of people don't think about how easy that can actually be. Yep. If you just, oh, they expect this close. Just give them that. We don't even need to change the ads, let's just change the page to give them exactly what they want. And now we're profitable. You just
Greg Marshall  11:31  made a point that I would have forgot to make. Okay, I didn't say. Okay, so I may or may have mentioned this maybe before, but I know I've told someone in person this. So one of my clients was getting zero sales. Okay, on their fitness product they're selling. Before the like, we started, right. So then we ran some tests. And for two weeks, we ran the we kept his ads the same. And all we do is change the landing page and the offer, and now he's getting sales all the time. Okay. But we never changed, the app never changed. The the ads never changed. The target never changed and nothing changed. Yeah, just what happened? What at the actual page. What's interesting is, if you look at the ads, the click through rates and everything have been the exact same, there has been no changes. Which would tell you that means the theory of they clicked on the ad. But when they were getting to the page initially, the offer was not good. Yeah, right. Right. But you change the offer, and now the same ad that you did nothing to converts. Right. And so that's, that's the point is to be flexible with what you're actually offering to test. Why aren't people buying? We don't have the, you know, the advantage of like in person, you can literally just ask the people, right, what it is online, you can't right? They're just, they don't reveal that to you. So you have to test things to see what it is. What are my favorite techniques to use for like, especially newer stores that are struggling with getting conversions a lot of times, because, like the point you made, the business owner believes they are the actual product, the art, they are the sweatshirts and the and the hats and the shoes, right? Which is incorrect. But I understand why they feel that way. Right. And I don't think it's wrong. I just think sometimes it can get in the way. So if it, one of my favorite techniques is when a company is struggling to get the conversions. What I typically like to do to see if it's people don't like the product, or if it's just like the price is I do a heavy discount for a short duration of time. And if we all of a sudden start seeing sales, then we know we're not communicating the value to justify the price. Right? Yeah, that's my favorite way to figure out a weave. Are we demonstrating enough value or do people think you are as a guest elite as you're saying you are right. Because if they all of a sudden are buying the product that means they liked the product right? Is they don't think the price is value to what you're giving them to?
Blake Beus  14:19  Yeah, I think I think that's a great strategy.
Greg Marshall  14:23  I usually have to twist the business owners heart Well, a lot of a lot of
Blake Beus  14:27  them don't want to discount and and I I fully understand I don't want to discount this I you know I should be able to sell it I put my heart and soul into this discounting cheapens the brand blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I heard Tony Robbins say I should be increasing my prices instead of decreasing my price. But here's the thing, you got to go through a chump troubleshooting phase. Yep. A temporary discount to try to identify a problem is not going to cheapen the brand. It could be a flash sale that you do for two weeks. And even though Tony Robbins tells you don't don't discount things because You'll cheapen your brand, the number of times I've seen a $7 offer from Tony Robbins is mind boggling. So that guy discounts his stuff all the time.
Greg Marshall  15:09  All the ones that say never discount, they do biggest perpetrators, they
Blake Beus  15:13  do it all the time. So you got to see, you got to look at what they're doing, not necessarily what they're saying. Because many times what they're saying is just marketing language to try to get you to buy whatever they're doing. So and then the other side of it is, you need to have an understanding, you need to explain this to your clients that people buy based on perceived value, not actual value. And the reason is, is because everybody's actual values a little bit different. Yep. And we don't know what the actual value is until we actually start using the thing or whatever. But when we're making a purchase decision, it's on perceived value. Now, that doesn't mean we should give everybody this perceived value, that's way overinflated and then try to sell that that's, that's manipulation. But if you're not explaining that value, so that they in their own head are thinking, this is a great deal. Yep. Even it doesn't matter if your product is $500, or $5. Yep, the perceived value is why people are buying. And so some time, if you get discount, if you discount and you're getting sales, then you got to think, Okay, we need to put some more explanation on the sales page or somewhere to explain the actual, you know, the value so that they can start adjusting their perceived value. And some great ways to do that are testimonials. Yep, it's a really good way to do that case studies to show results based on what your product is, or whatever. If it's something like a T shirt or whatever, because we talked about those a lot. Just some high quality lifestyle shots. Yep, can go a long way to increase the perceived value. There's lots of different ways to do it. But we need to have that understanding. Right? Well, and
Greg Marshall  16:57  that's, so if you're, if you're someone struggling with like, you're just starting and you can't, you're just not getting sales, be open minded to test that. Normally. When I said earlier, you got to twist their arm. It's because there is a fear. There's an assumption that everyone is watching. But it's false. Yeah, right. There's an assumption, like, I'm going on the news to announce to the entire world that I'm discounting my store. 50% Yeah. And now, you know, the whole world knows, cheap, you know, cheap and my brand. But really, that's an over, I guess, an over inflation. Oh, how much people are actually watching? Right. Right. So they're not going to remember you ran a sale to troubleshoot your brand, you know, two years ago?
Blake Beus  17:44  No, like, Absolutely not. So
Greg Marshall  17:46  don't only have to remember in two weeks, they might not even remember the mark. Yeah,
Blake Beus  17:50  there's so much going on. So I
Greg Marshall  17:53  think, you know, use that as an opportunity to figure out why. And I've done this multiple times with clients, and then they, they start to figure out, okay, because the fear uses if there's no conversions, it's no one likes my product. That's
Blake Beus  18:06  the fear. That's the fear. And that's someone who's created their own product. Yes, I felt that deeply. Yep. And it's normal. It is normal. I literally have been to therapy to help me with this problem. I think it's a very natural and normal thing. But it's something you kind of hit head on and worked through and work towards. And there's an entire industry of occupational therapists that help people deal with feeling that in their careers in one way or another, and it's totally valid, it's a valid feeling. And
Greg Marshall  18:42  so I think, usually, this is what I see. When, when, when a company is struggling to get conversions and people aren't buying it. They start that fear, it's triggering it more and more. So they're like, oh, no, no one likes my product. What happens? No, buy, you know, you go, you go through this negative mental cycle, right? But then when you run somebody this and then they see wow, I got a lot of sales when I did this discount. It's almost like it rejuvenates them, because then it proves them. Oh, people do like this. Right? Right. It's nice. I just need to figure out how can I sell it at a higher price, right? And so this is also a good way to build your confidence back up. Yeah, if you're struggling with like, Man, I spent all this time doing this and no one's buying it. This is this is a great way to do it. And don't be don't be afraid. Here's the other counterintuitive thing. So one of my clients we're running a retargeting campaign, which is gonna make total sense but to him, he felt like why why would we do that? So we, we, I think we're only knocking off like 15% or more, okay, like, they go on the page. Then they get retargeted I take 50% off right? Yeah, the funny thing because once again, this is the the tug of war with the client of like, just given Shot is there like, well, if I do that I'll be making less money. And once again, that's an emotional statement, because do you have something in front of you? Data that has showed that has proven that already? Yeah. Or have you tried it yet? Yeah. Well, we're running it and he's getting a 6x return about his retargeting. And I said, so interesting. We're lowering the costs.
Blake Beus  20:23  What's his what's his return on the cold traffic without the discount? 1.75 1.75. So this with people that don't buy, give him a 15% discount, and you're getting a 6x return? Yep. Even after accounting for the discount? Yep. So I'll do that all day long.
Greg Marshall  20:42  So to me, the cat. So this is where, you know, we talked about business intelligence, I have almost to ingrain in the head is look at how much we spent, how much was made. Yeah, look how much was spent. It's almost like as long as I keep that reminder, because the temptation is to act off a motion, right? And to say, I don't know if I feel like this is working, which, which is not the same as it is working.
Blake Beus  21:12  Right. I don't feel but but again, like the perceived value conversation, from a customer standpoint, as an agency owner to a client standpoint, they're making decisions based on that perceived value or emotion that I don't feel like this is a good idea. Yeah. Well, on paper, you're getting a 6x return. Yeah, you like to worry about how many times you just think about it, if I give this magical little machine over here, $1. And then they give me six back? I will keep doing that. Yep, I will keep doing that. I will do with 1.7. But I would rather do it with six, yep, you know, 6x. And so when people start wrapping their heads around that it's much easier in it, this makes me kind of take a big step back. And think the difference between really great media buyers and agency owners that work with clients, and those that are not really great, that tend to struggle is this ability to level up their own clients from an educational standpoint, to take the time to explain these concepts in a way that makes sense for them, so they stay on on board longer, they understand the value that they're getting, they understand and start to start to trust you more, but they've got to have that understanding.
Greg Marshall  22:32  Well, and I think you're 100%, right, which is, even as I you know, I've been doing this a long time, right. But there's always areas to improve. And that's an area of focus of mine, is to inject this philosophy of how if you think about it long term, and you're structuring off of these types of metrics, you'll get much better results than trying to do a hack or trying to just like, you know, skip steps, right, or not actually build a real machine. And because of that, I think, by educating them on this has been very helpful. Yeah, the business intelligence side, because with that, they're able to, it seems to drive down their anxiety. Yeah. Like, they just feel it. And once again, what is anxiety and emotion? It's not what's actually happening. Yeah. Right. And that's, that's the key. If anything, I would say, make sure to check your emotions as you're growing your business because you can make big mistakes in your business based off of feeling the wrong emotions for that day. And what I find there is a trend that I noticed when clients want to make changes. And it's normally they didn't sleep good. Maybe they got an argument with their significant other, okay, their children are driving crazy. Uh huh. And because of that, they want to make a change on their own.
Blake Beus  24:07  They want to feel some control in their life. I mean, really, I'm, I'm the champion, the champion, the champion of external factors wanting me to have some control in my business.
Greg Marshall  24:21  There's nothing wrong with that. I think that's I think that's a normal emotion. Yeah. So I don't want to sit here and say you should be a robot. Yeah, what I'm saying as you just take an extra step, and think, Okay, I feel very emotional right now, because of whatever. Uh huh. Let me take a rest for a minute. And just kind of decompress and then come back to this because I feel like it's kind of like, you know, you're married. If you're upset because of something at work. And then you go home and your wife says something to your likelihood of getting more set are some that means nothing is higher. And it has nothing to do with your wife.
Blake Beus  25:04  Nothing. Just because we're in an emotional state, right? And, and one trick I have for this particular thing, and maybe this is something that can help some clients or whatever is is to say, Okay, I want to make this change, decision made, which already makes me feel better because I made a decision. But then I say, I know I'm a little bit emotional, or I'm tired or whatever. So I'm not gonna actually implement it for 48 hours. And then 48 hours, most of the time, I'm like, Well, that sounds like a dumb idea. Sit on it for a minute and give it a minute. But if I do feel good about it by then I'll you know, I'll go ahead and make that change. And see, but I've at least, I've at least kind of felt like I did something by making the decision, but then waiting for 48 hours before actually implemented,
Greg Marshall  25:50  it's, it's a good, it's just a good way to do it. And it's something that I'm even trying to improve, how can I provide more value to my customers that could be as I'm doing more of this marketing, consulting and running ads, you also learn that some of the value that I believe, initially, I thought was not that valuable to the customer, is actually the big value of why people want to stay on like, remember, when we first got started, you refer to me as your marketing therapy. It was true, and it's more of not King Greg, click the buttons and get people, right. The value that you were really getting was, how do I not have so much anxiety that I'm crazy? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a big value to the customer is to be able to say, we got this. Yeah.
Blake Beus  26:46  And it was really nice for me to basically, to hand off that responsibility to you. Yep. So I could say, okay, Greg's got this, and he's gonna let me know how things are going. So I could focus on delivery or creating new products or whatever. And for you, it's less stress, because you didn't make the product and so you're not as emotionally detached in the product attached, you're detached, and so you can make better, more informed decisions. And, and it was it was, it's a great way to to delegate and handle and
Greg Marshall  27:21  it's almost you know, it's funny, it's almost now that you say that the perfect if you have if you have this question in your mind, should I hire an agency or a person to run my ads? It's not actually. Can they do the job? Yeah. It's, it's more about yourself? Do I have a tendency to feel anxious and concern about the ads when I run them? Yeah. If you do, you need to hire someone. And I'm being dead serious. Yeah, absolutely. If if you are someone that tends to stress out about, like, this isn't, you know, I got it, you know, and you just feel really emotional about it. You're the perfect candidate to actually hire someone else out, because you're the one that needs it the most. Because if you're if you can't just make decisions, like if you can't do this last night, you're with your family, you slept, no hours, you everything went wrong at home, and then you come you come into work, and you look at your numbers, and you can't separate the numbers from the business and home life. You really need to hire this. Because that just shows like everyone that if you run into that risk, you have to understand what your weaknesses are. Yeah. You just have like, we all have them. And that's
Blake Beus  28:50  and that's taking it way big step back and just talking about business growth in general. That's something you're going to have to step through if you want to scale. Yep. Right. And it happens so much with solo solo entrepreneur kind of situation, which, you know, I was in multiple times. You have to be able to let go of some of that control and delegate and train and one of my favorite books on this. It's an old book, it's called the E Myth. Have you ever read? Yeah, amen.
Greg Marshall  29:24  That's actually one of the first books I ever read. Yeah, it's,
Blake Beus  29:27  it's an excellent book. It's more about, you'd have to translate it over to like a digital, kind of kind of context, but still really helpful. But you have to wade through that. And if you don't wade through that, your business will always stay capped at a certain level. Now, some people are totally fine with that. Maybe it's like a second income type situation and that is completely fine. But if you're at a position where you're thinking, I'm doing everything and I can't seem to get this over the top, you have to find a way to let go of some of that control. and delegate pieces of your business and one area is with, you know, a media buyer marketing agency or whatever. And I don't want to talk about this right now, we should definitely do one on this. But how to find good media buyer or agency or something? Because that those are murky waters? Yeah, that is not an easy thing to do. And you can, I've worked with agencies that have a flashy website, so you have all the right words and language. And then when you start working with them, they don't really know. Anything. And and, and I've worked with others that their presence is small or whatever online, but they know they're stuck. Yep. And so maybe that's something we can cover. And we should
Greg Marshall  30:45  definitely talk about that. Because they're, you know, without, you know, saying any names or whatever. There's, there's a couple people that I'm working with right now that match that, yeah, now we're on this front end level, the public believes that they are running all these ads and all that, but then I'm in the background. And so they're hiring me like, Hey, I've actually been told this, we don't know how to market. Yeah. And I remember thinking, marketing, your marketing. And I couldn't believe hear that, right. But it just makes it makes you question all types of things. Who else is telling you they know how to do something? They have no clue. But yeah, I mean, and it's out there. And it's no, this isn't about shaming, or making people feel bad. This is just about knowing how to vet and do all that. And so we should, we should talk about this, because there's definitely some way just to protect yourself. And to make sure you get the maximum value Absolutely.
Blake Beus  31:45  In this in the same area. I feel like website development because I've I approach all of this from that was where I spent the first 10 years was in website development surrounding marketing technology. But the same thing is, is when someone wants to hire a website developer, yeah, the same problem happens i i worked with one company. At the by the time the project was done, the client had spent over $500,000, on this website, five, it was it was a very, very large product $500,000 on this website. And six months later, the whole project was scrapped because it was full of security holes. And this was this was in an industry where you just couldn't have a security problem. And the amount of effort it would be for for me and my team at the time to fix all of that would wouldn't have been worth it. And then
Greg Marshall  32:44  later, I wouldn't want to write a check big enough.
Blake Beus  32:48  I found out later that that agency had literally just found someone on Upwork to do all their development, because they didn't have any in house developers gonna have graphic designers and other things like that. They didn't have a developer, so they just hired someone on Upwork that said they had the skills. And that one person who they probably only paid maybe 50 grand, that one person did all of the stuff. Yep. And then they charged
Greg Marshall  33:13  $500,000. And that just shows you to to never, from a consumer standpoint, don't underestimate the expertise of cert like meaning, don't arrogantly believe that other industries are not as valuable as others because what that typically means is all well, anyone can do a developer. Anyone can make. Yeah, anyone can do email mark, right? You're making these assumptions. Like it's not that hard. Can't be that hard, right? And that's if you have that kind of mentality, you're most likely going to fall prey to that and end up hiring people that aren't actually good at what they say they're good. Yeah, or make a huge mess of things that don't need to be made. But anyways, we don't want to get too crazy. Yeah, we'll do a whole nother.
Blake Beus  34:04  I just was thinking of that just now. So we'll we'll make that happen. But let's let's wrap this up. If you were to kind of summarize this whole conversation, Greg, on how you've learned to better handle those anxieties, communicate with your clients better. Wrap it up, give us give us a good summary.
Greg Marshall  34:21  Yeah, I think the biggest thing is this, I need to directly tell them number wise, this is what we're going to do. And take the leadership of that and say we are doing this and being okay with if it fails Tommy and, and not kind of shying away from them. And I think with that kind of mentality and simplifying what really matters from don't even think about everything else. A couple of numbers. They just need to know how much we spend and how much are we making? What's the actual return? What's the click through rates?
Blake Beus  34:57  And then what's next and how I compare and how do I compare to others? Well, everybody worries about that. Yeah. How do I compare to others? How's
Greg Marshall  35:04  my progress good and good. That's actually what I'm getting better at is telling people this, you're either succeeding or we're not where we need to be yet.
Blake Beus  35:13  So we're going to make some adjustment. So this is where we're succeeding. We don't necessarily need to make those adjusts.
Greg Marshall  35:18  We make no adjustment. My job is to make sure you don't do anything. Yeah. Maybe,
Blake Beus  35:23  maybe test scaling up if you have that model supports that. Right. The business model supports that. So all right, cool. I like that. Greg, how can people reach out to you,
Greg Marshall  35:30  Greg marshall.co, and you can book a free strategy session.
Blake Beus  35:34  Blake beus.com. I have the SM3 group in there. It's a group kind of code coaching consulting surrounding social media marketing. So you can check that out.
Greg Marshall  35:43  Well, until next time, we'll see you guys later.
Blake Beus  35:45  Okay, catch you later. Bye. Bye.