Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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[00:00:00] Greg Marshall: All right. So Blake, even you you've been telling me a little bit about some some LinkedIn ads. We, we touched on a little bit last episode, but very, very lightly. And you know, I would love to go into this a little more deeply, so. Tell me the lake, that message. How does that work? So, so tell me what, what that's

[00:00:17] Blake Beus: all about.

Yeah. So the there's two, there's two different ways. You can do message ads, they just call a message ads, or they have conversation ads and w one of the most absolutely infuriating things about LinkedIn is their documentation is terrible. It's absolutely abysmal. And so there's, there's times you're, you're maybe reading documentation on how.

And it tells you that you can do it this way, but that menu option isn't there inside the ads platform.

[00:00:42] Greg Marshall: So basically in instructions, manual is flawed.

[00:00:45] Blake Beus: Yes. Yeah. And so you've got to do a lot of poking around that being said. I, I feel like sometimes when something's harder to get into it, weeds out all the lazy marketers and then there's a lot of gold there for the marketers that are dedicated.

So. I feel like it's a big opportunity. The message ads are basically like a one time message sent. So LinkedIn has its little messaging platform. The message ad is you type it, you send it and it gets sent to people in your targeting group. Got it. Like a want it's it's almost, almost feels like email marketing.

Got it. But it's like a one-time email, not like a drip sequence or anything like that. A one-time email. Now you could set up a drip sequence. You just have to do it manually. You just have to say, okay, we're going to send. And then we're going to send this and we're going to send this, but you can't really guarantee everybody that got the first one is going to get the second one.

So you would have to make sure that those messages are kind of self sustained. Got it. Got it. You couldn't say in my last email, I said this cause you, you, you

[00:01:43] Greg Marshall: wouldn't know.

Got it. So what about like, who's this for? So who, like what type of business would work the best with LinkedIn messaging ads?

[00:01:51] Blake Beus: Like anytime, anytime the sales conversation is maybe a little bit more complex.

I think a message ad works really, really, really well. Just because, I mean, if you look at banner ads or something like that, you, you get a sentence may be sure to get your point across. Usually it's a headline to get people on the sales page and a sales page does the heavy lifting, but a message ad is it sends a message out.

You can spark a conversation. Now I haven't actually done a ton of the message ads and they're not being sent from me. Okay. So one thing I actually don't know about the message ads specifically is if I send a message. And someone replies to that message, does that like show up in my inbox and do I need to reply to that?

And their documentation doesn't have a lot of data surrounding that. But we're actually using more of the conversation ads. Okay. Which is more like a chat bot. Okay. And that's a very, very interesting option. So. Let me tell you a couple of things we ran into. So I was telling you about my client.

They're targeting 1800 people that are account managers for a very, very large company, like tens of thousands of employees. And we want only employees of this company and only the account managers of this company. Okay. And this is for a you know, higher end software as a service SAS product that starts at about a thousand dollars a month.

Okay. So we have very specific messaging for these people. Our, our first message was with the first attempt we did it. This was very much You know, Hey, I'm Blake. I mean, it wasn't sent for me, but Hey, I'm Blake and I'm the director of sales for thi

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[00:00:00] Greg Marshall: All right. So what, here's something that I run into quite often, which is always confusing to me. Um, why is this such a big deal? But because it, to me doesn't make any sense. Which is devaluing customers that have purchased from you before, or even family or friends who buy our stuff because they like your product.

So,

[00:00:26] Blake Beus: so you're saying like, and you've, you've run into this where a business businesses mostly just focused on getting brand new customers. Correct. And they kind of disregard existing

[00:00:36] Greg Marshall: customers. So, and here's why this mentality is dated. This is kind of like saying, well, because I have my wife or my husband who already loves me now, I'm going to go ahead and just like, it's not that valuable.

I care more about other people who might want to date me. And you can imagine where your relationship is going to go with that mentality. Right. It's probably not going to work out. It's not going to work out very well, but for. If you think about the biggest businesses in the world, they actually have a different mentality, which is let's use Amazon because everyone pretty much everyone uses it.

They have a massive business and everyone can agree with that. Now I'm willing to bet they spent more time on how do they get Greg to spend. $18,000 more this year than last year, then just only caring about, you know, Sally down the road to buy a new $2 products. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because all the money is getting Greg to spend $18,000.

It's not in the one-time purchase of $2. Most business owners view their business in the light of, oh, somehow getting new customers that, you know, there's like this, you know, doing the air quotes, you know, there's this exciting feeling of I'm getting people who are buying my stuff that I don't know who have never bought from me before I get that feeling.

And there's always this like overvaluing of that individual versus what about the person who's bothering me 82 times in a row keys by for why are they not so exciting anymore? They're the ones that are actually paying your bills out, the person that buys once and leaves. And so that's kind of a subject I want to talk about is, um, changing the mindset to a more well-rounded business approach, where your point of focus is more about getting your customers to buy more from you, stick around.

And because in my opinion, by focusing more on those customers, you get much greater referrals. And you can grow from within. And so not only do you maintain your profitability because it's a lot cheaper to get the same person to buy over and over again, but now you're getting them to sell for you to bring you more people who are going to convert much faster than someone who has never seen or heard of you before ever.

And so that's, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, as a, as a business owner yourself, do you, do you ever fall into that trap of like overvaluing the new customer? Well, almost like feeling like, ah, you know, I already have them though.

[00:03:22] Blake Beus: Yeah, absolutely. I've 100% fall fallen into that. Um, and uh, I mean, everybody knows you hear this all the time that the new brand new customers are way more expensive to acquire than your existing customers.

Uh, I think, I think it stems from a place of fear, right? So if you're a business owner, a small, small business owners is mostly what I work with, but I work with some larger clients as well that have investors and everything. This tends to be a little bit more prevalent in small business owners. Uh, it's based on fear, right?

They, they constantly are afraid and I'm speaking for myself as well, constantly afraid that you'll be looked at as a failure, or you're just going to be another failure story, right. That business that didn't work. And, um, and you'

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[00:00:00] Blake Beus: Let's talk about Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Instagram,

[00:00:04] Greg Marshall: WhatsApp, anything

[00:00:06] Blake Beus: that Facebook owns, basically everything like their employees couldn't even badge in to the building. I did

[00:00:11] Greg Marshall: read that. What do you think.

[00:00:14] Blake Beus: Sure it makes it really hard to troubleshoot a problem. If you can't get into the building to fix the problem, I just thought

[00:00:19] Greg Marshall: it was crazy.

[00:00:19] Greg Marshall: Cause uh, they had that, uh, like, no, I messaged you yesterday. I remember. And I was like, that's crazy. The coincidence of this all happened the day after. I guess they had that 60 minutes, like employ come out and say that there was a funny. Yeah. Yeah, I guess not so great things. So

[00:00:38] Blake Beus: I, I actually had a few people reach out to me and say, oh, Hey, is this like, are they wiping their records and everything?

[00:00:46] Blake Beus: And. No just, no, this is purely coincidental. It's not, there's, there's too many backups of everything. Everything there's too many employees there that know everything they're not going in and cleaning up data or whatever. The 60 minutes interview was interesting. I actually listened to the whole thing, but it was interesting.

[00:01:07] Blake Beus: I do think that person's telling the truth. There's, there's probably some stuff going on there, but

[00:01:12] Greg Marshall: it's just, I think it's just too hard. Like one of the things, I guess, you know, an unpopular opinion would be at some level, I have sympathy for some of these, uh, CEOs and founders of these programs, because they're, I mean, imagine trying to manage.

[00:01:31] Greg Marshall: This type of, uh, I mean, you got over 2 billion people using the platform and most, most people can't even manage their own household. Let alone 2 billion people.

[00:01:41] Blake Beus: I can't manage my house. There's six of us. I can't manage. Yeah.

[00:01:46] Greg Marshall: And so it's, it's, it's, it's a very challenging task to have to go, you know, essentially manage 2 billion people, make sure everyone behaves in their best interest and you don't have any.

[00:01:57] Greg Marshall: You know, like, uh, personal biases, right? I mean, that's, that's just super challenging.

[00:02:02] Blake Beus: So in, in incredibly incredibly challenging. So, so, uh, but yeah, I mean, do we want to dive into the technical technical bits of it, or do you want to, do we want to talk about the impact on people or impact on advertisers?

[00:02:16] Blake Beus: Like what do we want to talk about?

[00:02:17] Greg Marshall: Basically the biggest thing we want to, uh, bring up in this, you know, shorter episode. Um, making sure that you're diversified and just multiple channels and understanding that each platform does have its value, but that you always need to understand what that value is, which is you don't own it.

[00:02:38] Greg Marshall: And we don't own a lot of things, but because you don't own it, you have to treat it as if one day can be taken away.

[00:02:45] Blake Beus: Yeah, and this is, this is why, uh, email platforms are so, so, so important and you might be thinking, okay, well, the email platform could, could go offline or whatever. That's, that's true. But email is a very old technology.

[00:03:00] Blake Beus: It's been around for a long, long, long time. And you can pull your own email address and back it up into like a, you know, an Excel spreadsheet or whatever. So you can always have your own copy of that information, but you have a way to communicate with your, your customers or followers or. In the event of some sort of large, uh, large breakdown or something that can impact things.

[00:03:20] Blake Beus: And that breakdown doesn't necessarily have to be a breakdown.

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Listen Notes

How do you know which ads and campaigns are working and which are duds.  It's harder than you think, but we're going to clear the air once and for all...until they change it all again.  

 

Reach out:

Blake Beus

Greg Marshall

 

 

[00:00:00] Blake Beus: Hi, I'm Blake Beus. And I'm your marketing technology Maestro.

[00:00:06] Greg Marshall: Hey, I'm Greg Marshall. I'm your social media marketing strategist.

[00:00:10] Blake Beus: And this is the modern marketers podcast.

[00:00:17] Greg Marshall: All right, well, uh, you know, Blake, I've got quite a few questions that, you know, I want to ask you because this is, you know, down your wheelhouse. This is your expertise right here. All right. Uh, one of the things that I want to talk about is attribution and tracking and what ad platforms are giving you and you know, just how that works.

[00:00:36] Greg Marshall: So my first question, um, is what is, what, explain the differences on attribution, meaning first, give us the definition of attribution for people who don't know. And then yeah.

[00:00:47] Blake Beus: Yeah. I mean, every attribution answers the question, which ads campaign. Audiences got you the conversion. So the sale, the lead, whatever.

[00:00:58] Blake Beus: And this is a question that basically, I mean, every business owner asks me this, every single one. Okay. Which one worked. Yep. And that's what attribution tries to solve. And it sounds like it would be a super simple thing, but it's pretty complicated.

[00:01:13] Greg Marshall: So, all right. And, well, this is a topic that I really want to go deep and because I think this will help out a lot of business owners, particularly with.

[00:01:22] Greg Marshall: So number one, can attribution be inaccurate on Facebook? Google, Instagram, YouTube, you name it?

[00:01:31] Blake Beus: I will take, I tell you right now, attribution will always be an accurate, there's never a time. It's not an accurate. Because that's a loaded, it's insanely complicated. It's there's so many little, just from a tech perspective, little networking glitches that could prevent, um, an attribution perhaps from happening there.

[00:01:53] Blake Beus: So someone could have an ad blocker or the wifi could drop right at the instant things. Uh, you know, that little packet gets sent off to include the attribution or the data could get grew up corrupted. A lot of people don't think about this stuff because we have a lot of. Error handling built into web browsers and everything, but behind the scenes, mistakes happen constantly, constantly all the time.

[00:02:16] Blake Beus: So that's the technical side of thing. The non-technical side of things is, um, is sometimes Facebook doesn't know enough about the person who made that made that purchase. So they can't correctly after they know a purchase happened, but they can't tie it back to a specific person. Or you bumped into what apple just did with iOS 14.

[00:02:35] Blake Beus: And they're, they're blocking tracking of certain things, which is a preventing Facebook from, uh, and Google and some of these others making more complicated to get correct attribution to, you know, whichever ad the ad set, whatever

[00:02:48] Greg Marshall: targeting God. So what about this? So here's the other question that I think will help a lot of people who are in particularly e-commerce, but even Allegiant.

[00:02:59] Greg Marshall: So. When you have attribution, not all attribution is the same. Most of these platforms are doing what you call last click attribution. Right? Right. So explain, explain what that means. Okay.

[00:03:14] Blake Beus: So, and this is where it all, it gets so complicated. It sounds easy, but it gets so complicated is essentially. Most of the time someone makes a purchase.

[00:03:23] Blake Beus: Let's just use that as our conversion objective. Uh, they've se

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In this episode we go over ways to reach the right customer using fear. 

 

But how do you use fear to sell and still be able to sleep at night?

 

 

Transcript

 

 

[00:00:00] Blake Beus: Yeah, let's just, let's just dive in. So we were, we were talking about a bunch of different things here before this call. We should have hit record just,

[00:00:06] Greg Marshall: yeah, we probably should just record our entire conversation all the time.

[00:00:10] Blake Beus: All the time, body cams.

[00:00:15] Blake Beus: Um, but we were, one of the things we were talking about was different angles and marketing. We started talking about fear, which is I made the observation. I think fear is probably the biggest thing to make people make a decision today. You've been using that with some of your clients and stuff, but I thought it was interesting.

[00:00:32] Blake Beus: I love, you know,

[00:00:34] Greg Marshall: tell about that. I thought, you know, it's, it's tough because you want to use fear as a way as human beings, we tend to not respond. To benefits as much as we will responsive fear, particularly if we want fast action. Right? So if you look at like some of the things that we want to accomplish, we'll use like weight loss, right?

[00:00:56] Greg Marshall: If I say, Hey, I can help you lose X amount of pounds because you're going to feel more excited and more energy, blah, blah, blah. Right. That might get you excited. But if a doctor says, Hey, if you don't lose 30 pounds in the next 30 days, you're going to die. Well, that that causes you to act faster. Right?

[00:01:15] Greg Marshall: Cause you're fearful of what's going to happen if you don't

[00:01:18] Blake Beus: act. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It, um, while I just barely relaunched a sales pitch for, for one of my products. And I was just thinking that through when we were talking about the fear is I don't, I don't have a whole lot of language that gets them to start thinking about those fears.

[00:01:37] Blake Beus: Now I do feel like sometimes we're in. We have so much fear hitting us people with like all these sensational headlines and stuff. So I feel like it can definitely be overdone. Yes. But there's legitimate or abuse right. Or use to manipulate, but there's legitimate ways to, to use, use that fear. And I'm definitely, I need to think more about that with my current sales page, because I don't think I have.

[00:01:58] Blake Beus: Of that kind of the, uh, the, the stick and the carrot. I have mostly carrot. Yeah. You know, all these things you want, but I want a little bit of a stick in there to, well,

[00:02:06] Greg Marshall: I think to what, what, you know, I was talking to a bunch of clients earlier this morning about, um, something specific when people reach out and they want more sales.

[00:02:16] Greg Marshall: What they're not saying is I want a hundred thousand, 200, $300,000 in sales spread out over the next 20. What they're actually saying is I need sales today and I want sales yesterday. Right. And so with that being said, you have to focus more on, well, how do I create incentives to make people act now?

[00:02:38] Greg Marshall: Versus they see a product. They like it. Well, I'll eventually get to a and most people's like, uh, language when they're selling stuff is like, Hey, we'll, we'll be around at any time. So. Buy from me for many times. Right. We all know that, you know, we're laughing cause it's like, we know that doesn't work

[00:02:57] Blake Beus: like that.

[00:02:57] Blake Beus: Not only does it work, but it kind of lacks Lex the confidence in our products. And we all want to use very soft, very friendly, very kind, sure language. And I get that. That's like my default time, which is one of the reasons I've struggled. And I noticed I missed this on my own, but, um, The, the reality is, is that for the right kind of c