Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

Blake Beus  0:00  Okay, so we were just barely talking about. I mean, everybody talks about data driven and all of these things. But we, we were talking about some unique situations where a lot of business owners, they've been through the the brand voice message, the customer avatar thing that they they put in that work, which I don't think is a bad thing. But then it's almost like they get a bit locked in, in that area. Stubborn. And and convinced that that that because they did that work, which is great, that that's what we need to stick with when the customers are voting with their dollars in a different direction. Maybe you can clarify what I'm what I'm getting at? Yeah,

Greg Marshall  0:45  well, I think one thing, and you know, I've think we've all fallen prey to this before, but being too overly focused on like, what you want the message and the image to be versus what the customer reacts and pays for. Yeah, and some examples that I would use is, oftentimes I see. And it's normally the individual that's very brand centric, right? Especially if they want to present a high end brand, right, they become so obsessed with how everything looks and feels to them, that they're actually focusing on the wrong person. Yeah, you need to focus on the customer who's going to buy it. And where this is coming from is actually I've run a bunch of campaigns where I've seen where the business owners is like dead set on the vision and the brand, and everything has to look a certain way, yet those campaigns perform very poorly. And then when we switch it up and do it more in the way that the customer responds to, the business owner is unhappy with how the image brand and voice looks. But the customers are responding and

Blake Beus  1:56  buying and buying. And so they're, they're happy with the money coming in. Yep. But they're not happy with the images or the video because they're not pro quality. Yeah, or, or any of those

Greg Marshall  2:09  are, they don't look as a very specific way, maybe the way they envisioned and I go back to, when I when I first started doing my fitness business, we initially wanted to go after like this high end. And I think a lot of changes is high end highly motivated, willing to spend a lot of money type of client. And we kind of just kept pushing that over and over and over again. And we noticed we had no customers, no one would pay us even though we were like we deserve the high paying customer we deserved this is the best product out there. No customers where we had people like beating our door down, saying can you help us lose weight? Can you help us get fit, and this is the exact thing we were trying to get away from. And we finally caved in because we're like, well, these people are literally like throwing their money at us asking us can we help them? Maybe it's time to make a pivot and make a change. And when we did that, we started seeing great success. And so I say that because it is very common, in my experience, especially if it's a newer business owner. Or maybe someone that has the habit of comparing themselves to other bigger brands, where they get so locked in on how everything needs to look that they don't do enough testing, to see what gets the customer to buy. And then how do I do more of that? Right? And that's kind of the point of this topic is to almost tell you make sure you're not making this mistake where you're doing it a certain way, because you want it. But the customer or the market is not actually even paying for it.

Blake Beus  3:49  Yeah, I mean, this is when I went to college, I have a degree in Business Information Systems. And I had a bunch of business classes with that. And it was it was one on one, it's like, marketing one on one, you are not your customer. Yep, you are not the one going in there and buying this thing to fix this problem. You've already solved the problem. Yep. So you are a completely different person than your customer is. And so the best way to

Blake Beus  0:00  It's been a couple it's been a couple of weeks. Yeah. You've been traveling. I got COVID. Yeah. And then we're back. But yeah. So you you read something on Facebook's documentation. Yeah.

Greg Marshall  0:14  And I surprised you and I never redacted.

Blake Beus  0:17  Yeah. Because usually their their advice is bad. Yeah. Every time I've talked with a Facebook rep, the advice has been at the grid has not worked and when I've tried it, but so I wanted to pick your brain on what this was, well go over it, it

Greg Marshall  0:32  almost. So basically, what it was, is, in the documentation, I was just making a training video for our clients to help educate them. So when they onboard, they understand what to expect when they're running ads, because a lot of our clients either have run ads a little bit in the past, or none at all. They've just started running businesses, and then know that they need to advertise on social now. So what I looked up was interesting. So the in the documentation, I read it said, you should only have one ad per ad set. What? And I so I had to check a couple times, because I was like, this is facebook.com documentation. And I had never seen this before. And so when I was reading it, I thought, well, this is interesting, because a lot of the accounts that I've had the most success with, I've always used this tactic, but did horizontal scaling, while using the existing post IDs, we even did this with you. Yeah, yeah. And the interesting part was, in the documentation, I should find the video that I created. It said like, the problem, especially when you're running the ad is, the more ad you have, the longer it takes the algorithm to learn, because it has to it just has that many more testing points. Sure. And so what I thought was interesting about that, though, was when I first started that, I was like, okay, that's the opposite of what I've heard, in many ways, cases, where they say when you're testing ads have multiple ads running to see which one works. Give it enough information. So the algorithm has something to work with. Right. And I thought, That's interesting, because that's essentially mostly what I thought and mostly what you hear. Yeah, right. And so this is like a contrarian thought. And the funny thing is, as I started analyzing a lot of the accounts that have scaled really big, we actually used the single post id and did heavy horizontal scaling, with no multiple ads in the ad sets, only one. And so at one point, I remember getting yelled at actually by a client, because they didn't like how I set it up. But it was working, which is I had a campaign. And I had like, 20 ad sets in there. Yeah. But all the same ad. Yeah. And it was running, and it was absolutely crushing it. And I was, but they're like, well, people are gonna get tired of seeing this ad or whatever. And they were overly concerned about this. And so I stopped doing it, right. And then the account starts and not, you know, goes well. And the sad part is this has happened multiple times where clients have this same objection. And then we try it, where you got a bunch of ads in there. And it just, I've just never seen it work when it's like a ton of different ads.

Blake Beus  3:31  First of all, it it always kind of blows my mind when something's working. And the clients like, Oh, I'm afraid it might stop. Yeah, maybe work. So instead, let's turn it off in advance some

Greg Marshall  3:41  all. Let's make sure it doesn't work.

Blake Beus  3:45  Make sure because the most surefire way to make sure your ads don't work is to turn them all off. Yeah. Right. Like, and I just don't get it. Taking a step back with with messaging. I know a lot of people are concerned Well, what if What if people get sick of it, and they get annoyed? And I think that's a very common thing that business owners think they constantly think I don't want to be that annoying advertising person. And we take a step back. I don't know i

Blake Beus  0:00  scaling like everybody, every client there, they always get nervous. Yeah, anxiety when they when it comes to scaling, right? So you found something that works. You're spending maybe 100 bucks a day or something. And now you're telling them alright, let's do 200. Let's do 300. Let's, yes, let's do this. And then they have a ton of questions as they do do that. So what happens? Yeah,

Greg Marshall  0:22  so, and it's normal to be nervous. I don't think that's abnormal at all right? Right. Because no one wants to like spend more money and risk losing. So typically, what happens? So number one, scaling, all that really means is do more, right, get more sales than you're currently getting, or more leads that you're currently getting. And typically, what happens? So here's usually the concern or the misconception of scaling. So let's say something is working really well, like $50 a day, right? Really, really low spent, and you're getting a good return. Let's say you're getting a four return on adspend. No, nice, right? So let's, let's just pretend that's happening now, if you haven't scaled before, or you're new to it, and I have made this mistake, okay. So I'm not like excluding myself, it is very easy to believe as well, if I spent 50, why don't I just spent $5,000, and I should get the exact same return of what I'm currently getting now of a Forex, right? Unfortunately, that is not how it works. And it pretty much I don't want to say it's impossible, but close to impossible to keeping maintaining that ratio that return as you spend more. And the reason for that, and Blake can probably attest to this is the audience, right? So the way these algorithms work, is when you're spending low spend, you're like forcing the algorithm to work harder to find that little pocket. That's a perfect match for your offer. But then what happens when you expand that audience?

Blake Beus  2:01  You will you start, you start having to boil over into the the people that aren't perfect for the fit, and that's fine. Yep. There's more of those. And that's a good thing. Yep. Because there's, that's a much, much, much bigger audience. But instead of finding the people that are ready, right now, you're finding maybe people that are going to be ready, tomorrow, next week, or even a few or even in a few weeks, or maybe the offer is not exactly what they need. And they're comparing a couple of alternatives. And it takes them some time to make a decision. But all of that drives your costs up. Yep. And so people, in my experience, people start seeing the cost per acquisition go up, yep. Which means their row as return on adspend starts coming down, and they start panicking because they think this is a trend, that's eventually going to mean, I'm losing money. So I'm spending all this money and I'm losing money. But in reality is a good thing.

Greg Marshall  3:04  Yep, in my eyes anyway. Well, and one of the things you have to keep in mind is, in my experience, okay, so I'm just speaking, in my experience, when you scale you actually, so people, I think incorrectly focus on the wrong part of the scale. And you should be thinking about the second sale, you're gonna give them the upsell, how many more orders they can make, and really focusing your energy on that. Not the the advertising part. Because it's inevitable that the cost per purchase, and the row ads is going to go down, the more you spend, but if you if you only focus on the advertising part, what's going to happen is you're going to get scared every single time it goes up, and you're going to retract or, you know, go back to what you were doing. And you're not ever going to be able to grow that and get more customers that you're looking for. And so that's the mistake that I see constantly is when they're trying to scale going, what worked out for x and 50. How do we make it work at $5,000 a day for x? Let's just keep looking at the ads over and over and over again, which is a

Blake Beus  0:00  I've heard this term float floating around zero pixel tracking,

Greg Marshall  0:03  or as you call it, zero pickle,

Blake Beus  0:05  zero. I'm full of it today, everything zero pickup pixel tracking. And I like I like that term. And it's something we've actually talked about, we didn't have this catchy term, sure term for it. But let's, let's take a step back and talk about the problems with iOS 1415. And upcoming 16, I believe, and why that's relevant. So what what, what problems did iOS 14 put in place that everybody freaked out about? Yeah, as advertisers, so

Greg Marshall  0:41  basically, you know, you just couldn't track as accurately anymore. And there was just so many targeting options taken away. So much data collection taken away, the reporting is way off. And because of that, that does impact advertisers spending, the confidence of how well your ads are doing. A lot of it can be psychological, if you're not looking at your actual numbers, and just, you know, change, people hate change. And I think iOS really put, you know, really put advertisers, businesses marketers in a tough spot, at least for a little bit, because of how everything was done in the old days, right, when the wild wild west of targeting and tracking and just plugging, there's just so many more steps now you have to do to try to get cleaner data. Yeah. So that's basically what happened.

Blake Beus  1:34  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I know, people tend to dislike change, or change throws people off. But especially in the advertising world, I feel like when change happens, it's, it's, it's a huge opportunity to level up, because, you know, some advertisers are not going to put the extra effort in to, to learn the new, learn the new way things are working, right, live live in the new world. And so they're gonna fall behind and new, you know, advertisers that are willing to be a little bit scrappy, and try new things, and whatever can contend to get ahead. Yep. So one of the things, you know, zero pixels. So I guess I'll talk really quick about the pixel just to give people a background and why zero pixel is even a thing. So how it used to work is you could install this tracking pixel on your website. And the tracking pixel was literally just a one by one pixel image, a lot of people don't realize that that's all it was. But when when the browser would load that image, you could also append some additional data, like which click ID they used when they clicked on the ad, or the browser ID of the person. Or if you've previously identified that person, you could even pass their email address and some other things back into Facebook system, or Google system, or whatever. And so you could connect the dots between data and events that happen outside of Facebook, we'll talk specifically about Facebook, outside of Facebook, you could connect the dots with what happened with a specific Facebook user and some things along those lines. And that was great for advertisers because we could track this person was actually the person that bought this thing, this person in Facebook world was the person that bought this thing over here, you could report that back, your ads reporting was nice, you could see how much you spent, how much you made, the dollar amount, amount, how many sales you had, or how many leads you had, and it was great. When iOS 14 came around, they said we are going to block third party tracking. And what that meant was any stuff that happened outside of Facebook, they're going to block reporting that back into Facebook, and it's a data privacy thing. In the grand scheme of things, most people probably wouldn't be okay with how much data collection Facebook was doing at the time. Maybe not even be that much data tracking they're doing now. But it was good for advertisers. Yeah. So when they did that mobile devices make up? I don't know why on it on most websites, I look at these days, I would say mobile iOS devices make u

Blake Beus  0:00  So we were talking about going viral. And we we've talked about how going viral is not the solution, not the solution, right? Like, like, a lot of people want to, they want to go viral, viral and everything you want to have that content that just takes off. But I think the words you used were going viral is not what you think it is. Yeah. Or something along those lines, right. So like, why why do you say that? Well, I

Greg Marshall  0:26  think, well, it's, what I do want to say is, I don't think it's not valuable. But it's not what you think like, going viral is not actually going to get you all of the sales that you think you're going to do. But there is a way to use it. Right? So most people have the idea that, well, if I can get this video or this post or picture, whatnot, seen a couple million times, then that alone will generate more sales. And I just haven't seen that to be the case in many instances. But there are ways to capitalize on that. So I know you said you had someone that recently had a post go viral.

Blake Beus  1:07  Yeah, so I have an office at. They call it a creative studio, that it's an old parking garage, they've converted into a bunch of different studios for artists and things and I kind of got in super early on they weren't entirely sure if it what what if it was going to be for artists or something else, or kind of working spaces. And so I'm, I'm the soul, not like artists sculpt or whatever, I just have my corner office and I just work out of it. But I like being around the creative energy. And I oftentimes talk with him about marketing and things and they have questions about all of that stuff. And we'll one girl she does. She she does these amazing. One one of these artists in name's Sarah Austin. Anyway, I'll mention her because you should go like check out her stamp. But she had, she does these amazing wood colored pencil drawings. And she had a real that went nuts. And she had four or 5 million views. And I think when she had that post go viral. I think she only had a few 1000 followers. Yeah. Right. So that was a big deal. Yeah, she's super excited about it. Got a ton more followers, I think her follower count went up by almost 20 grand. Yeah, like that. Super cool, like very exciting. And I was talking with some of the other artists there. And you know about that, because they all want to go viral and everything. And, and it turns out, she didn't really, she got a lot of followers got a lot of kind of traction and things. But none of that really converted over into sales. Yep. Right. And so none of it turned into selling of her art or anything along those lines. And so we were just kind of chatting about that. And I mentioned this to you. And that's where we kind of came up with this, you know, idea. Now, now she's putting into play some, some sort of a sales process, putting together some offers that she thinks might resonate a little bit more with the Instagram crowd maybe be a little bit more of an impulse purchase. And kind of exploring that a little bit. So it hasn't been a bad thing. But it's also like you go viral is super exciting and cool and everything, but it doesn't, it doesn't always translate over

Greg Marshall  3:25  into sales. Well, it's actually a good lesson, too, for if someone goes viral, they themselves can actually see that just being seen more, doesn't complete the actual sales cycle. Right, right. And so here's here's basically what Blake was talking about. She's coming up with offers and things like that is now what you can do is retarget. So anyone who watched that video, right or engage, you can retarget them with an ad with a direct offer. That's that basically sells something related to what that video was. Because one of the things that happens, posts that go viral on social media are never sales oriented. That's like the opposite of what the platforms actually want. And so if you go viral, it's not going to be something where you

Blake Beus  0:00  messaging 2.0. So last week, we talked about messaging. And we gave a lot of different ideas concepts on on messaging. And I know a lot of people think messaging. It's boring talk, right like to talk to me about algorithms or, or targeting or stuff like that. But as we've mentioned, many times messaging is becoming more and more, it's more important, always been important. Yes. But with changes in data collection and privacy rules, which are only going to get more restrictive things like targeting and that are going to become less effective. Yep. And so messaging, which I feel like we're seeing this all the time is becoming more and more and more important to you. So you wanted to follow up on on on what we talked about last week, with some tests and things you've run this week? And give us kind of a rundown on what you're seeing with messaging.

Greg Marshall  0:53  Yeah, so one thing, and the reason why we're harping so much on messaging, if we could sell you on messaging is king, you will actually be able to control your, your success, right in the future when it comes to your business. Because this is the one lever that if you pull it will give you the greatest return. Alright, so what I want to talk about as a client as a direct test, so $1,000, the offer really didn't change much. The targeting didn't change much. And they spent $1,000. Got no leads.

Blake Beus  1:27  Yeah. And so they brought you on to kind of be like, this isn't work. Yeah, like we spent 1000 bucks got zero leads. When you told me this, the first thing I was like I asked was, what was their lead form broken? Oh, that's

Greg Marshall  1:39  exactly what I thought I couldn't believe it. Because it is so unbelievable to think. Even the worst of that will get you one leave for $1,000. Right? Yeah. $1,000 like something's got to be brought. So the first thing I did was I looked at the targeting, are they even targeting the right areas? Yeah. Are they who are they targeting? Is it? Are they like their landing page? Is it working? Are they saying it to a page? Oh, everything worked? Okay. $1,000.00 leads. So what we did was we, we swapped out the what she was saying. And the ads so we still so ad number one was selfie style. And number two was selfie style. So at least our videos like style video. Yep, selfie, just offering the service zoek. We did that. And so there was no change in like how look, we didn't like increase the production, or make it look totally different. We same format. What we did was we changed the words on what we said. And we made one major shift that I think may have influenced the success of this. We made sure that the message was all about the feelings that the customer on the field versus ad number one was about what we did, okay, okay, which may seem very subtle, but it makes a massive difference

Blake Beus  3:02  was this in was was what industries it's a fitness industry. Okay,

Greg Marshall  3:07  so one, one add number one was about leveling up, we do CrossFit. We can get your nutrition plans, we can do all that, right? That's showing the business. And number two was about how they feel. So what are your customers always say when they come in? Well, they're looking for a place to feel included. They just moved here. So they don't really have a gym to go to. They want to be a part of a community. They want to be able to go with friends and family. And you know, so I said, switch all the messaging to that, and talk nothing about the other stuff. Yeah. So we made that shift. And to essentially put on steroids. What we did was the background of the video. I said do the videos in front of the places where your customers live, because this is a local business. Okay. So instead of just saying, Hey, do we live here? We said, like right behind right behind her was like the main shopping center. Okay, that's a very

Blake Beus  4:06  recognizable thing. Vengo ooh, that's cool. I have never thought about that. S

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

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 be

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

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 co