Unconventional strategies you‘ve never heard of before - Ep 013

Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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Transcript

Blake Beus 0:00 But we're recording. Right? All right. Oh,

Greg Marshall 0:06 Blake, what do you think? So you've got the topic of the day, you said this to me yesterday. And I thought, interesting timing, because I've been seeing some of these things and the ad accounts, and I've Yeah, my theories, and I have yours,

Blake Beus 0:20 we're gonna talk about this. And a lot, a lot of people have a lot of crazy theories about how, you know, the algorithm, or all of these different things work. And some of those could be true, some of them might not be true, but I'm gonna read this actually word for words, so we can pick it apart, because there's been lots of discussion about what's actually going on here. So Facebook, came out with this announcement, starting today. I'm quoting, starting today, if someone does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in accounts center, we will consider those accounts as separate people for ads planning and measurement. A lot of advertisers are reading into what this might mean. And first and foremost, you might be listening to this thinking, what is account center? Yeah, and I'll be honest, I'm in Instagram, Facebook all the time. I didn't know what a cat senator was either. Yeah, I didn't even know it was a thing.

Greg Marshall 1:17 Well, I've heard of it. And I also don't really know, what their meaning by Account Center, and the structuring of that. And so just hearing that makes you wonder, well, if I'm in it all day, and urine all day, how does my mom now or you know, someone who barely uses social media?

Blake Beus 1:40 Exactly. And so what they're saying is, if the accounts, if your Instagram or Facebook account aren't LinkedIn account center, then they're going to count those as two separate people for reach and estimated audience size and all of these things. And based on just some loose data, I'm going to guess nearly everyone does not have those accounts, Leah, and so you might start seeing potential reach numbers go up, which would cause your CPMs to go down? Even though not really you're only reaching the same person just on different platforms, if you're running ads on both Facebook and Instagram.

Greg Marshall 2:21 Well, one one thing now that you say that one thing that maybe test is when you run your ads, do more manual placement. Yeah, so actually say, Show this ad on Facebook only? And show this ad on Instagram? Oh, yeah. And just compare the reach, and then test them both together and see if they're somewhat similar. Because one of the things we talked about yesterday, the potential issue with this, I guess, from an advertiser standpoint, you know, I'm running a lot of ads. I know you run a lot of ads. You know, the CPM is one of the numbers, the CPMs, which is the cost for the traffic has gone up. I also find it conveniently coincidental that it's happening during the most expensive time of the year. Yeah. Which is the fourth quarter Hmm. Which makes me think advertisers must be either leaving the platform or panicking about the cost of the traffic that they're getting. Yeah, that maybe they're the there's a change to make it to make us advertisers possibly feel slightly better about what we're spending, right. And I I get both sides do not want to make it sound like everything is always bad on one side. And we're the you know, the good side versus the bad, but more of what is what are the incentives? What should we be paying attention to? And just kind of like the episode, we just did control what we can control? Yeah. And try to make the best of what's available to us. So that's, that's kind of my thoughts. But what are your thoughts about that? That's my first thought is, if they want to drive CPMs down, and it's the fourth quarter. It's just coincidental that this change is happening right now.

Blake Beus 4:08 Yeah, well, I think, I don't know some people read into things and think this is could be nefarious or whatever, I don't know, maybe, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the fact of the matter is, is businesses all the time try to present their products and services in the best light. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I mean, I go to the grocery store, and I see I see, you know, now with 20%, more or whatever I like, there's all of these triggers. And I don't go to the grocery store and think, oh my gosh, I'm being manipulated everything. For a long, long, long time. Facebook has been known amongst the world of marketers as, as a platform, you can get really cheap reach, right for a long time and a lot of advertisers over the years because of that have almost all their experience on Facebook only and haven't explored other platforms. Google, I will tell you right now, every every campaign I've ever run on Google, the CPMs are higher than they have been on Facebook. But now that Facebook CPMs are going up and up and up. Facebook might be thinking their advertisers are looking at other platforms like Google or, or LinkedIn, or Tik Tok or something like that, and and exploring those platforms and, and Facebook is maybe saying, Okay, well, we're going to maybe make these numbers look look a little bit better, whatever. I don't know, I love your idea of running traffic to other each platform, right? Because the reality is, is that while these numbers might mean something slightly different than what you think they mean, the or they meant in the past. As a good and non lazy marketer, you should be testing things anyway. Yeah, and so go ahead and test this out. And honestly, we change brings opportunity, we literally recorded a podcast about this, which you probably are going to listen to him out of order anyway. Because of published dates, but the this, this change is yet another chance for opportunity. And if you're testing a specific ad account, you might have an ad account that performs significantly better with the change, you might have an ad account that that performs worse with this change. Or you might have an ad account that this change doesn't impact hardly at all. Yeah, but you won't know that unless you do some testing, you test on either platform to see what's going on there. And really, that's what we want people to do, you want to be data driven, because there's no hard and fast rules about any of this stuff. It all really depends on your account, the data in your account, the offer, the language, and the wording and everything. And, and that just goes to show and we ought to probably take a step back and talk about that. We talk about it a lot. But this is another opportunity to maybe reevaluate your offer, maybe re evaluate your hook, maybe evaluate your image or the video or some of those strategies or your strategies, right, take a chance to look at the psychology side of things. And and maybe peel back away from the numbers just a little bit. Focus on some of those, the messaging and the hook and all that stuff.

Greg Marshall 7:10 Well, I think you're right on when it comes to change. This is how you hit the harder I guess, you know, the harder quote unquote, tracking becomes, the harder everything becomes because we've had it made for the last few years that it's like, we're like spoiled children. Now we've got everything we've ever wanted. And now it's being taken away from us, and how dare they but I think it's a good thing, because the opportunities will, will pretty much present themselves. Because if things get harder, that means more people quit. That means more people try to move to other things, more of the people that maybe are taking up all of the space and the oxygen and the ad inventory. We'll try something else. Yeah. Just because it's not as easy. And if you're if you're, I guess you could if you consider yourself a professional, and whatever it is you do, then you have to be committed to learning adjusting, even when it hurts to get better at whatever it is that you know is in front of you and things are going to constantly change. This is not the last change, we're going to see, we're always going to see constant change. And so I think, mindset wise, we should be thinking about how can we take advantage of these changes that are happening? And what can we do to separate ourselves from everyone else? Because usually, people become more successful when these types of changes happen. When there's opportunities where people see what does that quote, opportunity is worth disguise or whatever. You know, I'm talking about, I actually haven't heard that. There's a quote, and I don't even know if it's really said by Henry Ford, but I think so put it up, which is like, opportunity is disguised as hard work. Right? And I think this is one of these scenarios where you're going to see more marketers kind of panic, leave or get upset, because it's not like it used to be right. But the opportunity is in understanding, well, this is great. There's probably not a new opportunity because these changes have happened.

Blake Beus 9:16 Right? Right. And this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. And I don't even know who said this. And but it's lazy marketers make lazy money. Yep. And this is an opportunity to to really take a step back and evaluate things. So if I were to if I had a client come to me, they showed me this article, and they said, Hey, what should I do? What should I do? I have a couple of ideas. And I would love to pick your brain? Well, the first thing I would say is use this as an opportunity, opportunity to diversify your strategy. If you're not using YouTube ads, let's use some YouTube ads. If you're not using LinkedIn ads, let's try out some LinkedIn ads. And that would be the that's where my mind goes first and foremost. But Greg, if you had a client that came to you and said, I'm sorry freaking out about this this is Facebook being shady whatever, well, what would you say to them? How we should proceed to move forward?

Greg Marshall 10:06 Well, the first thing I would say is, remember, your business is your business. And these are just traffic sources. And so if they make a change our job or your job as the business owner is to adjust your strategy, and what you need to do in order to move forward right and project out. So So the answer would be, well, if the tracking, isn't there, what does that tracking mean? Anyways, because if you're using ultra precise tracking, and overly relying on that, and not thinking about building a full system, a full marketing system that happens all the time, then your business is actually probably more flawed than the traffic source. And the problem there. Right? That makes sense? Because if if, let's say, if I started a business, where I'm just like, Well, I'm just gonna only leverage the algorithm of these platforms. Well, if that's the case, I don't have a true business, because I'm only relying on that source of traffic, right? I'm not actually building a business, which is systems and people and processes and procedures, focus on the fundamentals, anytime you see changes that happen with traffic sources, or whatever it is that we're all accustomed to using. And we don't want to change. Always go back to what are the fundamentals? Right? What is my business? What is? How do I serve the customer? And just think, well, how can I get because all these platforms really are our messaging platforms? How do I get a message to get in front of someone that I want to do business with? Yeah, so if you just look at it that way, and just go, alright, well, if I can't get my message out this way, what's a different way that I can get my message out, you just have to be you got to be flexible, agile, and you just have to move and go, This don't work today. I guess I have to try something.

Blake Beus 11:56 Right. And, and it's, it can be an opportunity to really, really think differently about this. One of my favorite examples of this is actually talked about this briefly on another podcast. But there's this guy in the tech space in the marketing space. And he noticed that a lot of his ideal and perfect clients were using WordPress as a yes, website platform. And they were using a specific plugin for WordPress. And he's like, okay, so I have I have some money, where do I invest this? This plugin hadn't really had a lot of updates in a while. So we just contacted the developer and said, Can I buy the rights to this plugin for it? Can I buy it from you and maintain it myself with my team and everything? And they they struck a deal, and I don't know how much they paid for that deal. But they struck a deal. And now this guy's plug in on the next update. He updated it fixed a few bugs and everything. But now he's got a little link in there that says, you know, hey, this plugin is brought to you by, you know, I think his name's Noah Keegan. Okay, again, yeah, the guy. Okay, dork is website. This plug is brought to you by Noah Kagan. You know, contact me if you want to chat or whatever, just like a super soft call to action. And I don't know how much that traffic he got out of that. But that plug in right there probably got in front of, you know, 10 or 20,000 of his ideal clients, innovative market. That's innovative marketing. And there's lots of different ways you can be innovative like that, another innovative way that literally anyone can do because you might be thinking, Okay, well, I don't have a team of developers. And I don't know what platform people use, and I can't maintain a plugin. Another innovative idea is this is old school. But you just contact another business that's in a related field, or even a business that might be a direct alternative to your business, and say, Hey, let's do some sort of combined promotion, let's because I know you have your customers, I have mine, there's plenty of pie out there for everyone. If you have a bigger slice, that doesn't mean I have a smaller slice, let's be collaborative. And let's let's put together some sort of collaborative promotion. And we'll email both of our lists or we'll post it on both of our socials or something

Greg Marshall 14:05 elaborations I couldn't agree with you more like, we're gonna go I like I use the term old school, right, which is essentially a different way of saying, getting back to work. Yeah. Right. So instead of letting everything else do the work for us, we have to get back to work, which is Dan Kennedy. And you know, this, I say this all the time is my absolute favorite marketer of all time, because I think he calls it how it is. And his principles are just fundamentals. Right. And so, one of the things that I learned from listening to his programs for years is he had like this drawing of how in the center of your business, right, like the center is your business, and then almost like, like car tire spokes, you have all these different sources of traffic and ways to generate leads and your job as the business owner. To continuously build that wheel, because you never want to make yourself susceptible to one way of getting business, right, right. And so that's why if you're doing the fundamentals and always remembering that we are borrowing these platforms, and that we do not own them, that we need to be grateful that they're available to us, but also be aware that they can be taken away from us as well. So our job is not faceless job, or YouTube's job to make sure that Greg feels comfortable every day that he can grow his business. Right, right. It's Greg's job to figure out if this traffic source isn't available, what would happen if this got canceled, or that or this wasn't available, and you and your job is to keep building that wheel? And that's how that for whatever reason that always stuck with me is like, that makes sense. Because we've all had, you know, times in our lives where you overly rely on one thing, and then it's gone. You panic. Yeah. And you're like, Oh, my now what my whole thing is built on that. Right.

Blake Beus 16:02 Right. Well, and it also, one of the thoughts that came to my mind when you were talking about this wheel, because I love that visualization is, is some spokes of that wheel are only going to reach certain types of people. Correct. But you could have and probably do, I think every business does, has a large, large, large audience out there, that isn't on that particular spot exactly. Or isn't participating in a way that where they would even show up on that particular spoke, right. And a great example of this, I think, is upper level management. If you have a product or a service that is geared towards someone in an upper level management position, think VP, CEO of a medium sized company, I'll be honest, guys, they're not on Facebook. Yep, most of those people don't even have social media, especially if they, if they're a larger company, because their trend, they're probably trending a little bit older in age or whatever. And they just don't have the time for Facebook or Instagram, right? Or they just don't value or they just don't care. Yeah, they don't care about there. They're doing completely different things. And so you need to get a little bit more creative. They might be hanging out on LinkedIn, but they might, they might not be using any social media platform. So you might be thinking, Okay, how do I, how do I get in touch with these people, and that's where maybe you go to trade shows or conventions or, or you go to events that are related to what you're offering, and try to meet some people face to face. There's there's a lot of ways to think about it. But you might be spending time focused on one spoke and spending money focused on one spoke and leaving out all of these other opportunities Anyway,

Greg Marshall 17:42 well, and that that actually you bring up another Dan Kennedy point, which this is why I believe in this strategy, he says, he says, well, people say newspaper advertising or direct mail, or whoever platform it is that's considered old school is dead. And he says, not if you're trying to talk to older people with money, what if you're trying to talk to a six year old, that needs to spend a lot of money? Yeah, they're not going to be on any of these other platforms, they're only going to be able to be reached through newspaper, or direct mail, or any of the things that are, quote unquote, out of style, right. And that put a light bulb in my head, because that makes you understand, you have to keep building these spokes. And each spoke is an asset that's valuable to you. And even if it's only short term, that's okay. Because your job is to continuously build the spokes. And so one of the ways that I like to think about because I'm considered b2b A lot, right? So I'm looking for the CEO, upper level management person. And one of the ways that I understand is, I'm not going to find that person on Facebook, I know that, or Instagram, or even sometimes LinkedIn, or Google or YouTube ads. I'm going to find that person through a presentation. So old school chamber of commerce, trade shows, find a way to speak in front of an audience. It usually consists of those types of people, and you'll be able to pick up those clients and that's a spoke. Yeah, public speaking is a spoke. Yeah. tradeshows. That's another sort of podcasting. That's another one. So you have to keep building the spokes or else you're putting your business and your livelihood in jeopardy because you're you're you're pretty much very vulnerable if you don't have these because you can break down at any moment. If you're only using one or two.

Blake Beus 19:35 Yeah, yeah. I think I think it's worth pointing out to you have fast spokes and slow Yes, yes. So I'm laughing over here cuz that sounds like Slowpoke and yeah, for some reason that just really started. Yeah, yes. But, and, and the other thing to think about too, is on any one of those spokes, you you have people that are willing to buy right now versus people that are willing to buy buy later down the road. And we talked, we talked about this. I mean, one of the things I've been playing around with my email list, my email list is full of nothing but buyers. Yeah, for the most part. Yeah. And people that have bought from me in the past, and I've been playing around with different ways to market to that list. I've sent out very direct messages saying, hey, sign up for my new program, which is the new offer the offer? I'm kind of promoting right now sign up for my SM three program. And I will get signups. Yep. And then I sent out this last week of last couple weeks have been sending out basically very soft offers saying hey, here's this free training. And it's literally just a training that I'm just telling you how to do something, it's not a sales video disguised as a training, it's literally a training. And at the very end, I just say, Hey, if you want to chat further about this, or whatever, click the link below. And it's a link to my sales pitch. And I get signups those people also saw my first emails but didn't take action. But then they saw this training and then did take action. And so it's it's like even though you have a particular channel, email, marketing, Facebook, whatever, you need to understand that people are gonna respond in different ways to different types of messaging, those channels and different in different times and everything. And so you really want to have, we've talked about all the time, more holistic approach, and you really want to be in addition to paid advertising channels, you really want to be marketing in channels where you can't measure the success. Yeah, because that's where oftentimes a lot of the real gold is is in those channels. And that's honestly one of the reasons we're doing podcaster podcasting is one of those platforms, we see the number of downloads, yep, sort of, because because of how, how podcasting works, some platforms will pull in and consume your podcast hosted on their servers, and then you might get 10,000 downloads on that server. And that never gets reported back to our dashboard, we have no idea we really have no idea how many views we're getting, or downloads we're getting on this. And we don't know if people are clicking on the links in the in it are going to whatever, it's there's not a lot of visibility there. But it is a very profitable channel, if done, right. Yeah. And there's other channels like

Greg Marshall 22:13 that? Well, and the thing about channels is this, the measuring part will be more and more challenging as we move forward, especially if you're using digital. And that's why if you use a full system, you want to just look at the return on your system. Because the system is the biggest asset. It's kind of like if you look at as a car, you could say, well, what's more important the wheel that you're steering or the wheels on the ground? Or the engine? Well, it's kind of all of them, right? Like we can't like limit one or the other to try to quote unquote, optimize you need at all. And so one of the, you know, these channels where you have to look at it as if you're investing and more and more channels, one channel, could we could do a podcast, we can get one sale, it can make us $25,000 each year. Yeah. With a contract, that channel has now become profitable, right? Well, we got one purchase, right? But it's worth Yeah, right. But we never would have got it unless we invested in the channel. Right? And so that's why each channel you have to look at is there's potential to make a return and many different ways. And just the instant today, which is what everyone's after the that I need the return today. And that's it.

Blake Beus 23:28 Yeah. And really, what you want is kind of a mix of the of the boat in the cash infusion today. Yep. But then long, longer term strategies to help build and grow over time. And I'll be very transparent and blunt, one of the biggest issues I had early on with my business was I was focusing just on the very immediate cash return types of types of work, and not so much on the longer term, you know, types of marketing channels, and it made it made 2020 really suck.

Greg Marshall 24:02 Yeah, and I think and once they use the word that's important balance, yeah. Because being overly one or the other, can get you in trouble. So if you're overly cash flow today, only then you're you're sacrificing the future. Right? If you're only the future, you got nothing today. Yeah. Right. And so you have to have a balance of like, how do I make returns now? While also thinking about how do I make returns in the future? And that's, that's like the million dollar question, right? How do you set that up? And I believe it's building out your wheel getting all your traffic sources and and really committing to building a marketing system. And not just like a system and every other aspect but the marketing right or the sales but really taking it just as serious like the marketing and the sales is like the car is just you know the wheel that you're steering is just as important as the wheels on the ground. And everything needs to be paid attention to you can't ignore half the car or whatever, if you want the car to actually work. And so that's how you want to look at your entire businesses. Not only customer management, process man assistance, man, but also sales and marketing management. How do we get all of these to work together? So the car can last 20 3040 years instead of it work? Yeah, a works today, I took this one tire off, and I drove a little faster for 10 miles. But then the problem was, I couldn't go anywhere, right? Where I'm driving the car too fast. And it burns out and I got to go to the shop. So that's just kind of my thought process about balancing today. Yeah. And the futures it you have to have a balance. And it's a continuous thing, because sometimes we can all get overly seduced by you know, the gambling aspect of making money today. Yeah. And forgetting about oh, yeah, well, what about 10 years from now? Yeah. Are the diseases are making trade and

Blake Beus 26:04 hurt 10 years? Yeah. And it, it reminds me, it reminds me of this. Well, I see it all the time, I see people chasing the shiny new object, right? One One, quote, shiny new object I've heard and it's just new to me, is this concept. And we'll probably do something on this in the future. Because I think it's an interesting subject, I'd like to pick your brain on it. But it's this concept called Dark funnels, or dark social and, and it's a cool name that I'm super jealous of, because Nina was hard, right? Like, but, um, the concept is, is this essentially social media marketing efforts that you can't track you have visibility into and so that things like, you know, commenting in LinkedIn groups, or Facebook groups, or something like this, and one of the guys is pushing this really hard, his messages. If I were to start my business all over right now, I would focus on nothing but dark, whatever. And I'm like, that's, that's great.

Greg Marshall 26:57 I guess that's probably a little too extreme. But anyway,

Blake Beus 27:01 it is I'm like, I, this is where we start talking about balance. And I know why he's doing it, because that's what his consulting company does, right. And it's so much easier to talk about and push one specific concept and idea than it is to talk about things holistically. But things are aren't just, here's the one solution, everything. And marketers love to do that, like, this is a one way one fix this will fix everything. But the reality is is, is if you focus just on those things, you'll probably get a sale here and there. And your growth will be super slow, especially if you're starting out. In fact, that's probably not sustainable at all, if you're just starting out. Yeah. And so I feel like a lot of this, this is the journey I feel like a lot of businesses has, especially if they're kind of like in my core area where someone is there, they do the solar entrepreneur and start growing some things, they, they oftentimes will start off with this. Nothing but organic growth, I don't want to spend any money on ads, nothing more, but organic growth. And so they focus on posting and all of these things, and that's great. But their growth is slow. And then they are they start realizing well, you know, let's run some ads to push to an offer, and they start getting that immediate cash and like, sweet, I'm gonna do nothing. But as I focus all my time on ads, and that's great. And that can get you to a point and you start getting all these different followers and everything. But then when your your, you know, business overhead starts to increase, sometimes that model is less sustainable. So you need to hire on some additional staff or something like that. Now you're not as profitable as you once were, because you have this built in overhead. And and then they get to the point where they think, Okay, now what do I do, and this is where the wheel comes in. If you can focus on these wheel, the wheel and the spokes and think about things from a more holistic standpoint, then then you'll be better off as you go. And the one thing I want people to understand is, you don't need to feel overwhelmed about this, you feel like you need to have 5050 spokes on your wheel right now. And And honestly, this is what both you and I talk with a lot of our clients about and why we get hired by is we can help them focus on Okay, let's focus on these two spokes right now. And then in three, four months, we'll add these other two or three spots. And so you're not overwhelmed. Because you can only do so much. Yeah, there are ways to prioritize what you're working on, and how to focus on that. And honestly, I mean, if anybody has any questions about your specific thing, feel free to reach out to us as well. Yeah,

Greg Marshall 29:19 I mean, I think to one of the, the big. I consider myself one of the boringness marketers on the planet. And the reason why I say that is because I feel like the a lot of the ideas and concepts that I try to push are not what people really want to hear. Right. Just like exercise that we talked about with content creation. A lot of these things are, you know, we're talking about building systems. That doesn't sound very fun. We're building sustainability, long term growth. None of that sounds fun for anyone because we want it today, right? But I think it's the best method to growing things because if you can get your mindset into thinking about focus on a few things at a time, get it strong, like you're building a house, right? And get it strong, and then put the next piece of the house on. Right, make sure that's strong and then put it and before you know you've got a whole house. Yeah. And it's built very firm. You know, it's not, the house of cars is not going to just fall down because everything was built, you know, either inefficiently or not thought through, or you just didn't put the time and effort you tried to. You're too impatient, try to rush through it. Right, right. And I've run into that before. So I'm speaking from experience, not from I just woke up one day and knew this. In fact, I got burned by thinking the opposite way, which is why this is pushed me really hard into this strategy. And I just know that it's, it works. And you do have to pay attention to all this, folks. You have to be intentional. You have to be focused and discipline. All of those words, I just use I know you don't want to hear but, but it's true. And it's needed. If you want to have a successful business where you're marketing, and you can sustain it.

Blake Beus 31:08 Yeah, absolutely. Well, in closing, Greg, how can people reach out to you if you can

Greg Marshall 31:13 just go to our website, Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy call go over any market ideas, and we're by

Blake Beus 31:21 Yeah, just blink, be calm and reach out to me there. You can sign up on my email list. I have a couple of cool freebies. And you can even read about more about the membership program. I haven't called SM three. But yeah, we'll check. We'll check you guys later. All right, thanks.